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TheAnonymousUser's Ratings and Reviews
Exploration],
rated by TheAnonymousUser on Feb 03, 2021 (
2(.5) - Kind of good, but marred by questionable design decisions.
tl;dr - Open ended hack. Very rough around the edges. Overall bad-ish, but tolerable. Frustration =/= Challenge.
Pre-note:
@Contendo Read the damn readme. It's there for a reason.
>About difficulty: It's a little harder than the original ZM...
With that out of the way:
Got all 3 unknowns, plus the pirate base secret item.
Difficulty: It's difficult to decide whether this hack should be considered vanilla or veteran difficulty. It's somewhere in the middle. Some parts are on par with vanilla, whilst other parts are down-right disgusting (see tourian. Also how the hell do you no-hit deorem.) Game also suffers from some "Bomb Fucking Everything" with unhinted breakable tiles. Or worse, breakable tiles hidden behind layer 0.
Visuals: Hit and miss; mostly miss. Mostly basic, and painfully obvious which vanilla rooms were used where. Tiling errors, iffy tiling, visual curve balls (ie. super heat tiles in rooms that aren't super heated,) using background tiles as foreground (and in other rooms, the same background tiles are not foreground,) and various door-camera related issues (camera doesn't stop at certain doors. a minor issue.) Adding pink tiles for super heated secrets was nice, but on the flip side, having vine rooms be super heated with no indicator other than the map is a no no, for me.
Gameplay: Air control is ass. Speed keep is neat as a feature, but a little finicky to use. Mid-air morph is nice. It took me a long time to realise you can space jump in liquid, a feature I'm ok with (no this was not mentioned in the readme, but probably mentioned somewhere in zmht @shrug .) Instant door transitions were jarring at first, but won't complain about it. Less time spent in doors, the better (a smart move in the long run, as there are some misaligned doors.)
Progression: While the hack opens up after bombs, there are definitely wrong answers in which way to go (conner found himself gonig to tourian, just after getting bombs, and it did not look like a fun experience.) Some areas feel like they should be explored much later than they are accessible. It's also easy to overlook some progression items.
Puzzles: I'm not a fan of needing (or being encouraged to use) savestates to solve puzzles. Only once I ended up using savestates, and luckily, any of the bullshit puzzles are for optional items, and never (from my experience) included in main progression. Some of the optional puzzles were neat, whilst others should have stayed on paper. Don't sell 100% on frustration.
Other (without addressing anything that's already in the readme) :
- Climbing a respawn bug pipe is asking to get hit. No.
- Not breaking all the zebatites, and re-entering the room, will cause the lot to despawn.
- The first metroid section of tourian is ass.
- Being told space pirates stole our items, only for morph ball's pickup text to question why chozo leave stuff everywhere? Which one is it, riny? Did space monkeys steal our shit, or no?
- Fake PB that didn't get removed in chozodia.
+ Spreading refill saves across zebes was neat.
- Placing 3 super drops just before the grey pirates is a no no. Simple fix is to change the beam vulnerabilities to something else. Plus they die in 1 super, removing any challenge from the fight.
Readme things:
/ Gravity Suit - The game hangs up for a short while (no idea why,) but becomes playable again after the delay.
/ Mecha Ridley Escape - Timer machine broke (only shows up in MR's room. No idea if it's still ticking down in other rooms.)
/ BGM - May be referring to the Pirate Tension theme being played everywhere, if spotted by a pirate in chozodia.
/ NBMB crash when exiting chozodia - Pass. @shrug
tl;dr - Open ended hack. Very rough around the edges. Overall bad-ish, but tolerable. Frustration =/= Challenge.
Pre-note:
@Contendo Read the damn readme. It's there for a reason.
>About difficulty: It's a little harder than the original ZM...
With that out of the way:
Got all 3 unknowns, plus the pirate base secret item.
Difficulty: It's difficult to decide whether this hack should be considered vanilla or veteran difficulty. It's somewhere in the middle. Some parts are on par with vanilla, whilst other parts are down-right disgusting (see tourian. Also how the hell do you no-hit deorem.) Game also suffers from some "Bomb Fucking Everything" with unhinted breakable tiles. Or worse, breakable tiles hidden behind layer 0.
Visuals: Hit and miss; mostly miss. Mostly basic, and painfully obvious which vanilla rooms were used where. Tiling errors, iffy tiling, visual curve balls (ie. super heat tiles in rooms that aren't super heated,) using background tiles as foreground (and in other rooms, the same background tiles are not foreground,) and various door-camera related issues (camera doesn't stop at certain doors. a minor issue.) Adding pink tiles for super heated secrets was nice, but on the flip side, having vine rooms be super heated with no indicator other than the map is a no no, for me.
Gameplay: Air control is ass. Speed keep is neat as a feature, but a little finicky to use. Mid-air morph is nice. It took me a long time to realise you can space jump in liquid, a feature I'm ok with (no this was not mentioned in the readme, but probably mentioned somewhere in zmht @shrug .) Instant door transitions were jarring at first, but won't complain about it. Less time spent in doors, the better (a smart move in the long run, as there are some misaligned doors.)
Progression: While the hack opens up after bombs, there are definitely wrong answers in which way to go (conner found himself gonig to tourian, just after getting bombs, and it did not look like a fun experience.) Some areas feel like they should be explored much later than they are accessible. It's also easy to overlook some progression items.
Puzzles: I'm not a fan of needing (or being encouraged to use) savestates to solve puzzles. Only once I ended up using savestates, and luckily, any of the bullshit puzzles are for optional items, and never (from my experience) included in main progression. Some of the optional puzzles were neat, whilst others should have stayed on paper. Don't sell 100% on frustration.
Other (without addressing anything that's already in the readme) :
- Climbing a respawn bug pipe is asking to get hit. No.
- Not breaking all the zebatites, and re-entering the room, will cause the lot to despawn.
- The first metroid section of tourian is ass.
- Being told space pirates stole our items, only for morph ball's pickup text to question why chozo leave stuff everywhere? Which one is it, riny? Did space monkeys steal our shit, or no?
- Fake PB that didn't get removed in chozodia.
+ Spreading refill saves across zebes was neat.
- Placing 3 super drops just before the grey pirates is a no no. Simple fix is to change the beam vulnerabilities to something else. Plus they die in 1 super, removing any challenge from the fight.
Readme things:
/ Gravity Suit - The game hangs up for a short while (no idea why,) but becomes playable again after the delay.
/ Mecha Ridley Escape - Timer machine broke (only shows up in MR's room. No idea if it's still ticking down in other rooms.)
/ BGM - May be referring to the Pirate Tension theme being played everywhere, if spotted by a pirate in chozodia.
/ NBMB crash when exiting chozodia - Pass. @shrug
