ABANDONED: Mario Adventure
Nov. 30th, 2020 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoAnother housekeeping ABANDONED entry. I have nothing against this one at all. I never quit it on purpose, I was having a lot of fun with it, but at some point my attention span struck, other games came along, and I guess at this point it's been months since I touched it? Oops. I'm still not used to these housekeeping ABANDONEDs yet; it still feels weird to write this up like this one's dead (even though I can always go back and that's literally what the Extra Life category is for.) Still trying to get used to this. Please bear with us.
Mario Adventure is an incredibly ambitions Super Mario Bros. 3 ROMhack that adds a lot of features I would not have expected the SMB3 framework to support. Infinite lives (we know you're just going to try again and death is nothing more than a "go back to the world map and try this stage again" bounce, so let's not even bother with the unnecessary counter there,) coins are persistent and strictly a form of currency, the Toad houses can be visited as many times as you want as long as you have coins (thus making them shops more than anything else,) stages can be revisited as well, overall the world map feels more Mario World-like, speaking of Mario World the box for holding a backup powerup/item is there too, there are all new items and powerups....
It's an astonishing feat of turning SMB3 into an entirely new (obviously all the stages are original too) game that almost feels more like a demade Mario World hack than an SMB3 one at times. It's impressive as hell just from a technical standpoint, and the end result is a vast world that I really want to explore, and I had quite a lot of fun doing so for a while there until ??? . It takes a special patch for the game to work on hardware emulation (that is, if you want to put it on your NES Classic instead of playing it on PC) but it seems to work well enough for us once the patch is applied. Overall, it's neat and if it sounds like your sort of thing from the description, then it probably is.
I only have three major knocks against it, and two are the difficulty. First off, being a Mario ROMhack and all, this game is hard. It's... I mean, it's not Kaizo level or anything. It's not one of those Super Expert levels where they assume you're playing it on an emulator anyway so they may as well escalate things until savestates are required. There's no trolling. There's no reliance on arcane physics mechanics that casuals wouldn't have needed to learn before. There's none of this bullshit. It's like, hard by normal human player playing a normal Mario game standards. But it's still hard by those standards. Maybe comparable to some of the meaner parts of the Special World in SMW, I guess? The Mario version of Mega Man Unlimited, perhaps. It is fair, and I cannot stress that hard enough or frequently enough because yes I know how many Mario ROMhacks out there aren't, but you still will be grateful for those infinite lives.
The second complaint is the key mechanic, which on its surface is actually pretty cool. Beating the warship and the Koopaling of each region is no longer the end goal of that region; finding the key is, and that's a matter of some "in level 4, crouch for 7 seconds and then make a jump standing between these two specific bushes in the background to reveal a secret" nonsense. It's still worth it to beat the Koopaling, because clearing each region in that sense unlocks free travel (you can move all about the map and stages you haven't cleared yet will no longer stop you... roaming forced encounters like the Hammer Bros. still will though) and the thank-you letter from the Princess reveals a big clue about the location of the key in that region. However--and this is purely a matter of personal taste, but according to my standards--I feel that the key locations are a little too arcane even with the hint, approaching "bring a walkthrough" territory.
The third is the weather system, in that there are daytime, nighttime, raining, etc. versions of every stage and which one you will play is chosen at random every time the stage is selected. In theory, "the stage can cycle through different weather effects" seems like a cool and mostly harmless little visual boost that adds some variety to each level, and for the most part it is. However, one weather pattern in particular (when it's snowing, naturally) adds ice skidding physics, and the others do literally nothing except look pretty I guess. Thus, in practice you have a 1/(4? 5? I forget) chance of "oops, it's snowing, maybe I should just not even try and throw myself into the nearest pit and just load the stage again because the last thing this already-difficult section needs is to also be an ice level." This can be obnoxious when you started the stage as Raccoon Mario or one of the other high-level powerups because of course you still lose those on death.
Still, this is a cool hack. Even if it felt like beating my head against a stage I just couldn't clear, I was still having fun slowly (very slowly) forcing my way through it until I randomly stopped.
Mario Adventure is an incredibly ambitions Super Mario Bros. 3 ROMhack that adds a lot of features I would not have expected the SMB3 framework to support. Infinite lives (we know you're just going to try again and death is nothing more than a "go back to the world map and try this stage again" bounce, so let's not even bother with the unnecessary counter there,) coins are persistent and strictly a form of currency, the Toad houses can be visited as many times as you want as long as you have coins (thus making them shops more than anything else,) stages can be revisited as well, overall the world map feels more Mario World-like, speaking of Mario World the box for holding a backup powerup/item is there too, there are all new items and powerups....
It's an astonishing feat of turning SMB3 into an entirely new (obviously all the stages are original too) game that almost feels more like a demade Mario World hack than an SMB3 one at times. It's impressive as hell just from a technical standpoint, and the end result is a vast world that I really want to explore, and I had quite a lot of fun doing so for a while there until ??? . It takes a special patch for the game to work on hardware emulation (that is, if you want to put it on your NES Classic instead of playing it on PC) but it seems to work well enough for us once the patch is applied. Overall, it's neat and if it sounds like your sort of thing from the description, then it probably is.
I only have three major knocks against it, and two are the difficulty. First off, being a Mario ROMhack and all, this game is hard. It's... I mean, it's not Kaizo level or anything. It's not one of those Super Expert levels where they assume you're playing it on an emulator anyway so they may as well escalate things until savestates are required. There's no trolling. There's no reliance on arcane physics mechanics that casuals wouldn't have needed to learn before. There's none of this bullshit. It's like, hard by normal human player playing a normal Mario game standards. But it's still hard by those standards. Maybe comparable to some of the meaner parts of the Special World in SMW, I guess? The Mario version of Mega Man Unlimited, perhaps. It is fair, and I cannot stress that hard enough or frequently enough because yes I know how many Mario ROMhacks out there aren't, but you still will be grateful for those infinite lives.
The second complaint is the key mechanic, which on its surface is actually pretty cool. Beating the warship and the Koopaling of each region is no longer the end goal of that region; finding the key is, and that's a matter of some "in level 4, crouch for 7 seconds and then make a jump standing between these two specific bushes in the background to reveal a secret" nonsense. It's still worth it to beat the Koopaling, because clearing each region in that sense unlocks free travel (you can move all about the map and stages you haven't cleared yet will no longer stop you... roaming forced encounters like the Hammer Bros. still will though) and the thank-you letter from the Princess reveals a big clue about the location of the key in that region. However--and this is purely a matter of personal taste, but according to my standards--I feel that the key locations are a little too arcane even with the hint, approaching "bring a walkthrough" territory.
The third is the weather system, in that there are daytime, nighttime, raining, etc. versions of every stage and which one you will play is chosen at random every time the stage is selected. In theory, "the stage can cycle through different weather effects" seems like a cool and mostly harmless little visual boost that adds some variety to each level, and for the most part it is. However, one weather pattern in particular (when it's snowing, naturally) adds ice skidding physics, and the others do literally nothing except look pretty I guess. Thus, in practice you have a 1/(4? 5? I forget) chance of "oops, it's snowing, maybe I should just not even try and throw myself into the nearest pit and just load the stage again because the last thing this already-difficult section needs is to also be an ice level." This can be obnoxious when you started the stage as Raccoon Mario or one of the other high-level powerups because of course you still lose those on death.
Still, this is a cool hack. Even if it felt like beating my head against a stage I just couldn't clear, I was still having fun slowly (very slowly) forcing my way through it until I randomly stopped.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-01 04:00 pm (UTC)