So I've been playing some VIP 6... let me tell you that this game is hard as heck.
Basically, they've just finished most of what I assume is going to be Bowser's Castle. Bad enough? Oh wait, there's about 25 rooms in this place (1-F and then to about 17) and even the easiest is brutally unforgiving.
Some descriptions I posted on the Talkhaus:
Room 0: Boo Block platforms that appear and disappear in a hallway of blue fire. It's gonna be annoying, but it's by no means the hardest room here...
Room 1: A lava room with looping apples that fall from the ceiling continuously. Pretty simple, but the sprites are used in some very clever ways.
Room 2: Traditional SMW castle with Thwomps, Thwimps and spikes
Room 3: Weird puzzle block room where arrows divert the paths of Bullet Bills. It's very cool as a concept, even if the blocks and ASM setup is likely fairly simple.
Room 4: Underwater skewer room with fire everywhere. It's an interesting contrast, done with an absolutely eye burning palette.
Room 5: Weird looping underwater section where you have to solve a key related puzzle or end up back at the start.
Room 6: Puzzle land with snake blocks. Hit the invisible blocks to make a path for the snake to follow. Use triangles to run up moving snake blocks. That kind of neat thing.
Room 7: Atari style puzzle room with solid colour blocks and gimmicks. Looks very retro.
Room 8: An awesome layer 2 smasher room... where the smasher changes layout/design every five seconds. It's like a long room of different smashing traps are being wheeled into place as you go...
Room 9: A vertical scrolling tower somewhat akin to Castle Crush from Donkey Kong Country. Sort of.
Room A: Familiar pipe based room with Chucks and Fire Piranhas.
Room B: Nice looking church where Magikoopas try and fry Mario over a pit of rose Munchers. There's got to be a meaning there somewhere!
Room C: Piranha Plant and net based castle room, with oddly distracting moving background.
Room D: Climb a tower with weird spinning diagonal platforms. Pretty interestingly done.
Room E: Ride an elevator machine up a tower while avoiding mini Clown Cars dropping cannonballs.
Room F: Boss Bass returns, in a water themed castle room with a moving platform. Fun times?
Room 10: An icy warehouse, with Ninjis and Jungle enemies. No logic here.
Room 11: Layer 2 water area, with Rip Van Fish and Dolphins.
Room 12: Underwater tank fleet in a castle hallway. This is weird as hell.
Room 13: P Balloon castle level. With a very, very awkwardly moving Mario. Fun?
Room 14: Puzzle room made of those blocks meant to give you a 1-Up for collecting 30 coins in a level.
Room 15: Gold VIP style castle, with a demonic spider gone ballistic enemy known as 'Mother'. Tries to blast Mario with homing bullets, flames and explosions while flooding the room and chasing him through platform hell. Raocow will lose about 99 lives in this room, I guarantee it.
Room 16: Flappy Mario from hell. Lots of spike platforms come at Mario lightning fast from off screen and he has jump through the gaps perfectly. It's hard as all heck, and so bad that a half hour death montage of raocow's failures in this rom would be nowhere near enough to demonstrate the worst of the level.
Room 17: Thwimps meet Grinders on lines. It's fairly simple, unlike the others. But also hard.
Room 18 (likely only accessible after beating some of the previous 17 rooms): It's not done. Just a test room.
Gimmicks are amazing. Level design is borderline Kaizo... or maybe just plain Kaizo.
Want hell? This thing:
It can shoot magic. It can shoot homing bullets. It can shoot rotating bullets. Blast you with fireballs, use boomerangs. Flood and unflood the entire room. Kick footballs from thin air. Shoot you with ultra fast projectiles aimed directly at Mario's head.
And it hunts you down relentless. It cannot be killed or knocked back, even with a star. Basically, it's a Phanto or Koopa Elite turned Terminator esque psycho.
Did I mention that it's easy to find online? Or that the sprite apparently works with no major issues without patches or custom blocks? Oh god that's terrifying. I do not want to see a world in which this custom sprite has become something you see in every single Mario hack. I mean, it could even make Yoshi's Island 1 a challenge...
Welcome to VIP 6's Temple of Homing gone I Wanna Be the Guy.
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As for Mario's Nightmare Quest? Well, it's currently on Fusion Gameworks, ROM Hacking.net or the GCN at the moment.