For as long as there have been ROMs, there have been RomHacks. Most of them are terrible, just making Mario blue, Sonic brown, or breaking the game entirely.

But amidst all the piles of what we will call 'donkey dung' for the sake of self-censorship, a few gems shine brightly. This is the first of a series of articles on some of the better ones.

This week, we cover Super Demo World. From the hack's site:

"Demo World is a hack to demonstrate how well Lunar Magic can modify Super Mario World. [...] The third version of Demo World was released on September 21, 2003. Called "Demo World : The Legend Continues" (DW:TLC), it's a full hack of Mario World that's complete right to the end. It showcases many of the features in Lunar Magic, including the new tile and palette animation feature included in version 1.60. And as with the original Demo World, it has new custom blocks such as screen-scrolling type pipes that are similar to what you'd see in Mario 3. A version 1.1 update was released about a month later to fix a few bugs.

I was introduced to this hack from a thread on SomethingAwful, where I was treated to a commentated attempt to beat the game, not without frustration or error. Intrigued, I tracked down a copy and started playing myself.

Being a romhack, they definitely had the full features of an emulator in mind when designing the levels. I certainly wouldn't have reached as far as the second world without savestate abuse.

To complete the presentation, here's a tool-assisted speedrun of the game from Google Video.