BDSMW Central

Welcome to BDSMW Central your primary resource for "brutally difficult" Super Mario World ROM hacks.

This site hosts an assortment of hacks that have a reputation for being both quite hard at times, and sometime unfair in their design, while still being quite creative. This makes each of them a unique challenge to beat without tool assistance.

The list here was curated with input from folks in the SMW hacking community with the taste for and knowledge of these sorts of hacks.

The Hack List

These games are provided as BPS Patches either as-is or, in the case of some older hacks, with fixes applied to make them usable on modern emulators or consoles. Some older Japanese hacks featured here have also been translated to English alongside their fixes.

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  Luigi's Adventure

  2004 – Anikiti – Standard

  This hack is known for having a very difficult final world and lengthy final castle. This version is less forgiving than the 'Over Seas Edition' that was translated into English and edited for the North American audience.

  Download
• 

  Hyper Mari World 6

  2010 – Haimari – Standard

  Hyper 6 starts out unassuming but ramps up into being a very hard hack. The game's final world is notoriously difficult only to be outdone by the hack's Special World.

  Download
• 

  The Master Courses

  2006 – Michael Nguyen – Standard

  The Master Courses features some bizarre design choices that make it a tough challenge on the senses, especially in the later game.

  Download
• 

  Grey Eminence

  2020 – kebabchilla – Standard

  A more modern hack, started in 2014 but released in 2020, Grey Eminence is not without creativity but it has a steep difficulty curve and the levels are prone to including obtuse puzzles which add frustration to the experience.

  Download
• 

  S Mario

  2011 – Final – Standard

  Another hack from the Japanese community that is often borderline Kaizo in its design and challenges even the most experienced players.

  Download
• 

  Super ASPE Mario

  2015 – Various – Standard

  A very creative collab hack from the Japanese SMW hacking Twitter community. This game is full of many wild custom gimmicks and levels.

  Download
• 

  SUPER

  2012 – Wagokoro – Standard

  Another hack from the Japanese community with whose later stages will really challenge players' endurance and patience.

  Download
• 

  Super Challenge World

  2006 – Nigel K. – Standard

  This game is a lengthy, mostly vanilla hack. Its oddball level design ends up making it more challenging that it appears to be, often needing players to use alternate techniques to skip sections to make things more tolerable.

  Download
• 

  Kaizo Mario World 3

  2012 – Takemoto – Kaizo

  The third installment of the Kaizo Mario series, is not only one of the hardest Kaizo hacks, its final boss is infamous for having a lot of randomly generated attacks, often taking as long to beat as the entire hack that precedes it.

  Download
• 

  Super Responsible World

  2015 – ft029 – Kaizo

  A really hard vanilla kaizo hack, with a lot of clever but sometimes convoluted level design. It gained such a reputation for difficulty that people challenge themselves with the 1.0 version.
  
  An updated version from 2018 is hosted here.

  Download
• 

  SMW Intrigue

  2009 – Maxxim – Standard/Kaizo

  This hack was released only months after Kaizo Mario World 1, it is notable for having a very Kaizo-like design before 'Kaizo' was a category of hacks.

  Download
• 

  Kyōdai Mario

  2010 – Kado – Standard

  Another older Japanese hack. Kyodai (Brother) Mario from Kado has a healthy mix of good design and difficulty.

  Download
• 

  Super Marisa Adventure World

  2023 – Shiki_Makiro – Standard/Kaizo

  An imaginative hack from Shiki_Makiro that has been described as being in the same spiritual category as Haimari's Hyper series. The end game and final challenge are known to be quite brutal.

  Download

Honourable Mentions

These are some hacks that are uniquely questionable creations that are borderline unplayable or very tough to try and play without tool assistance.

• 

  What The Hell

  2010 – raocow – Standard

  One of the hardest hacks that has yet to be beaten without tool assistance.

  Download
• 

  "evil" YUMP

  2018 – JUMP Team – Standard

  Why JUMP Team modifed YUMP to be like SMW Highland—a hack where the sprites spawn in randomly with random velocities—remains a mystery but it sure does exist.

  Download
• 

  Horrifying Mario World

  2014 – GbreezeSunset – Kaizo

  A mostly vanilla tools-assisted Kaizo hack inspired by the original kaizo trilogy. Playing this without savestates is strongly discouraged, but has been done by a few people.

  Download

Quality of Life

Unless they already include them, many of these hacks lack the "quality of life" accommodations a lot of modern players are accustomed to, namely infinite lives, auto-saving your progress, and the retry system.

If you would like to play with some of those applied, you can download the following Asar patch which can be configured to:

• Disable life loss and gain (a.k.a. infinite lives)
• Increase overworld movement speed (convenient for overworld backtracking)
• Enable autosaving on overworld movement (useful for when the hack has no save points)
• Change Mario's starting power-up state on overworld with R (as a time-saver for power-up farming).

You are still encouraged to give a hack your best effort without this patch and play the game as-designed. 🙂

Acknowledgements

This site appreciates the work these creators put into their respective hacks and recognizes that their reputations for being "brutal" are more often than not the result of a mismatch between the expectations and tastes of modern players and the intent and context in which these hacks were originally made, especially the older hacks.

Thanks also to the folks fixing and translating old Japanese hacks, and archiving hacks on SMWDB several of which are featured here.