Super Mario Bros seems to be one of the most popular game series to base many hacks on. Admittedly, as much as I loved growing up with the original Mario games I was just not all interested in checking out a Mario hack. But sometimes you look for something different and this hack seemed to be pretty perfect for what I was looking for.

Panic in the Mushroom Kingdom is certainly not a new hack at this point, but anyone that says that it wasn’t innovative really don’t know what they are talking about. As well, the hack is sort of a parody of the Mario games with some slightly offensive material, with the exception of the Evil Kirby Land and what you win at the end. That kind of polarized me, but you will just have to see that for yourself.

As far as what’s been hacked, every stage is redesigned. The overhead world is totally different, but in the perspective of things, not too different. The player plays as Luigi instead of Mario. A lot of enemies have been changed but that is mostly later in the game. An interesting change that was made, but didn’t do anything that I noticed to affect the game, was at the end of some stages it looked like Super Mario Bros 3 instead of Super Mario World. Or sometimes to beat a stage you needed to touch a flag. It’s all worth taking a look at to see all that’s been changed. Especially seeing all the poor toads impaled near the end of the game.

There is no “readme” file that comes with the patch so for people that aren’t familiar with patching may have a difficult time figuring out how to properly patch the hack to the rom. The ROM needs to be expanded to 1 MB and this can easily be done with Lunar Expand that is found on this site.

Anyway, worth checking out and a lot of fun if you grew up playing Super Mario World.