2019 Blind Kaizo Race OST

Happy New Year's, everyone! This isn't a typical update post since my previous one was very recent so I'm holding off until sometime later in Janruary before I give everyone a taste of what's to come throughout 2022. For now I wanted to squeeze out one final project before the end of the year, and since I've gone quite some time since I made one of these.

Back in the year 2019, a "Kaizo" ROM hack of Super Mario World was created specifically for Summer Games Done Quick 2019: the 2019 Blind Kaizo Race. Instead of controlling Mario, you play as one of eight Kaizo Mario World speedrunners split off into two teams: the blue-clad One Tile Men, and the orange-donning Lunar Magicians and carry them through seven levels of chaos. At the event itself, the teams would rotate out their respective players each time one bit the dust, and the run concluded with the One Tile Men winning the event overall. That said the ending doesn't change based on which team you carry to the end of the game, so for casual runs it mostly boils down to which set of runners you prefer.

The OST is a 10-track collaboration of both original and converted tunes from five different artists, all rendered in Super Mario World's engine. Ripping them was not as straightforward as you might expect since only ZSNES provided audio that wasn't prone to stuttering mid-song, and still some songs were affected and didn't result in flawless recordings despite my best efforts.. Two of the levels spawned enemies that would produce some kind of sound- interrupting the recording's first parts, and the credits, well, cannot be accessed unless you beat the final level. Since I had no patience to play through the hack, I edited the levels through Lunar Magic so the enemies cannot cause sounds to play through their actions and the final level can be beaten by just taking a door to the final room then defeating the boss in a much safer environment without killer plants everywhere. At the end of the day I still managed to do everything the night before New Year's and provide something to cap off 2021, despite the possible likelihood that I'll have to come back to this hack and re-rip a song or two in order to improve the recordings.

Will I rip the songs from another Kaizo hack? Likely not, as many of them run for much longer lengths and don't give you the connivance of skipping levels or jumping straight to the final level. Anyways, you can grab the download for current version of the soundtrack here and I'll see you all in the new year.