HackoROMa – Royal Flush

When it comes to ROMhacks, they tend to fall into one of the same categories:
•    Unnecessarily Hard – Your Kaizo hacks and the like.
•    Easy Mode – Hacks which either made hard games easier, or original hacks that hold your hand through the entire process.
•    Fixers – Hacks which are meant to fix specific bugs or other problems with the game, improving them, things like Simon’s Quest Redaction.
•    Complete Overhauls – Hacks which feature new art, levels, music, everything in one package to create an entirely new game, included in this category is the best ROM Hack I’ve ever played, Super Mario World – The Second Reality Project (Reloaded).
•    What the Hell am I Looking At!? – Hacks which provide the type of head scratching confusion that you get from David Lynch’s stranger works.

When it happens you will know it.

I spent some time perusing a popular ROM Hacking website, when I happened across today’s subject, a hack of Super Mario Bros. 3 by user darkdata called Royal Flush – Princess Sidestory. Where does it fit in? Well let’s not beat around the bush, and dive right in.

Okay, title screen is pretty promising; new graphics, the title itself is kind of stupid, but I do appreciate that the hacker took the time to create some very nice graphics for it, much better than the usual block text we tend to get. The stack of dice is a bit confusing, considering that this is called Royal flush, but it looks okay. I’ve got no one else to play with so we’ll go ahead and select One Player mode.

Again, we’re looking pretty good here. Like the new map screen, obviously some kind of forest world, some purple in the giant mushrooms, neat stuff. The screen is begging me to press the ‘A’ button, so let’s see what’s going on here.
So we have Peach and Toadette. Toadette is just a recolor of the Toad sprite from SM3, but looks fine. Peach is an entirely new sprite, which isn’t bad, except for her completely oblong head and a nose that points out to an absurd length, making her look like a cross-dressing Pinocchio.

Okay, so this is a game board? Like some kind of board game, and we have to stop Bowser from ruining everyone’s good time. I guess Bowser is the guy that always flips the RISK table when he doesn’t get Madagascar at first draw. What an ass.
And there’s a dog. A dog who is apparently royalty.

So I revisit for the tutorial and it turns out that we have some options, blue squares are mandatory, but red and green aren’t. This sort of makes sense, because after a more thourough inspection of the Hack’s page, we see that this is supposed to be a Mario Part board. Sure. And we’re going to have a bomb ability? Okay, neat. Bringing something new to the table? Completely on board.
And the first level is sand.

Yeah, to hell with all that theming nonsense; Poison forest overworld? Yeah, that’s cute, but what the people really want is SAND.

That’s some quality grain right there.

And this isn’t just a phenomenon with the first level either, nearly every stage in this first world is sand. There’s so much orange in this hack you’d think it was a Wes Anderson venture. The level design is pretty meh as far as other ROM Hacks go, and the levels are surprisingly short. Each one took less than two minutes to beat, even with fully exploring and trying every single pipe for secrets. Shock of all shocks, there are none.

Not that far into the level, I come across the bomb ability.

Another thing I like is the way the coins jump up. It’s a nice touch.
The hacker made a neat little sprite for the bomb which looks pretty nice, but it has the unfortunate side effect of turning Peach into Lucille Ball.

You can hold up on the D-Pad to make the bombs go higher (which would be nice if there were a single flying enemy in the game), down while jumping to make them go to your feet (relatively unproductive), and just press the B button to make them explode uselessly at the ground because the bombs don’t bounce unless you bounce them on an incline. And this is one of my main complaints with the game. All the hacker had to do was redesign the fireball sprite and keep the same behaviors. There’s no point in including this cool power-up if I don’t get any use out of it! You might have heard of ‘Strategic Dominance’ which is a term in Game Theory which states that if you have the ultimate win-all option, you will always use it. The bomb power-up in Royal Flush is the antithesis of this.
A few more levels of sand later, I find a bonus card matching game like the one from SM3. The problem with this game is that it’s nearly impossible to lose. Instead of the game ending after a certain number of wrong matches, you only lose when you match two Bowser icons (which look oddly like Troggles from Number Muncher).

So as long as you know where at least one correct icon is, don’t expect to lose this one any time soon. And like in the original, matching cards gives you the item for you Inventory accessible from the map screen.

And there are Fire Flower icons which are stand-ins for the bomb upgrade. Once again, laziness comes to the forefront.
We run through a generic (and yes, incredibly short) fortress stage, kill Boom Boom and a path opens to the center stage that was blocked before. And sweet merciful crap, it’s not sand!

This is a bonus level which has no challenge, no fun, and no reason to exist. At the very first screen, you’re met with this icon , which allows Peach to jump higher, and this one  which makes her completely invincible (though without the added benefit of being able to kill enemies on contact). The bevy of Hammer and Boomerang Bros. that the level throws at you means absolutely nothing when there is no threat of death, not even the slightest chance that they can beat you, so I ended up skipping right over them. I get to the end of the level, and –

Okay, what the hell is this? The little Star Ball that you collect to complete the level isn’t there. I looked around a bit more and still, nothing. I then came to find out that in order to complete the level; you have to kill a certain number of enemies. After taking out all of the Hammer Bros, it still wasn’t there. Okay, so I need to kill the Spiny’s too? That’s all well and good, but I have neither the bomb nor the leaf, so I can’t kill them. I actually had to fall down a pit intentionally, go beat another level to collect a power up, and finally beat the level.
Let’s get through the last level and move on to Wor- oh, I’m sorry, BOARD 2.

And the level is boring. So we come to the end of the level and head down the warp pipe and –

Oh my. Those eyes. Those soulless. Dead. Eyes.

So we hop down and find Iggy. We jump around a bit and I kill him with a bomb. A single bomb. Now it could be that the bomb is just so powerful that it took Iggy out with one blast, but I would like to point out that it took about five bombs to kill Boom Boom back in the fortress. This leads me to the conclusion that Iggy is a lightweight. Peach floats down without a custom sprite of her holding the magic wand;

We come down and King Dog has turned into a star, and Toadette congratulates us.

So Iggy isn’t actually Bowser’s son, but one of his ‘goons’? Whatever, I’m a Superstar, for whatever good that does me. Let’s move onto Board 2.

And the game ends. Seriously, that’s the end of the game. Let’s ignore the completely misleading labeling of the ONLY Board as Board 1, but this is a game of 11 total levels (1 of which is a bonus game, and another is in some cases uncompletable) and can completed in less than 15 minutes.
All in all this hack has some things going for it, new art, a neat (though not fully realized or functional) new ability, and a halfway decent concept. Where it falls apart is in the level design, length of the game, the completely borked bonus stages, and the general hand-holding.
I wouldn’t recommend the hack, but if you’re curious, I’ll leave the link to its page again here.

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1633/

Next time, we’ll dive into the strange world of Horror Hacks.