Jul 11, 2021

Me getting the only star in OblivionWalkers Kaizo Trap no Slidekicks without the use of savestates.

I'm toying with the idea of playing through Katze's list of kaizo hacks, in order (they're ordered by difficulty). I've been thinking about doing this ever since he created the list a few months ago, and recently I learned that StarrlightSims was doing the same thing. So, I'm dipping my toes in, and this is the first hack on the list, so here it is.

This one-star hack is terrible, haha. I personally found it very annoying and it took me freaking two hours to beat. When watching it, it looks easy, even trivial, but I did not find it to be trivial at all. The ground is sinking sand, making movement very frustrating, and, as the name of the hack implies, slide kicks are disabled in this hack and performing one causes an instant death. This makes traversal limited to kicks and dive roll outs, but dive roll outs require a certain amount of speed, which can take two kicks if they are perfectly timed, but more kicks if the kicks are not perfectly timed (in which case what you intended as a dive roll out will come out as a kick, often leading to death). This makes timing everything and spacing everything in order to dodge the black quicksand very irritating.

Not sure if I will continue with this list. The reason I want to is that by forcing myself to play a pre-existing list, the idea is that I will hopefully become a more well-rounded player by facing challenges I might otherwise avoid. The downside is that the list has some abject garbage on it... While I could skip the abject garbage, this kind of counteracts my reason for going through such a list (for example, I'm now slightly better at navigating Mario through deep sand, something that wouldn't have happened if I allowed myself to skip the garbage). Skipping things also bugs me, as if I'm going to do something like this, the completionist part of me really wouldn't want gaps in the list. So, ultimately, I'm unsure if I'll keep going. I'll definitely try the next few hacks and see how I feel after that.