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[REMOVED] "Peach Castle Escape" by TheOtakuGamer

Permanent link to submission
Quote
File Name: Peach Castle Escape
Submitted: 2014.07.14 ~ 23:42:58 by AnOtakuGamer
Claimed: 2014.07.16 ~ 01:05:24 by Counterfeit
Rating: 0.0
Authors: AnOtakuGamer
Demo: Yes
Featured: No
Length: 17 exit(s)
Difficulty: Normal
Description: Peach is bored of wait Mario came to save her.
So she will escape from the castle by herself.
Tags: custom bosses, custom character, custom gfx
Download: Download - 222.81 KiB
18 downloads
The title screen is a few clouds against a black background with a blue wood border. "Peach Castle Escape" is written out in large letters diagonally from the center left, and is covered up but not eaten by menu text.

The intro is a cutscene with giant lettering. Grass is used as a period or apostrophe, but "Bowser castle" is incorrect; it should be "Bowser's castle" instead, and you should probably put a grass clump at the end of "herself" to finish the sentence. Another thing, too, why is the time going down in a cutscene? Why are you allowed to die in a cutscene? "The last happy day in princess life" is completely Engrish - it should say "the last happy day in the princess's life."

The first submap has a lot of very straight cliffs. There are tons of castles here too.

The second submap is much better-designed, but the ground tiles with black backgrounds don't work out well because the lightning exposes the fact that they aren't the transparent color and you get really blocky, gross lightning. What you did with that big hill is pretty cool though... so much neater than seeing all these perfectly round, cylindrical hills.

The third submap is just one big mass of red inside a cloud blanket.

Bowser Castle puts you right in between two spikes at the start. I enter the door right behind me, get a free 1up, and find glitched Thwimps. The room to the right says "THE MAIN DOOR HAVE SOME PASSABLE BLOCKS." backwards... 'Have' should say 'has'. The room to the left is Peach's room and has a really crude 'waterbed' and a green leaf that makes you throw fire. Anyways, the hint in the third room felt really useful because I never thought to look for a secret passage.
It's in the ceiling. Look for bricks that aren't placed evenly.
From there, you can get the P-switch and clear the rest of the path to the exit. Admitably, while the concept was good and kind of reminds me of how Peach kept trying to escape from Bowser in Paper Mario, the level design was pretty bad and the way the graphics were used (namely the tile floor being stacked rather than extended in parts) didn't help this. The blue castle background was pretty awful.

Peach's Secret Base gives you waaaaaay too much at this stage in the game and isn't even a real secret.

Observatory is a really random level with very few moments that are worth it. It has Magikoopa, tons of falling spikes which start falling just off camera (cheap!) and a lot of everything in the beginning and end. The whole middle is empty, mindless jumping from platform to platform. Again, poor design.

Crystal Tower is another translucent level with a very repetitive background and no concept which to speak of. It's just enemy after enemy on top of platform until you jump onto the next platform, and some of the graphical swaps are weird, like replacing a football with the flower part of the Volcano Lotus. It uses the Thwomp boss at the end.

Mushroom Kingdom has yet more Engrish. "Why everyone don't are in their houses?" Uh. "Why isn't anyone home?" would be a much better way of saying this. The red huts are full of free powerups. One hut is really long, flat, and full of enemies... then you get outside and experience jump-over-everything syndrome. Things get weird as you see Wiggler turned into Spinies with a flame on the leader's head and a roof on the ground and a bed on a block of sand above it. After that, the level goes very flat and spams enemies.

Mario's Pad is a ghost house with a long trail of coins for... no apparent reason. Shame, because they're usually good for leading paths that form via P-switch and are totally up to you to guide in the right place. Next room over, you see a P-switch and there's invisible ground around it. Problem with this setup is you have a fall to death before the P-switch. It'd be a better idea to place coins above safe ground and one above the P-switch and let the switches handle the rest of the 'safe areas' rather than leaving the whole thing blind where you can die unfairly. Also, use different color coins to signify different block behaviors.

Story has some cutscenes with more atrocious English.

House of Mysteries has a design flaw where there's a lot of area you can explore along the bottom only to reach a dead end, and from that point on, enemies you can't see will rain down on top of you. Secure your Lakitus or get rid of that bottom path beyond the vine entirely. The Pix boss was annoying because it kept spawning shells I didn't need for a LONG time to defeat the boss.

Doll House has a huge ceiling of turn blocks you have to fly through and then the level turns to rotating platforms mixed in with the cliched styles of platforms. There's actually some thought put into this level, although it looks more like Satori Komeiji's level. Also seriously? Fighting Pix AGAIN?

Special Castle is nothing but a repetitive P-switch and turn block wall level... you do the same thing three times, hit a few more switches, and boom, finished.

Mirage Tower is yet another translucent level. I have really bad sprite tile memory problems in one room and it took me a few seconds to see that I was carrying an item, because I could only see it when I turned. I realize the name is "Mirage Tower" but it's kind of weird to have cutoff floating decorations. I liked that jumping directly under the moon would block it off with a music note block. The level design did nothing that other levels in this hack didn't already do, and it didn't do it any better. Defeating all the Koopas at the end was neat, but at the same time, completely out of place in this hack.

Alice's Tower is a ghost house with a Fishin' Boo who is used annoyingly, which is a good thing, because that's exactly what he's meant to do. The landscaping in the first room is horrible: mindless slopes, which I forgot to mention also look just like this in Mario's Pad. The moon respawns every time you enter the level. The second room is very pink and has a lot of cutoff clouds for the ground. The Lakitus with their bodies sticking out of the bottom of the logs look ridiculous. Alice is a Mouser redrawn. Her hitbox is bigger than her sprite. She has a Lakitu throwing stuff at you.

The Path to Heaven starts out with a star run and then you have to confront a few homing bullets and Sparkies/Hotheads on solitary blocks connected to ropes. Then, you fight a giant Goomba while being attacked by three homing bullets. Frustrating level, but more original than anything else in this hack so far.

The Scarlet Clouds has a blind jump if you scale the clouds near the beginning because you can't see what's below you; the only way to know you're going to reach ground safely is to backtrack, which is a waste of time considering how much safe ground there is on the far right... it also does not make sense for the grass part of the wafer ground to be solid like a cement block when the rest of the platform is passable. Other than that, the platforming was a little better, and the new enemies are refreshing... but the level is still lacking in any solid identity through design.

Scarlet Secret Area is a graphical revamp of Top Secret Area with one set of blocks shifted over one tile.

Scarlet Fields felt like a really short extension of The Scarlet Clouds. Graphically and conceptually, they were the same level.

Guard Tower was actually a pretty cool level with the flying platform, though the level being as short as it was made it feel underdeveloped. YOU couldn't hurt the boss yourself; you had to lure her into the middle so shells would spawn on top of her until she died. And, that was the last level of the game.

Overall, this was a messy and unenjoyable hack. There were probably only two levels I'd say were fun at all and they came too late in the demo. A lot of the levels felt too much like they were the same, and a lot of levels had no concept, just a lot of platforms with enemies thrown about thoughtlessly. The hand-drawn graphics look incredibly crude and clash with the higher-quality stuff, and some of the ExGFX rips are poorly assembled in the levels. The hack's title and description are deceptive: this hack is a crossover Touhou fanfiction after the first level, and in poor English that sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense. A lot of the cutscenes used massive, chunky text, and not a lot of graphical presentation to illustrate the story. Words were hyphenated at places not between syllables. If you're going to make a hack in English, get a proofreader who is fluent in English.

Difficulty: Normal
+1 to:
Wakana
Snowshoe (fantastic review btw)
SuperAgentYoshi
Duffwin (another great review)

Just look above you...
If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!
Nice to see you attempted to submit a new version. For what I remember in the beta I tested for you, this one is way better than the other one, though I feel like more work could have benn put into this one.

The level design is a yes and a no: basically, some parts were pretty good, while others were kinda flat and boring. I'm glad you followed my suggestions and fixed a few zones, but, as I stated in the feedback message I wrote for you, the level design still isn't the best. Here I highly suggest you to play a few hacks made by other users: in this way, you can figure out and have more clear ideas of how a good level design should be.

The aesthetics...aren't the best either: again, I'm glad you followed my suggestions, especially for the palettes (a few ones really were awful >w<), but I feel like it could have been better. There is some cutoff, weird tiles and bad palettes like this [O]. You should improve it even more, I think, because as overall, it's not the best.

Misc issues, not many: I already mentioned the cutoff in some sections; also [O] this section suffers from sprite tile limits (I'm grabbing a P-Switch here, but because of the tile limits, looks like I'm grabbing the air >w<). Here I'd use the No More Sprites Tile Limits patch, or maybe, in a simpler way, remove a few sprites.

The difficult is normal, the difficult curve is kinda weird but I feel like the overall is indeed normal.

This was a great fix if compared to the last version I played, but unfortunately, I'd reject this hack. Don't feel bad about it, since this hack is getting better and better every version. I'll be happy to help you again if you need me for more feedback.
When you first start up the game you'll see a title screen with a rather interesting font, and for some reason the wood paneling on the sides is slightly off-center. You probably want to fix the wood so it's equal on both sides.

Starting a new file will instantly land you in a cutscene with a timer, meaning, if you don't jump for whatever reason, you can die and possibly get a game over before you even start the game. Also very noticeable in the cutscenes is the font, which seems to be written in ALL CAPITALS along with being ugly and annoying to read. You could easily fit more text on the screen as well if you didn't draw such huge letters. My suggestion is to stick with the default font or some other font that already exists. There is also an actual cutscene level that you have to beat, putting story exposition inside the levels would probably make more sense.

As for the gameplay, most levels in this hack, especially the early ones, tend to be long flat areas with some enemies. When there is platforming, it's generally just jumping from one gap to another. There is one room in this hack that's entirely flat, and you're running from left to right the whole time without pressing any other buttons, other than occasionally jumping over a Koopa. A huge amount of levels in this hack are empty like this, sometimes with an occasional ledge or bump in the ground. It's not unplayable, but it's boring and I only get entertained when there's occasional enemy spam.

Not going to lie, but the thwomp boss in the first world is tedious to fight. It would be a lot better if you could use throw blocks to hurt the boss instead of bob-ombs. I almost ran out of time waiting for the boss to get in range of an explosion. The crystal boss (First boss of World 2) starts out annoying at first, but gets slightly better as the amount of crystals reduces. I'd limit the crystals on screen to three at maximum, one for each color, which makes it easier.

In Doll House, the area where you need to jump through the huge wall of turn blocks is simply crazy if you're attempting to grab the key. SMW tends to be very buggy with those kinds of things, and I find myself being pushed through the ground when you try to spam through it.

Special Castle is an entire level full of the same puzzle where you sit around and wait for the P-Switch to run out, while baby-sitting a Koopa shell so you can hit the turn blocks. After you advance to the next room, it's the same puzzle again, and again. I don't even want to bother finishing this level, but at the very least you are given the option to leave.

The second boss in World 2 is essentially the same as the first boss from World 2, but you're in an even smaller room. There's only green and blue enemies to hit yet the generator keeps on spitting out red ones I don't need- absolutely useless. Also, the boss is so foolish it actually ends up hurting itself by colliding with the shells that have been spawned by the generator, you don't need to throw them if you don't want to.

The battle with Alice is kind of weird, there's no boss music, just the default level theme. Apparently even if you kill Alice, you still have to kill the Lakitu, which I don't even know why he's there in the first place. I assume the game only beats the level when all enemies are off the screen, so you HAVE to kill the Lakitu and make his cloud despawn. I think it'd be better if the level was beaten when Alice dies. Also, surprisingly Alice is probably one of the easier bosses, but I'm thankful for that.

I played through the rest of the levels, though I don't have much to say. Path To Heaven is a lot better than the other levels since it's not as boring, but it still is rather cheap with the slippery physics and the muncher spam. Scarlet Clouds is also a decent level to play through, with new enemies and more variety in the level design. Scarlet Fields, though, was basically the same level as Scarlet Clouds. The boss at the end of the Guard Tower killed itself, I'm not sure if that's intended but I will roll with it.

In general, the palettes aren't very eye-pleasing. Palettes range from very over-saturated to dull, but they aren't so terrible you can't discern what stuff is, so you've done a passable job and the game is playable. Aside from the palettes there are various graphical oddities littered throughout the hack. You'll see glitched tiles on the jumping plants, and I can't even begin to describe why the goal tape is stars. The Fire Flower is apparently a Leaf (I assumed Raccoon Suit at first), but it functions the same, you're just firing leaves for some odd reason. Wigglers are a bunch of Spinies with a random flame sprite on their head, Thwomps are made out of circles from the Pea ledge sprite... really, I don't get it.

The overworld has the same general aesthetic problems as the levels do. One main problem about the overworld is that it's flat, again with palettes that aren't very good looking. It simply does not feel that interesting, and needs more decoration and terrain variation. The overworld is also inconsistent, with instances where a normal level or a fortress will look like a ghost house or a cave, which doesn't make much sense.

I'd say, overall, this hack just isn't coherent. I don't know how we went from Peach escaping Bowser's castle to fighting evil dolls or someone called Alice. It's like two different game universes, and I was legitimately surprised when I started seeing Mario enemies in the third world, reminding me this is a Mario game.

I didn't really enjoy playing most of the levels because there wasn't enough variety to them. Most of the time, I'm just running across empty areas, jumping over easily avoided enemies, or fighting an annoying custom boss. The later levels in the hack were getting better, but it seems like everything else was left behind. I'd say, your early levels need massive improvement and other errors need to be corrected (Graphical glitches, sprite memory issues, tweaking the bosses, and so on) before it begins to be accepted here. Thus, I reject.

Difficulty: Normal
I just want to warn you, this review may sound harsh, but I've noticed alot of problems with this hack

First off, the invisible blocks that lead you to the secret door I found by accident while trying to find it. Making the blocks invisible with no indication of where is not good, I would suggest making the walkthrough blocks a darker palette so you can see them and think "hmm, maybe there's something there".

The overworld palettes (for the first one especially) don't have very good palettes, please change them. Also I like the idea of a giant hill, but it looks really funky. Also when I got to the fourth map I couldn't ven proceed to the next level. If it was supposed to be the end of the demo or something you should have indicated that. If not, please enable right.

The level design wasn't very good, I got bored for the entirety of this hack, if the level design were better, than maybe I would've liked it more.

The second pix boss (Also you changed the graphics of the pix's, very nice) was a little hard, I actually had to slow down the game speed to 50% until I got rid of two pix's.

On the topic of bosses, the Mouser (alice or something) and Goomba boss have unfitting music. There was no suspense whatsoever. And for the mouser boss, I didn't like the lakitu because it seemed to make it more difficult and cluttered. And I wans't sure what was going on when I got rid of mouser and the level wasn't over, until I got rid of the shells.

The goal tape looked funky and in the second (or third, I don't remember) level it had odd placement.

One thing I did like though was the walking cannon sprite (I gotta find it now).

Also some areas were too difficult at times such as the flying platform toward the end.

Overall I would like to see this hack worked on better, but in the meantime, reject
This hack has a lot of problems. The most notable is the text, which is full of errors. It really needs some proofreading. In terms of the graphical work, it's generally pretty poor. I wouldn't say poor graphical quality should outright be reason for a rejection, but in this hack's case the graphics negatively impact gameplay. A lot of the color combinations in the hack are very saturated and clash (the level's Mario's Pad is especially bad about this.) but the biggest problem is that sprites are pretty misleading. I encountered some enemies with what appeared to be spikes on their heads, only to learn that these were koopas. When stomped, their shells are mushrooms. In fact, all shells are mushrooms, however some mushrooms are 1ups. There are several other enemies where it isn't apparent how to approach them because of the way they look. There's an enemy in the level Crystal Tower that looks a bit like a stack of pancakes, and it is not apparent whether or not you can jump on them. You can. In the same level, the transparency overlaps with some items, which ranges from weird (a door) to exceptionally confusing (a powerup is almost invisible because of it.) Additionally, there's an area in Mushroom Kingdom which is particularly disorienting as the background is a solid color and the floor is a solid block of black. This makes it impossible to gauge if you are or aren't moving and how fast you're actually moving.

In terms of design decisions, this hack makes a lot of pretty poor ones. I won't go through all of them, but I will look at the most glaring ones.

Several levels start you right next to something that will hurt you. Crystal Tower in particular puts you on slippery footing about one block away from a ferocious stack of pancakes, which is irritating.
Some powerups give you life, as you would expect, but some don't. Mushrooms (the one's that make you big, not the shells) heal you for one heart, but neither type of leaf does. 1up mushrooms heal you for all your hearts but the 3up moon does not. On the topic of powerups, the hack has a really bizarre approach to them. It just sort of throws them at you. You'll enter a room and then immediately pick up two leaves. This happens a lot. It makes powerups you pick up on your own a lot less necessary since you'll frequently have a leaf in reserve already and if you pick up another leaf, it won't heal you anyway. It also makes it impossible to choose which powerup you'd like to use for a particular section, as the game immediately replaces them when you enter certain areas.

The bosses are huge difficulty spikes compared to most of the rest of the game. I fought two bosses in my time with this hack (I stopped after the level "Doll House" as I had pretty much seen enough to make a decision about it) and they both fought similarly. Four objects bounce around a room and an item generator generates shells that can hurt the corresponding color of enemy. These fights are really irritating because A: they are most difficult right at the beginning and become much easier later on and B: become really tedious later on as you wait for the correct color shell to appear while a single enemy passes harmlessly through the room. Additionally the boss fights aren't over as long as a sprite is on the screen which means that you have to wait for the shells to disappear completely before the fight is over. This isn't obvious and I spent some time trying to hit an invincible character with shells trying to end the fight.

In terms of level design issues, the hack has a number, but I'm going to mention the most egregious problems. First off, no level, at least through the level Doll House, has a checkpoint. There is a level with a midpoint gate, but it doesn't actually do anything. Very frustrating. In the very first level, there's a bunch of blocks that aren't actually there that you must pass through to proceed. You learn this from a backwards hint from a text box, but the box doesn't give you any hint as to where they are. The hint mentions a main door and I thought I was looking in the wrong room because there's very little indication of where the passable blocks are. But in terms of level design flaws, the level Mario's Pad is the absolute worst. The level is full of boos, but they're very easily just run past and really pose very little threat to you. A door then leads you to a room with no visible floor and a P-Switch. A hint block tells you that the P-Switch will show you where the floor is. Unfortunately the P-switch is across a gap which you can't see and which is incredibly close to the entrance. Once you hit the switch, a line of coins covers the floor. Kind of. There's actually a coin over a gap right near the end, meaning you can jump into an area which the game has established should be safe and then immediately die. This whole area has a searingly neon green background and also includes an area of one block wide platforms that you must travel across before the P-switch runs out or you're stuck in an area where you can't see anything. This whole area is really frustrating.

In terms of positives, this hack isn't devoid of them, but they are really obscured by the problems the hack has. There are a few level design decisions that are actually pretty interesting. The level Mario's pad has a coin line block that you can use to get a lot of coins, but because you control it by moving around, you have to dance around with a big boo that is in the area. The idea of a finding a hint block in a secondary area that tells you how to proceed in another area (this occurs in the first level with the aforementioned passable blocks) is a neat concept but is executed poorly. The boss concepts are fairly interesting but are executed somewhat poorly. (In particular the second boss is fought with faster, larger enemies and in a much more cramped space, making it really frustrating.) Some of the spritework is pretty charming, I particularly like the big boo that makes a weird kissy face at you. Other things are really garish.

Overall, this hack needs a lot of revision, most notably palettes should be reworked, a proofreader is really necessary and the levels need a lot of work in terms of design. I think a substantial bit of testing would really benefit this hack.

Reject.

Difficulty: Easy with brief Hard areas.
Romance tip #20: It's okay to hug a lot of girls!
Suika Ibuki - 25107
I dunno, how the text can be that bad?
Since I've made a thread where Mirann and Koopster translated all the text from the hack.
Portuguese→English.
And i guess they can speak English fluently.
#unbanMB980