Why are fangames/romhacks always so fucking hard?

Why are fangames/romhacks always so fucking hard?

>AM2R
>Somehow manage to beat at least one Omega Metroid without losing health and not waste as much missiles on them
>Can't get the hang of Zeta Metroids for the life of me

But to answer your question OP, generally the people who make the fangames and romhacks have played the other games to death and they're designed for fans who have done the same

>not playing your first run on Hard

But Metroid was never hard. You could beat every Metroid 5 times and still job to the first Gamma, not to mention those fucking Zeta.

I did that. Regular enemies drain half an E-tank.

Fans want a more worthy challenge the feel the official games can't provide (usually it's true, see Pokemon) so they set out to make that challenge themselves.

I love Zelda 2, and wish there were some good rom hacks for it.

Someone named IcePenguin did make several promising-looking rom hacks for the game, but he cranked the difficulty up to 11 and the hacks are just tedious. Stuff like removing the healer and magic restorer from the towns so you have to grind/farm magic refills to restore magic and life. Even the simplest blob enemies (bots) take 6 hits to kill at the beginning. Oh, and changing the boss hitboxes so their attacks cover a much larger area.

I want a Zelda 2 rom hack with difficulty close to that of the original.

Often times they are made for people who are hardcore as the makers. Not to mention that since many ROM Hacks that are typically made by up and coming game designers made from older games as a baseline have a tendency of making the games hard as a cheap way to extend the playability of the games.

Are there any good fangames based off of Half-Life 2? Not horror games, though.

two reasons

>they're following the difficulty curve of the games they're based on

>they're short as fuck and/or poorly balanced

I actually played all the way through this and even got 100% item collection.

The bomb jump crumble block maze after Crocomire can die in a fire.

Because they are made by and for people who have mastered the original games.

It's generally designed for and by people who are crazy good at the game.

Bass isn't even the hardest boss on 8bdm, you just wait until you find Quint

I want a good hard crystal romhack but I can't find one

Does MM8BDM actually have a story mode?

Fans cant into good level design so they use extreme difficulty to compensate.

Yeah, beat some SP bot matches and you can end up fighting some bosses including the Yellow Devil.

Pretend you already played through and beat a game without cheating or looking up a guide
romhacks should be a continuation of that difficulty curve, starting where the original game left off and getting progressively harder approaching as close to impossible as reason allows by the end.

Oh, so no cool levels?

I'll still try it out

Because they don't have AAA megasuits breathing down their necks to make them "accessible" for "wider audiences".

>Not Evil Robot

That's what they are, you just missed the initial curve with earlier fangames/romhacks.

In making my own romhack, one mistake is to, after having playtested a section several times, increase its difficulty because it's too easy. The problem there being that it's only easy because you know the hack inside out and you've played through the section many times more than any player would want to.

Get a friend to test it.

>implying ROM hackers would have friends

>implying people online don't flock all over your dick once you release it

Then make friends.

Or fuck, just post it here.
Despite all the hate Sup Forums still loves to play videogames.
And there's such a broad spectrum of players on here that you can get feedback from every angle you can think of.

I got quite a few playtesters, so it isn't an issue. It's just something that has happened and that I try to stay aware of.

Honestly, anyone who makes a hack or even an original game should probably keep the difficulty on the easier side. It makes playtesting easier/faster and you can always add a hard mode or something similar to compensate.

People who have never taken a video game design course wouldn't know how to engineer difficulty.

...

>Video game design course

Literally the memest of meme degrees, even more so than gender studies.

>even more so than gender studies.
Really? I would think you'd at least learn some coding and/or 3D modelling skills.

Every zeta has a spot you can hide in

You can cheese all of them if you want, they only take about two minutes each to beat

Being harder than FF6 doesn't make BNW hard.