GuestLog in

A fun game which is significantly different from the base game, A Link to the Past (LttP).

This fun hack mixes LttP with elements of a bunch of other Zelda games (at least from NES to DS) and is stuffed with references to countless popular game and movie franchises.

The base gameplay is based off LttP with some significant differences, and it retains the dungeons and fun puzzles.

The biggest downside is the cringey script full of early teenage humor with a bunch of cringey sexual content, so keep kids away from this hack. Most of the dialogues are also very tedious and while you can skip them, you never know when the dialogues have an important hint or story elements so you often feel forced to go through all that tedious and cringey stuff.

I recommend you to do some save backups in the last quarter of the game because there are multiple endings and doing certain actions at certain points will lock you into an ending and you won't be able to see all endings in a single play-through.

I am convinced this hack only exists because Euclid randomly stumbled over the "spawn lightning" routine in A Link to the Past's code and SePH, learning about this, went mad with power and thought to themself: "With this, I could literally turn gold into shit! MUWAHAHA!"

Jokes aside, Conker's High Rule Tail is easily the most impressive A Link to the Past hack I've played to date (which isn't necessarily saying much, since I've only played like two or three). It's so different from the base game that it could very well be considered its own thing, especially the MSU-1 version with its unique soundtrack.

The hack is obviously meant as a spoof, which is apparent at every single moment. It never takes itself seriously for even a minute. Yet despite this, I actually ended up having a surprising amount of fun with it. The dungeons in particular shocked me with how much fun they were to play. Don't get me wrong here, I wouldn't necessarily call them amazing. They do contain a lot of repetitive puzzles (like every dungeon containing at least one or two "light all torches" puzzles). They also have your typical ROM hack jank here there (like a dungeon where you're often teleported back to the main entrance and then have to redo the same annoying torch puzzle). Some are even outright lazy (like the clouds dungeon, which consists of only like eight or so big rooms). However, I still think they were all quite fun to play through, and I enjoyed them a lot more than even some dungeons in serious ROM hacks (like Parallel Worlds - that game's dungeons are just torture).

Later on, the game has a few optional dungeons/puzzles that are quite experimental and do things you wouldn't normally see in the game (like having to utilize moving blocks in order to literally rewrite the room and remove walls). Those are things you'd really only ever see in a ROM hack. Some of those could be quite difficult and even frustrating (like some large rooms with moving block puzzles, where a single mistake meant redoing the entire thing), yet even they were very fun in their own right.

Gameplay-wise, the hack contains quite a number of both minor and major changes compared to the original. Most notably, the pause menu has been redesigned entirely. This is definitely impressive, and the new pause menu does include quite a number of interesting and notable new features, but overall, I find it to be a mixed bag.

One of the major changes is that the game's map screen has been integrated directly into this new pause menu. Instead of pressing X to open the map, you now press start and then press L/R a couple of times to get to the map. This was likely done to free up the X button for new functionality, which a couple of items in the game use. However, this unfortunately creates a problem. Since the map screen is no longer a dedicated button, it now shares space with the item menu, which in pratice means you'll constantly be switching between the items screen and the map screen in the pause menu. At first, this isn't a huge problem, because the game also includes another new feature and lets you switch items mid-game with the L/R buttons. However, with every additional item you get, this becomes less and less feasible. Eventually, you won't get around using the items screen, especially since later dungeons require quite a lot of item switching (basically, think of Link's Awakening, but worse). So eventually, if you're like me and look at maps all the time, you end up constantly having to switch between the items screen and the map screen, which gets annoying quite fast.

Even then, the map that you get isn't actually particularly great. On the original game's map screen, the map was not only intuitive to read, but it was also easy to tell different floors apart and how they were connected to one another. This is no longer the case in this hack. On the new map screen, all floors of the dungeon are condensed into a single layer, which makes it super confusing to understand how rooms connect to one another, which essentially makes the map almost useless in any dungeon featuring multiple floors. Unfortunately, none of the new functionality that goes onto the X button in-game is even that great to begin with, so I'm not convinced this trade-off was a good one. I think a way better solution here would have been to move the save feature onto the pause screen, which would have freed up the select button for the map (though of course I have no idea how simple this would be to pull off).

Another issue I had with the hack was with its world design. The game world is literally a parody of Super Mario 64's hub world, where you run through Peach's castle and jump into different paintings to enter different worlds. In theory, this should be a good thing and make traversal quite convenient since everything is connected to the central hub area. In practice, I actually found the opposite to be the case. All of individual sections are at least respectable in size and often also have a linear layout. This means that in order to get from one specific area to another one, you often have to traverse quite a long distance, because there's almost no shortcuts between the individual areas directly. This shouldn't be such a huge problem, but unfortunately, almost every area contains something important that you'll need to return to ocasionally. For example, the first world has Tingle's drug store (this game's version of the witch's potion shop), which is in almost none of the other places. So if you ever need to get there to buy a potion (which you'll likely be needing a lot of, due to this game high magic consumption) you'll probably have to traverse through multiple areas. To make matters worse, fast travel isn't unlocked until the literal end of the game. It almost feels like an a afterthought at that point.

Talking about magic consumption, yeah, that IS a major issue this hack has. It requires using magic all the time. I already mentioned how literally all of the dungeons have one or more torch rooms, often even in places that you have to revisit where you have to redo the respective puzzle each time. To make matters worse, in this hack, the fire rod permanently replaces the lamp once picked up. In theory, this makes sense and sounds like a good idea because the fire rod is essentially just a better version of the lamp. However, the lamp has the advantage of consuming considerably less magic, which would have been really useful in some of those torch rooms. Taking it away really feels like a bad move. I mean, you only need to use the fire rod like five or six times before the bar is empty, and since most torch rooms contain at least four torches, you don't really have a lot of room to fuck up.

Now thankfully, the hack includes a new feature that automatically refills the magic bar over time, similar to A Link Between Worlds. However, unlike that game, this hack's auto refill is so damn slow that it literally takes multiple minutes to completely refill the par. How do I know? Well, there's a bunch of rooms in the game that basically require a full magic bar to get through, and since I rarely had any potions with me and there were rarely any refills around, I regularly found myself having to wait multiple minutes for my bar to refill before I could reattempt a puzzle. Made failure really that much more punishing. The boss fights against Kholdstare and Trinexx were quite a pain because of this and I found myself having to run around and dodge attacks for an eternity, just so that I could attack. To be fair, this problem is inherited directly from the original game, but since the devs already had the foresight to include automatic magic refill in the first place, why not make it at least slightly useful? I mean, the bar doesn't have to refill instantaneously, but having it refill in, let's say, a minute rather than multiple would have already gone a long way.

Another thing to note about the magic is that while the game includes multiple upgrades to half the consumption, those are really hard to find. I basically played the entire game without them and then only found out where they were by looking into the spoiler guide. In theory, I don't doubt that people will randomly stumble over the location of the second upgrade. However, I genuinely believe the first one's location is almost impossible to guess on your own, and without the first one, the second one can't actually be obtained. Had the upgrades been even slightly easier to find, I'm sure my complaints about the magic consumption wouldn't have been this big.

Overall, the hack includes a fair balance of both fun additions and really bad additions. For example, the sword got a bunch of new forms and abilities. I found all of them to be quite fun to use, especially the last one. It felt like a nice reward for exploring. On the other hand, at some point in the game, you can obtain an upgrade for the hookshot, which really ends up feeling more like a downgrade, because it just adds an attack to it that is more or less useless, yet causes the entire hookshot animation to be about twice as long. It feels like something that was added just for the heck of it. The game has a bunch such additions. Another notable examples is in the very first dungeon, where you can find a fairly well hidden optional item. As far as I remember, the game never really explained what it did, so I ended up never using it. I only found out about its purpose later on once I read the spoiler guide, but by that time, I had already found a new item that permanently replaced it, so really, it did absolutely nothing for me in my playthrough. I'd say overall, many of the hack's items can be considered experimental, where "experimental" means "it kinda suck, but hey, at least it's new".

Now let me talk about the game's bosses, because oh boy, did the devs go buck wild there. Most of them were simply rebalanced slightly and/or placed in slightly different boss rooms for a higher challenge. However, a bunch of them were changed significantly. For example, Mothula now spawns random lightnings (remember my joke in the beginning? I wasn't actually kidding). Kholdstare now can be damaged only with the fire rod, even after it starts moving. Agahnim probably got some of the most significant changes. Instead of spawning lightnings from his hands and instead of moving to the center of the room before doing it, he can now just use the move from whereever he wants, and the lightnings will always spawn directly above Link. This essentially makes dodging them a pure matter of luck. Don't know what the devs where thinking there, but I'm guessing they were just trolling. In fact, it gets especially bad in the fight against three Agahnims, because while the original game disabled the lightning attack in that battle, in this hack, all three Agahnims can actually use it - which just means that eventually, you'll be showering in lightnings. That change alone transformed this battle from one of the easiest into one of the hardest.

Then there's the final Ganon battle, oh boy. Let me confess right now that I didn't actually beat this hack, and the sole reason for that is Ganon. After attempting the final boss twice, I just figured that it wasn't worth it, so I went ahead and looked up all the endings on YouTube. Ganon got so many changes which serve absolutely no purpose other than to make the battle frustrating and annoying. In this hack, whenever he teleports, he's actually invisible - unless you hold down the X button, that is. This makes him normally visible. But first of all, why the fuck, and second of all, I'm not going to play the entire battle, permanently holding down the X button. I only have so many fingers on my right hand, come one. It's a completely pointless addition and, once again, just feels like trolling.

Even worse than this is Ganon's final phase. In the original game, Ganon left plenty of opportunity for attacks after each teleport, patiently standing there before moving on. In the hack, you get none of that. Ganon only remains in each location for a fraction of a second, immediately spawning a bat and telporting away - this is of course in addition to his invisibility gimmick. There's almost zero opporunity to get any hits in on him. Doing so requires chasing him down and getting really close to him, which is almost guranteed to have a bat spawn right into your face. Whenever that happens, it will usually get at least two or three hits in on you, and I swear, no matter how hard you try to stick to the room's center, eventually, one of those bats is gonna drag you into the pit - and that's what ultimately made me quit the hack, because geeze, the respawn point once you fall into the pit is a cruel joke. You essentially have to replay 5-ish minutes of of a boss rush before you can even get another shot at the battle. Even the secret shortcut to Ganon, which requires going through two secret mazes, hardly saves any time. Both paths take an eternity. Had it been just the horrible boss fight alone, I surely would have seen the hack through to its end, but having to replay the section before the fight again and again just felt like too much a waste of my time. The endings were hardly worth it, anyways.

With all that bein said, it's finally time for me to talk about my bigest complaint with the hack: Its humor. I'm pretty sure SePH wasn't a 12-year-old teenager when making it - but if this assumption is incorrect, that sure would explain a lot.

The humor is bad. Like, really bad. From beginning to end, it feels like the stuff a 12-year-old teenage boy would find funny - literally the kind of stuff I might have come up with in 2003 when I was that old. I'm talking things like "haha, Goron titties funny", "haha, cursing funny", "haha, strip clubs funny", "haha, violency funny" or "haha, drugs funny". I mean, almost all of these things CAN be funny, but only when presented cleverly, which the hack just never even attempts doing. At a few occasions, the humor even gets outright offensive, like joking about Alzheimer's, or throwing in a transphobe joke for good measure. I mean, come on now. No matter your political affiliation or your world view, even in 2016, "girl has penis" just wasn't a fun punchline.

Genuinely, the only times I kinda enjoyed the game's humor was when it was just silly multimedia references. These are usually quite inoffensive and I can get behind them. They remind me of a bunch of Super Mario World hacks I like and even of some RPG Maker games I played in the early 2000s. Luckily, these DID make up a large portion of the game's overall presentation, but I swear, whenever Conker opened his mode, he would say something incredibly embarassing. It's such a shame, too, because I feel like this humor can't possibly be representative of the game this hack is based on. I unfortunately never got to play Conker's Bad Fur Day yet, but even with its M rating, I'm pretty sure its humor can't have been THAT bad, right? Otherwise, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be remembered as the cult classic that it is.

So in conclusion, Conker's High Rule Tail is a very impressive ALTTP hack that is quite fun to play, has nice dungeons, as well as a bunch of cool gimmicks and items, but also gets horribly frustrating regularly, has a some major annoyances and features some of the worst humor I've experienced in a long time. I do think the hack is absolutely worth playing through, especially since there isn't actually a whole lot of alternative A Link to the Past hacks out there, but be warned that you'll probably be annoyed by it on more than just one occasion.

After playing Parallel Worlds and really liking what SePH did with it, it was a matter of time waiting for him to do a sequel to the game and finally seeing he made another hack called "Conker's High Rule Tail" I just knew I had to play it and these are my thoughts on the game

Spoilers Ahead: The game makes you start off with a choice between Easy or Hard optional Boss fights, if you're not an expert at ALTTP don't pick Extra Spicy because even I had a problem with some of these boss fights having to go prepared with extra fairies. The game makes you go through 3 levels without a sword but best item you get early is hookshot which really helps with stunning some the enemies and block puzzles early in the game, getting Roc's feather was nice touch to put into this game. I have to say I really enjoyed most of the humour throughout this game, some were a but to much and some where just perfect. the retro throw-back dungeons were great, really digged the Resident Evil dungeon and Yes I will say.. The Parallel Tower now in ruins was a flashback to the horror which was but was not nearly as bad as it was. The Roman numeral numbers were added to the dungeons too.

The little treasures and heart pieces (DNA Fragment) were fun to find which actually made me want to 100% the game (which I did) and explore every little place in the game, get all the rings and sword up-grades to get great final ending to this game. Having Conker use different tails as shield up-grades was a great thing to add into this game and Chuck Norris fairy up-grades gave me laugh.

Being able to openly explore the game after you beat all 9 dungeons made me really fall in love with this game. So much to do after the 9 dungeons, getting the harp to explore all the worlds (The hockey world was funny) and different ones you can't find on the map just made this game so unique. I can see how it took SePH 8 years to do this and as sad as it is this was his last game he made, he really went out in a blaze of glory.

If you're a fan of A Link To The Past and all the other rom hacks made by these people than you owe yourself to play this game. It's a must

Beware of the hard optional puzzle. I know who made that one...

Superior hack: 10/10

Don't let the title fool you. Based on the title I thought it would be a low quality romhack with bad spritework and dialogue. Boy was I wrong.

This is an incredibly well designed hack, with a lot of secrets, well designed dungeons, complete with the type of humor you'd expect from a Conker game. Unlike Parallel words, the difficulty isn't absurd. It has difficult bosses and puzzles, but not absurdly so.

You can just beat the game and move on, but the game rewards exploration and looking for all the optional secrets and areas around every corner. There's even multiple endings. You can tell the author of the hack put a lot of work into this.

Any fan of Link to the Past needs to play this!

This is easily the best rom hack I've ever had the pleasure of playing. Even if the corny humor is not for you, the dungeons, puzzles, items, everything here is just amazing and enjoyable from start to finish. I even took the time to 100% the game and nab every little treasure and heart piece (DNA Fragment) from every nook and cranny.

There's just a ton of optional content to find and do, from crazy hard puzzles, to multi-layered dungeons full of optional loot and multiple endings. I was just floored by all the work put into this.

If you're even a tiny bit of a Link To The Past fan, you owe it to yourself to play this fantastic hack.

I've played a number of great Zelda ALTTP hacks, but this one is really something special. Many times in my playthrough I couldn't help but pause and just shake my head in disbelief.

This hack has a huge amount of flexibility, to appeal to users that want to just complete the game ASAP, and to those who want to take on the many optional challenges to earn special items and 100% it.

As the description states, this is not nearly as frustrating as Parallel Worlds. However, you better show up to the boss fights with full health and fairies, as they are a bit more difficult than vanilla ALTTP.

Do yourself a favor and go play this right away! GO!