kaizo

I like too, he stole kaizo. Like, that name, that's the ubiquitous term for romhacks that are more annoying to play. […] Is kaizo now just like an internet adjective for anything that's, like, mildly irritating?

[2011 April 1, Michael "Slowbeef" Sawyer, That's so Kaizo!, archived from the original on 20 Jan 2023

I recently played the kaizo hack known as Invictus.[…]As my sore hand recovers, I’m left asking this question: is “kaizo” good game design?

2019 May 5, Josh Bycer, “The Bizarre World of Kaizo Games”, in Medium (published in SUPERJUMP)

What if it could be different? What if there was a way for your average Mario player to learn these tricks? That’s what GrandPOObear, one of Mario Maker’s most prolific streamers, is trying to accomplish with his already-impressive “tech talk” series, where he combines detailed video tutorials explaining basic kaizo techniques alongside Mario Maker 2 stages he’s specifically designed to help anyone accomplish those very same techniques.[…]GrandPOObear wasn’t born with inherent kaizo knowledge;

2019 July 11, Patrick Klepek, “'Mario Maker' Expert Creates Easy Way to Learn Game's Secret Kaizo Tricks”, in Vice

Troll and kaizo levels, however, are designed to generate very different sets of emotions in their players, and to understand these we must understand first their construction and the intentions of their designers, before considering their players.

2020, Mark R. Johnson, “Playful Work and Laborious Play in Super Mario Maker”, in Pablo Abend, Sonia Fizek, Mathias Fuchs, Karin Wenz, editors, Digital Culture & Society (09: Laborious Play and Playful Work I), volume 5, number 2/2019, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, →ISBN, page 110

Many Mario Maker 2 kaizo stages can take over 25 hours for a top-level player to beat. Even at its most impressive, solving a kaizo level is an incredibly repetitive act: Each one of them will take hundreds (if not thousands) of attempts to clear, meaning that any viewer will essentially be watching the same level for hours on end. For some reason, watching GrandPOObear, or other kaizo speed runners try and fail, over and over again was the only thing I could focus on, the only thing that kept the fear out of my mind.

2020 January 20, Sam Greszes, “Waiting and watching: How brutally difficult Mario levels helped me through my mom’s stroke recovery”, in The Washington Post