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[REJECTED] Super Mario Bros Special Enhanced - zacmario

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I should have something witty to put here (even if it's just to update dated info), shouldn't I?

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Demo: Yes
Length: 4 exit(s)
Difficulty: Easy
Description: A super mario bros style hack. level design is based around smb special on pc 88.
i changed the physics to more resemble smb orignal style. the wall kick has been added for a little flare.
this hack contains 4 levels complete. the rest are considered beta.
Submission Notes: please only judge me by the 4 levels on yoshi island. the rest are beta. thanks.



Graphically, everything in the hack clashes so badly that I have no idea what you were going for- including Mario's sprites- which use a combination of his SMB frames, some bad walking edit of those, and SMW frames poorly recolored to fit the 8bit style he has going for him.. You use a huge mix of graphics from the NES SMB games along with their SMAS counterparts and SMW to the point that nothing looks good next to anything. Normally I don't care too much about clash, but it's really, really bad here.

Design wise, I have no clue what you were going for here, either. Even though it's still early game, the gameplay still has to be interesting and engaging to the player to motivate them to continue playing onward, but you fall very short of the mark with how dry, reptitive, and intuitive everything in that aspect is. (It's Jump Over Everything: The Game). There is a minor inconveience with the fact you have the A button perform a standard jump, but wall jumps require you to press B.


Difficulty: Easy
Verdict: Reject

The Official +1'd Club!:
- Everest
- Zone355
- Domiok
- Wakana
- Hippo

Hi there hack creator!

I unfourtunatly have negative things to say about this hack in general and considering the length of this hack, this review will not be so long. To begin with the level design of this hack, it was mostly repetitive though the custom elements in this hack felt mostly inhibiting overall. It made the levels less enjoyable than they could have been (even though the hack was pretty much screwed in terms of the amount of fun I had - sorry). Considering levels like World 1-3 are present, that is a major blow to my morale when playing this hack. It felt pretty repetitive like a lot of the hack and the walljumping part felt a bit annoying when the dynamics of it are taken into account. One last thing: Please do not allow access to broken and/or unmodified levels as it makes the hack look sloppy. It is best not to allow entry into them.

The other factors of the hack? Well, all I can say about the graphics is that there are a lot of clashes present such as NES graphics used with SNES graphics. That... does not look good at all for the most part (World 1-5 actually looks decent despite the combination in my eyes though this is most certainly a universal opinion). The music sounded nice overall though it didn't really fit in with some levels due to the graphics used (in my personal opinion). There are some graphical mistakes present such as in Yoshi's House and World 1-1. Hiring testers is the key to success if you are not willing to test it yourself! That is all there is to say.

Difficulty: Easy... but annoying.

I cannot see this as being high quality enough for it to pass so I will go with rejection. I would also scrap this hack and start anew with inspiration from other hacks in the hacks section.

+1
This hack isn't very long so I can only write so much about it. Here's my review of Super Mario Bros Special Enhanced.

Are we allowed to review hacks if the link hasn't been posted here?


I feel like you weren't quite sure what you wanted your hack to be. It felt like everything clashed together.

LEVEL DESIGN: Very boring and repetitive. I felt like sometimes I was just running through the level without really caring about it. You seemed to use the walljump ability is various parts of the hack. That's fine, but please give an indication to do so. I only found out that you had the walljump patched in when I jumped into a wall accidentally.

There were many areas, specifically your bonus game rooms where the roof didn't meet up with the top of the screen. This makes look awkward and weird looking.

In some areas you could take unfair/blind damage. Such as the bouncy mushroom level, I would bounce up right into an enemy I didn't know was there.

GRAPHICS: Everything clashed. You seemed to like the 8-bit style Mario, the 8-bit style of foreground, but for some reason you had SNES 16-bit backgrounds. If you're going to make an 8-bit hack thats fine, but keep it to one similar style. Don't mix and match. There are exceptions to that, but for this case it clashed badly.

MUSIC: Ehhh, it was okay but it felt like it didn't match the level at all at times.

OVERALL: This hack needs a lot of improvements in many areas. Level design, music choice, graphics choice. I suggest scrapping the project and starting over. Stick to one style and don't derail off of that. If you want to create an 8-bit hack, keep it that way and don't use 16-bit bg's and graphics.

Difficulty: EASY
Verdict: REJECTED

+1

Send me a PM! | Click for my hack! March 25 2015 Update is here! | SteamID | Layout made by JackTheSpades
I played through this when I was a bit tired, but briefly going through this hack demo today, I will say that the biggest thing that concerns me is that the hack is simply clashing and uninteresting.

As everyone mentioned, the graphics that you have chosen for your hack do not mix well. You took graphics from so many of the early Mario games that the levels lose their style quickly, and levels become "that level with the spiders" and "that vertical level with the sand." If I were to select the predominant cause of clash, I would say without a doubt that the use of Super Mario Brothers graphics cause the most issues, followed by Super Mario Land enemies. Most of the land and decorations, which nicely appear throughout some levels, center on the original Super Mario Brothers blocks, and with enemies from NES, SNES, and GameBoy titles, they really break the appearance of the level that largely contains the original style. I would recommend keeping the original Super Mario Brothers graphics and reducing enemies to NES style enemies only or redrawing enemies in an NES style, or you might ditch all NES graphics entirely and try to blend the other Mario styles that you have in an appealing fashion. Otherwise, the palettes often do not blend, with sometimes bland colors in the foreground and bright colors in the background or vice versa. They aren't terrible, but they contribute to the clashing theme in the hack.

Musically, the choices that you implemented are mostly okay; however, some choices stand out awkwardly. You can assume that a hefty majority of players have also played through the original Super Mario World, and it just sounds strange to use overworld music in your levels even if they did happen to fit, which they do not. While some music do not cause conflicts, they often feel too energetic. The Yoshi's Island submap uses an overly athletic theme from Yoshi's Island that does not match the relatively docile nature of the map, for one example. Other than that, the gameplay just not support the music, and the gameplay definitely is the larger concern here.

The gameplay of this hack demo lacks much content to really keep the player going. Many of the enemies do not get in your way to challenge you, and you commonly set up chains of the same enemy obstacle that grow stale after a few iterations. I get the impression that you did not play through the levels enough to gauge how they interact with you as a player. In the second portion of Yoshi's Island 2, it looked like you wanted the spiders to act as obstacles similarly as Thwomps, but the player can just stand to the side of them when they drop to avoid harm. Yoshi's Island 4 has both elements of design and of negligence. You placed some ant enemies on higher ground so that the player must time jumping to avoid the sun and to avoid pellets or rocks that the ants throw, and those instances were some of the few times that I felt like I was doing anything beside moving. Unfortunately, you do not use that interesting theme for much of the level. Toward the end, you set up some reward blocks that could be accessed by invisible coin blocks, but with ant enemies and the sun to avoid, I found the invisible blocks to be a major obstacle that threw an unfair and unexpected curveball to the balance between enemies. Additionally, you place ants on platforms that mostly just immediately walked off the edge; they only filled space. Consider your enemy placement more in ways to force the player to think, and your gameplay will change for the better.

On the subject of gameplay, I liked that you tried to change the player's physics and character, but these changes definitely bogged down the hack. Instead of making me feel like I was playing a Super Mario Brothers themed hack, the changes to the running in the game more annoyed me and really slowed the pace of the hack. Zone355 brought up walljumping perfectly. You used it about twice, and I would not have had any inclination to try walljumping in Yoshi's Island 3 without the information in the hack's description. There is little purpose of walljumping other than to spice up the physics. Your changes to Mario's graphics certainly fit the original Super Mario Brothers theme, but they do not translate well into Super Mario World. Mario has lost many important frames that defined his movement and that made him feel fluid. I laughed when Mario just shuffled up the vines in Yoshi's Island 3, but it felt very out of place given that I was playing a Super Mario World hack. In order to make this graphics replacement appropriate for a Super-Mario-Brothers themed Super Mario World hack, you will have to probably come up with frames to fill the void of Mario's animations.

This hack has a long way to go, but I would really like to see you continue with this project or something else. You seem to be learning a lot through the questions that you ask on the various help forums, and it would be great to see you develop fun and engaging hacks in the future. Everest put it well. Don't be afraid to ask for beta testers and opinions. They will help tremendously with your hack, and they will help you to improve your hacking style.

For now, I would reject this hack with a difficulty rating of Easy.

+1
Whoopsie, I didn't see we were meant to play only the first 4 levels. I'm still going to review considering all the levels I played, since the final verdict won't change.

The level design isn't very well done: the first levels could go, but at a certain point the linearity got annoying. Even if you added pretty cool gimmicks, like the sand one, the wall-jump, the execution still kept poor. It's a pity, since you had the instruments but didn't use them well. An example may be the vertical climbing level, where I appreciated the wall-jump gimmick, but the level itself was extremly linear, where the player just had to climb and avoid a few sprites here and there. Nothing more. On the same scheme I could go with other levels, the sun level, the sand blocks level, and so on. Overall, you definitely need to improve your design, keeping in mind the main resource you used for each level.

Aesthetic-wise...wow. In the past I've seen pretty bad hacks in terms of aesthetic, but this one beats them all: bad palettes, extremly clashy graphics and glitched GFX slots are what this hack is made of. I wonder if you bothered testing it, since lots, lots of errors are an easy fix. The big thing though, that bothers me most, are the clashes. You used NES style with the SNES one, like they are meant to stay together, while of course it isn't. When making a hack, you have to choose a style and keeping your graphics all in that style: if you want to make a NES hack, use NES graphics only. Overall, an impressive aesthetic, in a very bad way though.

As said earlier, I played more than just the 4 levels. I'll be reporting a few mayor and minor errors that you should fix:
- As major errors, I saw that the Star Theme music glitches terribly (I played with ZMZ). It may be a wrong setting in the txt you used (I believe you're still using AM4?);
- Another mayor error, here the hack crashes in an interesting way. This wasn't meant to be played, but be sure to fix it in your next demo, since it's an instant rejection;
- Misc errors: wrong GFX tile; glitched star tiles for the explosion; bad palettes; the climbing animation is very bad, but it made me laugh a lot; tile limits issues, even a few earlier levels suffer from it; this sprite is meant to generate certain tiles when the platforms go up.

Difficulty is easy, with an inexistant difficulty curve.

Due to the incredible amount of errors, glitches and design, I'd reject this hack. Lots of more work must be done in this one before being decent.

+1
Thanks ill keep moving on and make the adjustments and get more opinions before I submit again
Click here to read my review on this hack.

+1

Extras



I should have something witty to put here (even if it's just to update dated info), shouldn't I?

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I don't know how to feel about off-site reviews when it comes to hacks pending. The review itself is relatively harmless, but it reeks strongly of advertising your website.

That being said, this hack is as good as rejected. Please take all of the feedback in this thread into serious consideration before submitting another hack.