Super Metroid Dark Nightmare
Release date: Jul 27, 2017
Author: jailsonmendes
Download: Version 1.1 [UH] (296 downloads)
Genre: Challenge [?]
Game: SM
Difficulty: Veteran [?]
Average runtime: 13:00
Average collection: 0%
Read Me: [None]
Forum Thread: [None]
Rating: Star Star Star Star Star
Description
Fusion of the worsts hacks SM, like SM impossible,nightmare(Jam)Kaizo,and others… maybe Humanly possible
Screenshots
Screenshot
Ratings and Reviews
By kkzero on Mar 04, 2020 (Star Star Star Star Star )
No completion stats.
Bad "challenge" halfhack, nothing to see here.
By Sapphron on May 06, 2020 (Star Star Star Star Star )
No completion stats.
Worst. Hack.
The room before climb has respawning pirates that take like 100 shots. I gave up there because this is a worse version of The Nightmare, which pedro also made.
Did not finish.
Do not recommend.
By Syphon on May 06, 2020 (Star Star Star Star Star )
No completion stats.
No.
By H A M on Mar 03, 2023 (Star Star Star Star Star )
No completion stats.
Pedro123 couldn't beat his own hack
By dagit on Jan 17, 2024 (Star Star Star Star Star )
% in 13:00
[Watch Video]  
Time is RTA with massive cheats. Collection percent is meaningless (because cheats).

I just assumed the other reviewers were being a bit hyperbolic. How naive I was! You should avoid this hack for your mental and physical health/well being. It's hard to explain why that is without massive spoilers.

As such, this review contains massive spoilers. You have been warned.

At first this hack seems like a typical challenge hack. Very constrained. Everything kills you instantly. Enemies move so fast that they teleport around the room. You have less energy that normal. All that usual terribly unfair stuff that comes with challenge hacks. However, this hack holds a dark secret, as its name might imply.

You start out as normal but with a reduced ceres timer, get morph, get a missile pack (that grants 1 ammo), and then you start the climb back to get bombs. The rooms are overly challenging but many challenge hacks go all in on that. Enemies take about a minute to kill and block your path and instantly kill you. This forces you to shoot them. And many will respawn. Eventually you can get through it. I used save states to accelerate the process.

When you reach bomb torizo's door is when you get the first hint that something isn't right. You'll have 1 or 2 missile ammo at this point depending on your collection rate. However, the door won't open. You can't farm for ammo because the flying guys outside BT are immune to your gun BUT even if they could be killed missile and super missile ammo drops give 0 ammo. Health drops give 1 or 2 depending on big or small. Farming is just not viable in this hack.

Next you'll wander around and you might eventually find another missile pack in a far off corner of Zebes. It should be noted that the hack author really likes the kill count door mechanic. You will encounter many grey doors that require excessive enemy farming to open. This can be as high as 255 in some rooms! Anyway, when you leave the room you will be warped back to the room a couple rooms right of morph. So then you have to climb back up to the ship/BT. However, the 3 missile ammo you have at this point is still not enough to open the door. We checked in SMILE/SMART and the door outside of BT, and ALL missile doors, requires 255 missiles. How will you get those missiles? That missile pack in the far corner of zebes you just got, it respawns. Each time you get it you will need to complete a loop.

You will need to complete this loop 253 times to get 255 missiles. I did about 25 iterations of this loop. My personal best was probably around 15 minutes and still had at least one death. Maybe you can do better? Maybe you can learn to do the loop deathless in 8 minutes. That would mean you'd only spend about about 34 hours collecting the necessary missiles. It would have taken me around 60 hours.

Surely once you get bombs things improve right? Wrong. The next item you need to collect using a loop is super missiles. Again you get 1 per iteration. I'm not sure how long this loop takes when done optimally, but to do the loop you'll now need 768 missiles. That's because you'll run into three missile doors in one room and 2 of them respawn and block the 3rd, so you can't just leave and refill. Now we're talking over 100 hours (766 loops at 8min each) to collect all the missiles. And that's assuming you're a speedrunner that can get 1 missile every 8 minutes with no deaths. For me it would be more like 200 hours.

How many super missiles do you need to collect? By the way, you'll need to revisit the ship or a refill station after each super missile so you can use another 512 missiles to open the path to the next super. You'll need to do this new loop 1530 times because there is a room with respawning green doors that each take 255 supers. I don't have good data on how long this super loop takes but considering it's a pretty big loop, you need to refill at the ship after, and you have to fire 512 missiles each time. So let's say it takes 10 minutes per loop. That's 255 hours.

So you're looking at 350 to 450 hours easily just to collect enough ammo to get out of Brinstar and into the rest of the game. This is the point where I switched to playing on emulator so that I could edit my inventory to just give myself infinite ammo and all the suit upgrades. I wanted to know what else was in the hack but I was no longer interested in obtaining the items normally.

Even with those cheats, turbo fire, and emulator turbo speed, it still took me another 6 or 7 hours to beat the hack. That is, I spent about 6.5 hours playing legit and another 6.5 playing with cheats.

After you get all that missile and super missile ammo, you will need to do a lot of hell running because gravity doesn't provide full heat protection and varia is as deep in norfair as you can imagine. So you'll probably want to grab a few hundred power bombs. I'm not sure how many you want. I gave myself varia. Thankfully those respawn without you needing to leave the room. So while it's tedious it's significantly faster than the other ammo grinds.

Now once you've beaten all the bosses and entered tourian, the tedium shoots up again. Now you have to open several kill count gray doors in tourian. The MB fight is vanilla. However, during the escape the timer will be set to about 100 minutes and you will need a serious chunk of that time on the remaining grey kill count doors. In one room you need to kill 255 pirates to proceed. This took me 60 minutes and I couldn't use emulator speedup as I had to move around and shoot the pirates. I did cheese my emulator so that it thought I was holding angle and shoot when I wasn't pressing anything. Otherwise I would have had to taking significant breaks because I can't hold buttons down for 60 minutes straight. This hack IS bad for your health.

Animals saved. Not recommended.

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