Second that. They don’t call 'em Nintendo Hard for nothing.
Hell, I’ve been playing Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts for damn near 25 years now off and on, and I still can’t beat that mfer without save states. And that’s a whole gaming generation ahead of this one, where the console actually supported saves, and games didn’t really have to be as hard anymore to make back their money.
Early Kirby games in general seemed pretty easy coming off the Super Mario Bros games. I had Kirby’s Dreamland on the Gameboy and I remember thinking about how Kirby could just inflate and float over half the enemies in the first half of the game. It got a little more technical later on but I don’t think I ever really struggled to beat the game, even when very young.
In fact, growing up on the hard knocks of SMB led to some spirited conversations with my friends about Sonic the Hedgehog, as well. In Sonic as long as you have a single ring in your pocket you’re immortal, and if you get hit just pick the ring back up. In Mario, if you get hit, you just fuckin’ die. Maybe with one extra chance if you had a mushroom, but you don’t get that second chance back until you find a new one. Now as an adult I realize the design spaces of the two games were different - Mario was actually intended to be a reasonably difficult platformer, where Sonic was arguably less about the precision platforming and more about just having fun going fast as fuck, boi. But as a kid you better believe I took every available opportunity to call Sonic fans casuals. It made me lots of friends, as you may imagine.
Confirmed Starmourn has been recently moonlighted to a “legacy” game. It’s still playable and you can still make new characters and interact with everything in the game but it’s no longer under active development.
Which is a shame, really, because Starmourn was cool as hell. It just apparently wasn’t all that popular compared to some of the others, so it’s being put on a back burner to preserve resources at Iron Realms, which is understandable.
I am a fan of Iron Realms MUDs personally though if only because of their Nexus user interface. I find it a lot more approachable and well put together than others I’ve tried (namely, Aardwolf, in fact). Very clear and concise and nearly infinitely customizable with user scripts. I haven’t been invested enough into MUDs long enough to speak for end game though, so someone else will have to speak on that. But introductions and it would seem up through at least mid game on most iron realms games (which could consist of hundreds of hours, frankly, to even reach midgame sometimes) are totally fine and fun.
I haven’t owned a mac in a long while, but I had one around 2012 and back then I was happily running N64 and SNES emulation and was somewhat active in the Super Mario World romhacking scene. I can only imagine it has improved since then. I know for a fact you can run tons of emulators on Linux because I have them all installed on my steam deck.
Many emulators run on mac or Linux and you can buy usb-ended controllers for damn near every console that has ever existed.
Except for that one spot where you have to shoot at an unmarked wall to blow up some bricks to continue on the main game path. I understand having secrets behind unmarked walls but that bit really bothered me. It was the only time during my playthrough that I had to look up where to go next. The rest of Dread is really, really good at leading you in the right direction without feeling like it’s holding your hand and is honestly a marvel of game design.
I had no idea, lmao. Do you mean Somari? That’s all I can find when searching for it, seems like these days someone has hacked the original Somari rom into a pretty solid recreation of Sonic The Hedgehog. But the original is, by all accounts, extremely bootleg.
Thats actually pretty cool, not gonna lie. Having an earlier introduction to bootleg gaming and rom hacks might have pushed my life path in a very different direction.