Which One Is Harder? Kaizo Mario Hacks, Or Slaughter Maps?

[DSC]

Personally I'll go with Kaizo. Doom offers much more freedom of movement and choice even in combat puzzles, which is a big deal.

 

 

On another note, I've had this idea for awhile... There are many well-known Mario YouTubers that play Kaizo hacks, and by now those kinds of hacks are pretty well-known themselves in the mainstream too. Hell, I know of a big, big animation channel that made a video on them. They totally eclipse slaughter maps in terms of public knowledge... So, here's where my idea comes in. Would it be possible to challenge those people to play a few of our most well-received, acclaimed wads and perhaps bring some more public perception? I don't know how hard it could be, or even possible. It most likely would have to come from our top community members, and they sure have a lot more interesting and important things to do... I would try myself, but I don't have any social media, so...

 

EDIT: It does not even have to be "pure" slaughter, obviously combat puzzle and the like is fair game too!

Edited February 16, 2022 by DSC

[dasho]

This seems like two completely dissimilar skillsets. Would you ask the world's best Doom speedrunner to get a WR at Mario Brothers, or vice versa?

[Shepardus]

What do these have to do with each other besides being hard (except, of course, when they're not)?

[DSC]

6 minutes ago, dasho said:

This seems like two completely dissimilar skillsets. Would you ask the world's best Doom speedrunner to get a WR at Mario Brothers, or vice versa?

 

6 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

What do these have to do with each other besides being hard (except, of course, when they're not)?

I don't see how they are so dissimilar. Both are subsets of incredibly hard game modifications made by two of the biggest and oldest mod communities out there, that both require insane skill, reaction times and patience to beat.

[Bauul]

This is an odd comparison, given "slaughter maps" is such a huge category. Also slaughter maps aren't even necessarily hard - the opening levels of Haste or MSCP are all slaughter and by design don't put up much of a challenge at all.

 

This question is like asking "what tastes better: Gordon Ramsay Michelin-starred restaurant dishes, or Thai food?". Not only is it entirely subjective, it's also not an equal comparison.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Bauul

[DSC]

I seriously thought both were similar enough to warrant a comparison when I made this thread. Seems like I was at fault there... Sorry.

[Dimon12321]

Doom Slaughter maps are made for solo challenges and cooperative.

Kaizo Mario is about matching your movements in tact. They usually have 1-2 possible scenarios of completing a level and if you screw up, you usually cannot get back on the track. No wonder why there are so many TAS movies about it.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Dimon12321

[Ludi]

Grand Poo World 3 could eat Sunlust for breakfast. I'll leave it at that 

[DSC]

8 minutes ago, Sr_Ludicolo said:

Grand Poo World 3 could eat Sunlust for breakfast. I'll leave it at that 

Wait... I thought there were only 2 GPWs?

[Midnight_00]

15 minutes ago, DSC said:

I seriously thought both were similar enough to warrant a comparison when I made this thread. Seems like I was at fault there... Sorry.

I don't think you're wrong to compare them. Maybe not all slaughter maps are difficult but the comparison still comes naturally.

 

I don't really play Kaizo hacks, but I've seen some playthroughs of them and they're clearly far less forgiving. 

[Sena]

Assuming you mean any Mario level that uses the Kaizo style, and not just the original one (because then you'd be comparing one specific ROM hack to an entire genre of WADs), probably slaughter for the singular reason that you have health and armour, whereas in Mario you can take 1 or 2 hits and that's it.

[Pseudonaut]

I've never played any Kaizo Mario, but my impression is that it requires extreme precision constantly. Slaughtermaps don't, and instead test the player's situational awareness and impromptu tactical ability. Like others have said, totally different skillsets are involved. It would make more sense to compare Kaizo Mario to some very precise platforming-type maps, like this one:

 

 

[Mr. Freeze]

Slaughtermaps typically aren't hard unless you make a mistake. Kaizo Mario is punishingly tough. 

[Kute]

they seem different to me. Mario levels like that strike me as pure rote memorization

 

But it's not like there aren't maps I assume for both that are nigh-impossible 

 

I think a 3d game like Doom is engaging alot more of your noggin than a 2d platformer though

 

But assuming the same species is playing both games, the accomplishments of both will settle to that level. So this is all nonsense.

[MFG38]

6 minutes ago, Kute said:

I think a 3d game like Doom is engaging alot more of your noggin than a 2d platformer though

 

That depends on a lot more factors than the (in)existence of the 3rd dimension. I know 2D platformers I'd classify as harder by design than many FPS games. But then again, I play both on a regular basis.

[Murdoch]

I really do not get this. Never heard of these hacks but even so, surely there are some slaughtermaps more difficult than others, and hacks more difficult than others? So it's really an odd thing to compare so absolutely when there's inevitably variance among examples. Not to mention perception of difficultly is entirely subjective. I've played Doom most of my life. I've played Mario maybe twice. Obviously i would consider the latter more difficult. 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Murdoch

[Nine Inch Heels]

To begin with, this comparison makes very, very little sense, because difficulty is primarily a matter of individual perception rather than an objective metric... Put any Kaizo Mario player in front of any hard slaughtermap, and they'll struggle a lot unless they have some noteworthy FPS experience under their belt... Do the same thing vice versa, and the slaughtermap player won't finish a single Kaizo Mario level unless they're being told about crucial concepts such as re-grabs... Put a Kaizo player and slaughtermap player up against RJ_SLOTH, and nothing's going to get done. Why? Because RJ maps are so removed from your usual FPS gameplay and your typical 2D platformer that neither player will have any degree of "synergy skills" going into the rocket jump map.

 

There's also this common misconception that Kaizo hacks are all insanely tight and require near frame perfect precision, which has been debunked countless times already... Not only do Kaizo hacks vary a great deal in terms of difficulty (even though all of them involve difficult platforming) but even hacks that lean towards more difficult than average (GPW2, fly me to the stars, storks apes and crocodiles) are still lenient enough to allow for a reasonable degree of accessibility if you understand the basics of the tech that's required to beat a Kaizo level in the first place...

 

TL;DR: neither is harder

[philcul]

1 hour ago, Pseudonaut said:

I've never played any Kaizo Mario, but my impression is that it requires extreme precision constantly. Slaughtermaps don't, and instead test the player's situational awareness and impromptu tactical ability. Like others have said, totally different skillsets are involved. It would make more sense to compare Kaizo Mario to some very precise platforming-type maps, like this one:

 

[video]

 

Are those rocket wall jumps at the end!?

[Lewonx]

As someone, who played both, I say, kaizo Mario is harder. First off, if you are playing with saves, you can savescum through some even not currently humanly beaten maps (like Okuplok), but even some easier kaizo hacks have stuff like double shell jumps, that no amount of saves will help you with. Saves aside, if you compare average kaizo hack with an average slaughterwad, kaizo hack is way harder. As for the tas only stuff, Item Abuse makes Cosmogenesis and Tarachillax look like a joke.

[Captain POLAND]

2 hours ago, Kute said:

I think a 3d game like Doom is engaging alot more of your noggin than a 2d platformer though

Chess is 2d. Try beating Stockfish 15 in blitz.

[Mr. Freeze]

3 hours ago, Kute said:

I think a 3d game like Doom is engaging alot more of your noggin than a 2d platformer though

 

Laughs in Ikaruga 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Mr. Freeze

[Hitboi]

Those two genres are different in terms of difficulty, but I'll say it's Kaizo Mario, it has a lot of puzzles and requires precision with platforming.
While on the other hand, Slaughter maps rely on dealing with situations and making tactics to overcome challenges.
 

3 hours ago, Kute said:

I think a 3d game like Doom is engaging alot more of your noggin than a 2d platformer though

But some 2D games would act very similarly if they transitioned to 3D, think about 2D digital tabletop games and top-down RPG games.
Most(?) 3D platformer games are like 2D platformer games but with more freedom.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Hitboi

[Ludi]

4 hours ago, DSC said:

Wait... I thought there were only 2 GPWs?

 

I meant 2, sorry

[Kute]

1 hour ago, Captain POLAND said:

Chess is 2d. Try beating Stockfish 15 in blitz.

 

This is easily, and I mean easily the most flawed analogy I've ever been presented with. 

 

Why would you even bring a head to head match-up that makes absolutely no use of physical dexterity into a thread related to a single-player platformer?

 

edit: but do you guys not realize how pointless this argument is? How can one be more difficult unless you specify an exact map? Doom slaughter maps can mean like, Courtyard, or they can mean gigantic 7 hour clusterfucks that require save-scumming. It's such a huge variable. I would assume both games can more or less be programmed to a difficulty that no human player can reasonably beat.

 

 

 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Kute

[Kute]

2 hours ago, Lewonx said:

As someone, who played both, I say, kaizo Mario is harder. First off, if you are playing with saves, you can savescum through some even not currently humanly beaten maps (like Okuplok), but even some easier kaizo hacks have stuff like double shell jumps, that no amount of saves will help you with. Saves aside, if you compare average kaizo hack with an average slaughterwad, kaizo hack is way harder. As for the tas only stuff, Item Abuse makes Cosmogenesis and Tarachillax look like a joke.

If you want to say that with save-scumming Doom isn't very difficult, then hey, no argument here. That's very true. It's so true that it seems almost pointless  to bring up - you'd almost certainly have to be talking about Doom without save-scumming if you were trying to cite it in a difficulty situation.

[Nine Inch Heels]

1 hour ago, Kute said:

If you want to say that with save-scumming Doom isn't very difficult, then hey, no argument here. That's very true.

Except it's also true that I could just as well cheese my way through any Kaizo hack by way of savestates in the emulator instead of dealing with the potential exhaustion of getting rolled back to a midway in a Kaizo hack, therefore making much faster progress much more easily than somebody who uses only what the hack they're playing is providing them with... So that entire talking point about saves making anything "easier" (which, by the way, is straight up dishonest), is moot in the first place...

 

At most there's perhaps an argument to be made that some situations in classic doom can be save-scummed through whereas a Kaizo hack won't be as merciful to someone who uses save states, but what's made "easier" with save-scumming anyway..? You still didn't find a reliable solution to a problem for which one exists, you just brute forced the game enough to luck your way out of something you would have no business beating otherwise... Sidestepping a problem instead of solving it merely brought you one step closer to the end of the map, but you still wouldn't have a reliable answer to a fight you had problems with - nothing has become easier, because nothing has been figured out and no lessons were learned.

 

We might as well argue that doom is easier with IDDQD on - at least that would be a heck of a lot more honest than save-scumming the shit out of a map and then claiming that something has been "beaten"...

[Maribo]

I heavily agree with everything NIH has said in this thread. I get the compulsion to compare two different community's generally perceived "super hard" categories of content, but it's mostly impossible... I mean you can draw parallels, ie: something like Kaizo Kindergarden / Learn to Kaizo to Practice Hub (Practice Hub is general speedrunning but it works well with this analogy so it's the wad I'm going with) in terms of what they are (introduction to mechanics that are relevant to the genre/style) but you can't really go much farther than that.

 

I would highly encourage anyone who has even the lightest interest in it to try beginner Kaizo hacks. You don't have to be a platforming god to enjoy them, just like you don't have to be a god to enjoy wads like Rush :)

 

Other notes:
Sunlust is largely not slaughter, at least pick something like Dimensions if you're going to make a meme joke for the meme comparison thread.

Routing runs for Doom maps also requires rote memorization at a base level, but also execution. The same is true for Kaizo, and to brush it off as simply head-slamming-into-wall memorization is silly at best.

It would be far more apt (but still really silly) to compare Item Abuse to TAS-intended wads rather than Cosmogenesis.

[Grain of Salt]

from most difficult to least difficult, imo:

• untitled2 (putting this here because imo it's not really humanly possible. it's an anomaly whichever way you slice it)
• modern "kaizo hard" smw levels
• the hardest modern slaughter maps
• the majority of modern slaughter maps
• the majority of slaughter from 2010 to, like, 2017
• levels of the original kaizo mario world
• older, pre-sunder slaughter
• "HR style" maps from before "slaughter" was the catch-all term du jour

My splitting of slaughter eras does not take into account the general rule of thumb that when a new level of scale or difficulty enters mainstream doom mapping, Timeofdeath usually did it already in like 2010.

 

I agree with nih that comparing different flavors of difficulties is actually impossible and pointless, but it's still fun to sort things and make lists.

[Kute]

1 hour ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Except it's also true that I could just as well cheese my way through any Kaizo hack by way of savestates in the emulator instead of dealing with the potential exhaustion of getting rolled back to a midway in a Kaizo hack, therefore making much faster progress much more easily than somebody who uses only what the hack they're playing is providing them with... So that entire talking point about saves making anything "easier" (which, by the way, is straight up dishonest), is moot in the first place...

 

At most there's perhaps an argument to be made that some situations in classic doom can be save-scummed through whereas a Kaizo hack won't be as merciful to someone who uses save states, but what's made "easier" with save-scumming anyway..? You still didn't find a reliable solution to a problem for which one exists, you just brute forced the game enough to luck your way out of something you would have no business beating otherwise... Sidestepping a problem instead of solving it merely brought you one step closer to the end of the map, but you still wouldn't have a reliable answer to a fight you had problems with - nothing has become easier, because nothing has been figured out and no lessons were learned.

 

We might as well argue that doom is easier with IDDQD on - at least that would be a heck of a lot more honest than save-scumming the shit out of a map and then claiming that something has been "beaten"...

 

While I agree in spirit, and was going to say this myself - I had to avoid this exact point because Doom does indeed allow you to save at any point, and I don't think the mario games do. But I have no idea where you play these kaizo roms and if emulator's array of options counts or whatever.

 

It's largely moot though because many people don't consider maps to be "competitively beaten" if it's done via saves, but I've been bazooked on this very forum for making this exact point, so I'm wary of making it. 

[Nine Inch Heels]

43 minutes ago, Kute said:

While I agree in spirit, and was going to say this myself - I had to avoid this exact point because Doom does indeed allow you to save at any point, and I don't think the mario games do. But I have no idea where you play these kaizo roms and if emulator's array of options counts or whatever.

 

It's largely moot though because many people don't consider maps to be "competitively beaten" if it's done via saves, but I've been bazooked on this very forum for making this exact point, so I'm wary of making it.

Any emulator I'm aware of that can run ROMs and ROM-hacks has a built-in save-state-feature that can be used at any point (never mind slow-motion), and people use those save states to hell and back - not for the purpose of claiming to have mastered something after somehow making it through every section just once and not more often than that, but for the purpose of being able to practice sections they want to become better at...

 

There is a stark difference between using saves prior to a difficult section in any map/level/whatever so they can be fully understood and practised, and saving every 10 seconds in a fight that has not been understood at all while using "pray" so somehow, after enough saves and loads, one makes it out the other end... As in: There is a difference between using saves to learn something so it actually becomes easier, and save-scumming to circumvent the need to develop a thorough understanding of whatever it is one is currently being brick-walled by...

 

Using saves is good, and I'm not one to fault anybody for using them, neither am I going to argue that everybody has to beat any map save-less or else it doesn't count. But the moment somebody says they've beaten a map while completely and most importantly consciously sidestepping the "understanding what the map actually wants from the player part" I'm gonna have to disagree for very obvious reasons.

 

If people are having fun save-scumming around, by all means, knock yourself out. Nobody cares what you do with the WADs you download (as long as you don't redistribute them while claiming they're your work) but at least be aware of what you're doing and why you're doing it, and maybe consider that there's a more convenient way to accomplish what you're after if you're save-scumming anyway. Which is to say, if you're not gonna be able to beat something straight up, punch in IDDQD and get it over with instead of torturing yourself while you're teetering on the brink of saving yourself into a corner... It's the same result, but way less frustrating...