The whole release of Grand Poo World III was one of the best things happening in the Internet last year. The chaos that broke smwcentral, how it beat Super Mario RPG in viewers on Twitch for quite a many days and how much fun every streamer seemed to have with it.

I can't get past the first jump though, but still, thank you barb!

I wish I had the skills.

Agreed, it was a blast to watch people tackle it. In addition to what you mentioned, I'd include Barb's Lunar Magic streams. They were super chill and it was some of my favorite content of the year, getting to watch him in his creative process working on the hack.

For sure. And those kaizo block/fish snipes that barb uses so masterfully. Good stuff.

I made a web based level editor that I was hoping would fill in gaps I perceived in Mario Maker: https://smaghetti.com/ I no longer work on it and never really filled those gaps, but it was a fun time nonetheless.

Agree, been super fun to watch everyone work through GPW 3. The clip compilations are always fun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOpt3DU-16I

The bits where streamers faces show up in the levels are hilarious

Lololol! I laughed so much watching this. Amazing. The design of that level is the mind of a f*cker. Lol!

LMFAO that video is the gift that keeps on giving... I lost my shit at the shark towards the end

I loved playing with this when I was in high school. This is such a great memory. Thanks!

Barb (creator of Grand Poo World 3) is my favorite level designer and surely one of the best... But I would say peak Mario might have been the 2022 GDQ Super Mario World romhack race. Some of the stuff in that is truly mind boggling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdMR0uMA_2Q

Wow, this outstanding. Thanks for the link. Always amazed at the creativity of these rom hackers.

Is Lunar Magic open source?

No, and it has the single-maintainer problem (buses, lottery, etc.). The tool has a high learning curve and hidden/unexplained features that you have to read years-old forum posts to use correctly. Lunar magic is great, but there is tons of room for improvement. There has been at least one attempt to solve this problem, though progress has been slow: https://github.com/SMW-Editor/smw-editor.

I spent a lot of time with Super Mario Flash back in the day, has great level editor, you can share levels by copy and pasting a level definition: https://funkypotato.com/super-mario-flash/