This is a great hack in my opinion. A great soundtrack, great level Design, great everything really. New Super Mario World 1: The Twelve Magic Orbs Powered Up (https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=section&a=details&id=34324 )is a ROM hack by Pink Gold Peach and is an enhancement of the original Twelve Magic Orbs. This hack has the following:
- 12 Worlds with 93 levels
- 276 star coins with 3 in each level (Star coin counter on the overworld)
- Bonus world unlocked after collecting all 276 coins
- 16 new Power-ups
- Playable Luigi without 2 player
- Custom bosses in each castle
- Choices between Normal and Hard mode (This run does Hard mode)
The Power-ups:
Advantages: Allows to break empty turn blocks from above. Gives an extra hit. Is always given from a midway
Disadvantages: None to be known of.
Advantages: Allows to go through half-tile blocks. Gives higher jumps. Doesn't kill enemies after jumping on them (Could also be considered a disadvantage in some cases.)
Disadvantages: One hit death. No Spin Jumps.
Advantages: Press A in midair to spin upwards and float to the ground. Press down in this state to fall fast and break through empty turnblocks.
Disadvantages: None to be known of.
Advantages: Press X/Y to shoot fireballs. Press while holding up to shoot them angled upwards. These fireballs kill enemies, melt ice blocks, and activate P-Torches.
Disadvantages: None to be known of.
Advantages: Press X/Y to shoot ice balls. Press while holding up to shoot them angled upwards. These ice balls freeze enemies into frozen coin blocks that can be picked up and thrown. They can also be stood on like keys. Tech wise, these can be thrown with midair inputs to get a ton of speed when landing on them. They can also be used to gain a lot of height.
Disadvantages: Tech wise, the screen only scrolls up 1 pixel per frame. So in order to get the screen to scroll up you must land for longer. Ice block midairs can clip you into a wall and kill you.
Advantages: Press X/Y to shoot bubbles. The bubbles travel further in water. These bubbles turn enemies into coin bubbles that can be bounced on to reach higher places.
Disadvantages: It is literally never used in the run.
Advantages: Press X/Y to place a cloud platform below you temporarily.
Disadvantages: There's seemingly at least 1s cooldown regardless of whether or not you collect another cloud.
Advantages: Press X/Y to shoot super balls. These balls bounce diagonally off of surfaces and kill any enemies they hit. They also break any grey blocks.
Disadvantages: Never used, the super balls can clip into the wall causing janky problems with some shots.
Advantages: Allows to stun sprites, freezing them in place and if an enemy is stunned, makes them weaker to kill.
Disadvantages: Never used.
Advantages: Press X/Y to shoot boomerangs. The boomerangs can be used to kill enemies, and grab some sprites through walls.
Disadvantages: None to be known of.
Advantages: Ice flower, Allows to move faster in water, Ducking with P-Speed gives you sliding state.
Disadvantages: Penguin sliding is slower than sprint speed so it's not used.
Advantages: Allows to move faster in water.
Disadvantages: Constantly resets speed when trying to run, and thus P-Speed becomes impossible/very slow to obtain. No Spin Jump.
Advantages: Pressing down with P-Speed gives you shell sliding state. This allows you to break through Blue Shell blocks.
Disadvantages: Shell state is slower than sprint speed so it's only used to break the blue Shell blocks
Advantages: Super Leaf, hold down and press X/Y to turn into a statue and break special stone blocks and become invulnerable.
Disadvantages: After leaving stone state you can't do inputs for a couple of frames.
Advantages: Press B in midair to use the jetpack. Using this after spin jumping can cancel the spin jump (Can be a disadvantage in some cases)
Disadvantages: Doesn't instantly give upwards speed, just subtracts from your current Y speed.
Advantages: Allows to wall jump and wall climb. Pressing X/Y does a swipe that kills any enemies right in front of you.
Disadvantages: No Spin Jump
Advantages: Doing a P-Speed jump allows to gain lots of height.
Disadvantages: Tail swipe comes out slower than a cape spin
Advantages: Doing a P-Speed jump allows you to gain cape flight which can give you a maximum speed of 51.
Disadvantages: Only shows up in endgame.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1 (BSNESv115+ core)
- Beat the game as fast as possible
- Collect all 276 Star Coins
- Obtain 100% completion
- Beat the game on hard mode
Comments
The main reason I chose hard mode was so that it'd be a bigger challenge. After looking at it now, it may actually also be faster than normal mode. Every time a new power up is introduced to the game, there's always a Star coin that requires you to use the gimmick of the power up to collect. This is at least 14 pipe transitions removed from the run. Significantly shortening the time.
Stage by stage comments
World 1-1 Pipeline Plains
Surprisingly enough, there's actually some stuff to talk about here. The first Star coin is faster to get by jumping down into the pit and wall jumping back up than waiting for the koopa to do it's cycle to the best point. The second Star coin is faster to collect by doing a midair. The Third coin is possible to collect with a well placed landing and shorter than normal jump
World 1-2 Shroom Hills
All three coins require some sort of speedrun tech to collect unintendedly as well. First requires a midair, second requires a well done Shell jump, Third requires a walljump.
World 1-3 Grassy Grotto
First Ice flower of the game. This is the fastest power up for a while.
World 1-4 Ipe Fields
Here's the first instance of an Ice block jump to gain enough height for the second Star coin
World 2-2 Solar Chase
Since the ice flower allows us to create Ice blocks we can carry, we can get maximum efficiency out of item swimming
World 2-4 Flooded Fortress (Secret Exit)
After hitting the first water switch, immediately getting item swimming is essential to go through the water faster.
World 2-A Haunted Galleon
Here before hitting the switch, we hit the turn block next to it to get the penguin suit, the better version of the ice flower.
World 2-4 Flooded Fortress (Normal Exit)
Here you can clearly see the significance of Penguin suit over the ice flower
World 2-5 Urchin Reef
If the normal exit of 2-4 wasn't a good enough demonstration as to why the penguin suit was better, here's a fully underwater level. Notice the insane underwater speeds of consistent 40 flat compared to the typical 32 average
World 2-Castle Wendy's Water Tower
Thanks to the mini mushroom from 2-6, we can do some jumps to avoid having to use FLUDD as much and gain height faster.
World 3-1 Construction Zone
This might be the first instance of having to actually completely go backwards to collect a coin.
World 3-A Magicasino
Here we have our first collectathon level. In order to obtain the red switch here, we have to collect 100 purple coins. This took some time but I think I found a good route. I probably could have sped it up by doing wall jumps with the suit to turn around faster.
World 3-5 Explosives Inc.
Grabbing bombs from earlier in a point helps speed up breaking the bomb blocks as it saves a lot of time depending on how long ago the bomb was activated. Since with the cat bell you can't spin jump we have to do a very tight Shell jump to make the gap and avoid the podoboos.
World 3-6 Polluted Waters
Here you can see the ice block midairs truly shine with all the fast paced movement. Unfortunately since it's an Ice flower not a penguin suit the underwater section is slower than it should be.
World 3-Castle Iggy's Poison Inc.
Losing P-Speed here doesn't matter much since the podoboos are able to be frozen and after the major slowdown of collecting coin number 1 it'd probably be hard to anyway.
World 4-A Overwhelming Oasis
Here's an example of needing to stall for a while so the camera can scroll up on star coin two
World 4-2 Skyrocket Sunset
Every single coin here uses Ice blocks to collect them each in their own unique way that's fast
World 4-3 Mysterious Ruins
Here we do a ton of ice block midairs to grab the first coin as fast as possible
World 4-6 Snake Block Pyramid (Secret Exit)
This is the level where we lose all power ups for some time. For the treasure room, you "must" use the Rocket Boots, Cat suit and mini mushroom. Fortunately we can skip the Rocket Boots. The others, not so much. You see, they add power up removing blocks after each section to avoid breaks
World 4-Castle Lemmy's Sand Castle
Here we get actual real keys which are very helpful. The first 3 keygates are useless, However the fourth and fifth can be done in reverse to go faster. By going straight you can get the key over there and then keyjump up that hole to grab the second key (While also collecting the Star shards as well of course). A double grab saves having to individually carry each one and speeds up the final gate opening
World 5-Castle Morton's Fire Fort
In this level, most sprites can interact with a certain tile and that will cause it to break. The first camera scroll here is to manipulate the spawning of the fire bar so we don't have to wait for it to be in a certain position to get past. The second camera scroll is for the same purpose, but to get the fire bar out of the way rather than keep it out of the way.
World 6-1 Crystal Path (Secret Exit)
The door to the secret is on layer two. It may have been faster to just walljump up honestly.
World 6-A Emerald Ember
From what I'm aware, there's no reliable way to get P-Speed that's faster than just sliding. You don't really need the Koopa shell to hit the on/off switch, you can just use the throwblock which is easier and faster.
World 6-2 Crystalline Lake
Hammer suit is only obtained here to collect the Star coins as the Star shards are hidden behind blocks that can only be broken with hammers. Thankfully the next level doesn't quite need a Tanooki Leaf so we can just get the one at the end of that level. We WILL need one for the next few levels.
World 6-4 Electric Fortress
The first part of this level is very precise to do without waiting on the platforms. Luckily it's a very short section and the rest is less precise. The midway is what we needed the Tanooki for in this level. It's a vertical section. Ascension is needed and thus the Tanooki is best.
World 6-5 Minecart Road
This is the very first instance of under the level. It's not easy to do with the Tanooki since you have limited. For the secret exit that also appears in 12-3, holding right is the key. Doing frame perfect jumps can also help conserve speed so the steep slopes don't slow you down.
World 6-Castle Kamek's Gem Palace
The boss here is RNG. I didn't do too much interesting playaround. Just kept messing around until I got good RNG and used that run. Not much you can do in a room with nothing in it anyways.
World 7-3 Deep Dark Pit (Secret Exit)
Here's the one singular level with P-Torches aka Torches that activate P-Switches when you light them. Nothing significant about this level besides the rare usage of the fire flower
World 7-A Rockfall Mines
The early camera scroll is to get the mega moles to spawn faster. Keeping a mechakoopa also allows to clip into the ground to skip the wait for one of the mega moles
World 7-3 Deep Dark Pit (Normal Exit)
There's a camera scroll right before collecting the last Star coin. This is very precise as you need it to 1. not despawn the Super Leaf and 2. not be too off screen that the fireball doesn't make it to the P-Torch
World 7-5 Explosive Inc. Mt.
Despite what was going on in Explosive Inc., those rules are nowhere near applicable here. There's mainly the TNT blocks over the bomb blocks. So holding any bombs are useless
World 8-1 Ice Block Hills
About this entire world, expect to see bumpty hyper speed. When you hit a bumpty from the side, your speed gets set to 64. Since that's significantly higher than the highest possible speed you can get otherwise, we almost always go for it unless we nearly instantly have to lose it all. This is also basically the only other level that we use the fire flower in.
World 8-4 Thermal Temple
After hitting the Water Switch you'll see I'm facing right but moving left. If you hold left and right simultaneously, you can get this effect. It actually helps with moving the fish out the way.
World 8-5 Cold Winter Night
I have no clue if you can collect the second Star coin without the assistance of Yoshi while still being fast but I do know you probably can save time by ditching Yoshi in the pit instead of doing what I did.
World 9-2 Cloudy Garden
Using Ice block jumps is way faster than the lakitu cloud. If the
World 9-3 Tanooki Island (Secret Exit)
Here's where the Tanooki Suit comes in. The better version of the Super Leaf. This one let's you turn into a statue by holding down and pressing X/Y. A funny thing I found when I was playing this hack is you can use this to slow your fall. I never did it in the TAS even though I meant to. Most of the parts in the secret exit can be "skipped" by just tail swiping instead of turning into a statue.
World 9-5 Sunset Sky Ruins (Secret Exit)
Alot of stuff in this level is weird to collect as you basically need some sort of shell or something to get back up to safety with speed. As for the secret exit, I don't think it's even possible with the Tanooki Suit. So here's probably the first time we use the cloud suit.
World 9-A Lightning Heights
You may be wondering how the lightning is going through the ground. By doing a frame perfect camera scroll, you can cause the screen to start scrolling the frame the invisible sumo summons the lightning, which basically lets it go through all ground. As for the second camera scroll later in the level, that's to manipulate the spawn of the sparkies so I can land on the flying blocks to collect the second Star coin without damage.
World 9-7 Locked Temple
There's a key for a key gate that unlocks what seems to be nothing. That's actually where the Star coin is in normal mode. However, since it's not there, it is just an extra key. And this key is faster than the intended key for the lock blocking progression, so we grab this one instead.
World 10-1 Flashing Colours
Something I should have explained earlier is that basically every level has an invisible ceiling. That's why when I collect the second coin you don't see me just going over the rest of the level to the exit. It would help if it was gone since both exits are in this same level.
World 10-A dnaL esreveR
The gimmick behind this level is simple. Reverse controls. That's it. Everything else can easily get used to. So the easiest way to do this level is to remap your controls, Left to right and vice versa, up and down and vice versa.
World 10-2 Faded Lands
The gimmick behind this level is some blocks occasionally disappear and others appear, then later the other way around. Optimising this level is all about knowing when some are gonna disappear and others will appear.
World 10-4 House of Illusions
The boos in this level are reversed. If you look at them, they come after you, if you look away, they stop, the eerie's take the shape of ? blocks, there's fake doors, and fake midways. In the last part is pretty precise. Even with the camera scroll, it's still very precise to avoid the eerie's.
World 11-1 Asteroid Belt (Secret Exit)
Every level in this world besides 11-B , 11-3 and 11-Castle has space physics. Meaning low gravity. There's also a trick where if you pause you can manipulate your Y-speed to either give you tons of upwards or downwards speed (You'll have to check for that speed to know which direction you're gonna go.) This isn't used in this level, however I don't doubt that it could've been to try to clip through some ground with 127 vertical speed.
World 11-A To The Moon
Here you can see the pause buffering vertical speed in action.That first jump is nowhere near possible normally.
World 11-B Power-up Planet
The one and only #-B level in the entire game. This is our earliest cape in the entire hack. Don't expect to see much use out of it though, especially not in this level.
World 11-2 Zero-G Zone
Here you can see something else that low gravity does. If you have cape flight, you permanently ascend until you hit a ceiling, and if you're still in cape state 1 (Ascending) you basically have infinite sticky flight. Since the entire levels an auto scroller, there's nothing else to really note.
World 11-3 Orbital Station
Here's the first time going under the entire levels happens. It was kinda hard considering I didn't know if I would turn around or not, but after a while I got the hang of it.
World 11-Castle Tatanga Powerplant
There's a lot of precise cape movement in this second horizontal section of this level due to how clustered it is. For the boss it's faster to wait until you have all four mechakoopas then ambush Tatanga with them.
World 12-1 Lava Cliffs
Within this world comes a new source of fast movement, bullies. These are weird however. They almost always set your horizontal speed to 72 when you're on ground, but in the air there's a higher change to get 32 speed. Either way, it's faster travel to get 72 speed than 37, 49, and 51 speeds. So we bump into them to obtain the speed, then once it gets down to 63 we start the hopping glitch. However we occasionally need to slow down still as 63 is too fast in some cases. We also need a damage boost to avoid losing all the speed on the unavoidable lava pokey. Funnily enough, the camera scroll after the midway was not supposed to spawn all those fireballs. It did help though. Otherwise a lot of stuff would spawn that'd get in the way. The camera scroll was so that the lava geysers would not be too high and I could actually grab the second Star coin.
World 12-3 Magmatic Ravine
Since we can't get P-Speed really, we have to take the Tanooki Suit and slowly make our way through the level by spin jumping on Blarggs, Lava Geysers, and a single Bowser Statue Fireball
World 12-A Airship Attack
The only thing to note here is since we lost the Tanooki Suit earlier, grabbing the super leaf from here can help us skip through 12-3 faster.
World 12-5 Castle Courtyard
Since this is just a boss rush there's nothing to really note. The only thing to optimise is the outside movement to get to the next boss as fast as possible. And the doors are weird. For some reason I couldn't enter the door if it wasn't on screen.
Secret course 3 Purple Coins
Finding the fastest route for all the coins and Star shards was pretty easy, especially with the cape. There is also something else to note here. Right before section 4 of the level you can see I go through a Power-up removal block, but keep the cape. I technically lost the cape, but I didn't. I have it until I release Y. This state also comes with a couple of weird things as well, such as cape spinning being disabled, and diving having a glitchy top half of Mario's sprite.
World Star-1 Around the World
The cape was gotten because otherwise this level would be awfully slow with the Frog Suit.
World Star-Castle The Tower of Power
This level is broken up into four powerup sections. Funnily enough, I didn't initially realise this but I was doing them all in reverse. Mainly because I wanted to do section 1 last and section 4 first due to the choice of powerup both of the ended with, so 4-3-2-1 was the fastest route I could find. For the second section of room 4, you can actually skip grabbing the spring by placing a cloud block right under the powerup removal blocks, then jump and you'll get enough height to get into the door. For the first section of room 3, the Penguin suit is back, for 20 seconds as immediately afterward we need the mini mushroom to get to the next section (I don't know why the poison mushroom has a visible X sprite as if it was Lunar Magic. If I'm unlucky I may have ever so slightly modified something in Lunar Magic when I was looking at the level, but then again I don't think I ever clicked on that sprite. For the second section of room 1, avoiding damage could have been way faster than what I did. I have no clue how I didn't see that. Using the shell to do a Shell jump in the small hole can be used to reset vertical speed to be able to land on the spring. Then the boss fight is the same as before, just longer. and that's it. Just enter the credits and that's time
Other comments
There's multiple occurrences of Lunar Magic asking me to "Save Level to ROM?" so if something desyncs then there's probably something shifted by 1 or two tiles. However, looking at the ROMs previous versions, there's only one so I don't think I did anything significant.
Darkman425: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: So there's a few changes that the author didn't mention with this hack that are important to note:
- There are some mechanics that have been changed that make some strategies familiar to vanilla Super Mario World unusable. Most notably, shells can't be taken through pipes and the Left+Right cloud speed glitch has been patched out.
- The main changes between Normal and Hard mode are as follows from the hack page:
- Normal mode allows a powered up Mario to power down to big Mario when damaged. Hard mode changes it so that a powered up Mario powers down to small Mario when hit. This mostly isn't super relevant outside of an edge case in World Star-Castle where a fire flower could've been grabbed slightly sooner on Normal in one of the rooms.
- The timer in Hard mode runs faster which is irrelevant for a TAS as it doesn't affect anything.
- Star coin locations are shuffled between Normal and Hard. In general, Hard mode star coins are harder to reach. However, there are some cases where Hard mode star coins can be faster to grab than Normal mode star coins e.g. all of the star coins in World 1-1. This doesn't mean anything for a standard TAS that reaches the ending but is incredibly relevant for a 100% TAS where Normal mode and Hard mode require different approaches.
Due to the star coin placements being changed between difficulties, I believe it's fine for this 100% TAS to retain the Hard mode part of its branch as it's relevant for full completion.
With that out of the way, I can say that this is looks good. For most normal viewers this would look incredibly tight. For the most part I agree from my experience with SMW TASing, though I did manage to catch a few minor sections that I could prove were suboptimal due to the sections looking off visually:
- World 2-6 - I managed to save 12 frames by briefly slowing down to 36 speed before the paratroopa in order to slide on the slope beneath for sprinting speed. https://i.imgur.com/t52pM7r.gif
- World 5-6 - With 6-5 running I managed to fly over the triple fire bar at the end of the room to grab the 3rd star coin faster, saving 79 frames. https://i.imgur.com/eadqrVJ.gif
- World 6-A - I found a way to get sprinting speed at the start of the level and maintained 6-5 running until the flight needed to enter the green pipe. The 6-5 running speed also meant that the 1st and 2nd star coins are obtained with minimal slowdown, resulting in 212 frames saved. https://i.imgur.com/2RHiQsa.gif
Overall, the time saves I managed to find totaled up to 303 frames, or roughly 5 seconds. That's not exactly something to worry about for a TAS that's over 2 hours in length, especially considering that I'm pretty sure frame rules are still in effect for some objects in the hack. The fact that I only found that much means that this is very well optimized everywhere else. Nice work overall!
Accepting to Standard as full completion on Hard mode.
fsvgm777: Processing.
Also replacing the movie file with one that has an accurate re-record count.