0:00 verlorenes Potenzial fühlt sich schlimmer an als etwas, das einfach nicht gut ist 1:12 squarsh Ich wiederhole mich, aber warum ist diese Mittelung so schwer, …
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0:00 verlorenes Potenzial fühlt sich schlimmer an als etwas, das einfach nicht gut ist 1:12 squarsh Ich wiederhole mich, aber warum ist diese Mittelung so schwer, …
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it's a level like this that really tears me apart in terms of having a proper opinion. tech-wise, it's super cool, and gameplay wise i could even buy that someone could enjoy it… but in the same way that someone can enjoy a kaizo level, or a super mario maker troll level. that is to say, actually subjecting all but the most masochistic of players to a level like this that requires pinpoint precision and a mess of memorization is, at best, a little unreasonable.
ultimately i think i respect the Authorial Intent of the level to say that this would make it objectively better, but for me — and probably in the contest setting at large — i would've just added midpoints before the latter two puzzles. it's such a little thing, but it would salvage the level so much for me. even just one would have been awesome. the insufferable foos and plants and fish and precision would still be there, but it wouldn't seem nearly so Sisyphean to play.
Ah yes, the one level in this tier I never finished. Really wanted to like this level, especially given the choice of music (Midnight Rhapsody from Prinny 2, Tenpei Sato's work is excellence incarnate) but… yeah. Rooster time. And you can imagine how much worse it was playing this thing with the infinite foo bug.
Really wasn't a bad idea for a level, but the combination of no checkpoints, fog bois that cover the plant obstacles, crazy claustrophobic corridors for said plants, and hazards that you have to avoid with the same directional controls that you control the plants with all spell out a level that I swear the creator couldn't have possibly playtested from start to finish the way the level was intended to be completed. Seriously, the amount of coordination and spatial awareness required is beyond what an average person would possibly be capable of.
Plus the music made me want to stick lasagna in my ears
Death count: 594+4 (17 today)
Moon count: 5 (2 today, at 4:23 and 8:13)
(2:44) Today's first death is brought to you by Fire Bro.'s fireball!
(3:39) Yeah, it is unusual, but at least this level has usable reset doors.
(4:23) MOOOONNN!!!
(4:38) I also don't like the idea of being shot at while trying to navigate a vine through a twisty passage that is sometimes partially obscured. Yeah, that Venus Fire Trap is too much here.
(6:03) Doesn't help that the guy takes a shot at you very quickly after you come out of the reset door, and it's a shame that the reset doors don't count as checkpoints too.
(6:26) And, woe betide you if you happen to be standing in front of the reset door when you try to move the vine up.
(7:15) Nice clever maneuver to position yourself on top of the pipe to make the Venus Fire Trap shut up.
(7:27) Success!
(8:07) Whoa, another moon? Honestly, as much as I like moons, I think it would be better if those relatively easy-to-get moons were power ups instead, though.
(8:17) Unlike in SMW, where you can easily spin jump out of the water.
(8:22) Wow, narrowly avoided Ptooie there somehow, and dying there would've really sucked, since there hasn't been a real checkpoint yet.
(8:24) Oh, no. Not again…
(8:31) I don't blame you. Having to redo everything up to this point legit would be horrible.
(8:48) Oh, geez… You have to perform other acrobatics down below while paying attention to the vine above? This is just way too much.
(9:19) And this level's apparently too cheap to give you Fire Flowers to let you deal with some of the annoyances down below.
(9:55) Pfft… So, the Control Vines can self-cannibalize themselves in that way, which Control Coins cannot do.
(10:47) Are you sure about that hit detection, SMBX? Man, the hitboxes of the plant's fireballs are so unforgiving here.
(10:55) Sensory overload, yo!
(12:40) Limit break time, and again, I don't blame you.
(14:07) Okay, this part is done.
(14:11) And now to play the waiting game… Aw, the waiting game sucks. Let's play Hungry Hungry Hippos!
(15:59) Yeah, why were there no midpoints at all?
(17:08) Yep, Sturg hated those Venus Fire Traps as well, rightfully so.
(18:17) Yes, Sturg's review here is 100% dead-on correct. Remove the enemies below the Control Vine areas (or give the player a way to dispose of them, like Fire Flowers), and add midpoints, and this level would've been MUCH better overall.
(19:30) LOL, inebriated Goofy.
The last puzzle is completely skippable because for some reason not only did the author put two layers of clock walls(??) that spawn the star and serve no purpose in doing so, but they also put the timer walls right beside them, making for the easiest zip of your life.
if the level didn't have all that extra stuff, it would have been pretty solid. I agree that this level had potential, but it was really squandered.
I've been playing ahead a bit, and this level gave me such a huge problem. So much so, that I actually looked up some of the cheat codes built into the original smbx engine, since the invincibility you can select from the in game menu wasn't enough. There's one that let's you walk through walls, and it's been handy more than once. For those curious, you activate it by typing "shadowstar" on your keyboard at any point during game play.
By the way you 100% talked to that bird the first episode.
A few checkpoints, and no fire-spitting plants in the puzzle zones, and this would have been a fantastic level.
squarsh is a funny word
s q u a r s h
Enerved raocow lose english speak I see.
One very rare occurence where I think I was screaming at the level.
Today, we all got rooster time.
Gotta chime in with a lot of other folks in that this is a really cool seeming level that is just devastated by a lack of checkpoints of any kind. That, combined with some questionable enemy placements (hello 4:30 to 7:30) makes it just flatout unenjoyable. Like Sturg said, the *possibilities*, the potential for a great level, is right there in the level designer's face.. but they opted to toss out quality for artificial difficulty.
Ohhh words come out of people's mouths, I thought they were numbers.
I know it's not a unique opinion, but maaaaan I wish there was a version of this that was just the vine puzzles and not the danger from enemies. Especially seeing as I had played this stage on an earlier patch where the Foos never stopped blowing, thus making it impossible to get a clear look at the last setup.
I'm horrified by the idea that some abomination is half of a mushroom harder than this.
Abject cruelty, right here. It's like being forced to solve a Rubik's Cube, while being shot at by an Old West gunslinger.
You definitely spoke to the green birdie, it's the blue birdie you haven't talked to. Over on the right. Next to WhimWidget. …It's probably not important though so don't worry about it.
Honestly I think all of you are being too hard on this level, but it might just be that this is my kind of difficulty, y'know, like the kind where you have to keep track of 6 things at once. Souls series and Touhou, I'm lookin' at you. Only thing I'd change here is resets to midpoints.
I feel like with that last puzzle what you need to do is move onto the pipe during the first part where the vine is moving right. That'll give you plenty of time for the cheep cheep to get into position so you can get past him the second time the vine is moving right.
The sin of today's level is: "attentional divide." Up there on the list of bad things to do to a player.
The human brain simply isn't made for complex multitasking. Those who claim to be good at it are mostly good at task SWITCHING, which is more about being able to disengage and re-engage quickly. So attention is a limited resource. Typically, this sort of abuse comes from enemy or hazard spam, which makes it extremely difficult to recognize and react properly to every threat because there are too many threats to process them all. This stage provides a different take on it by not spamming enemies but instead requiring you to perform a highly attentionally-demanding task while essentially blindly navigating through hazards that are outside of that attentional focus. The inordinate level of punishment (no midpoints) and lack of degrees of freedom to make errors (few power-ups) exponentially compound the frustration that comes with failing tasks which would otherwise be fairly simple if they weren't paired together.
this level would have been made way much better if they gave you a mushroom generator at each reset door. And honestly? to ME, that's the difficulty it should be, according to the author's own design philosophy. Giving a reset door at each challenge says to me that it's aware of how long it takes to replay and doesn't want to punish you too much.
So why does it punish you way more for getting killed? Moving and guiding the plant aren't individual challenges, getting hit probably means you're going to lose the plant and have to restart. In that sense, what might be simple movement is made much more complicated by the flower that you need to guide, and it ends up being pretty easy to die.
That's my take anyway!
Reminder that hard and unforgiving are not the same thing. The vine challenge is hard, but the lack of checkpoints is unforgiving.
In addition, being difficult does not inherently make your level good, which is something I feel like a lot of people need to learn. The vine thing is hard, but at no point does it really seem like anything I want to play.
The carbuncle ate itself!
I think you put yourself down when you say you can't multi-task. The task being presented in this level actually made me cringe the moment the fire plant appeared. Any player would have had a tough time with that.
Oh, man, it's just like Mega Man X5!
This level is a good example of how sometimes less is more. Squarsh!
Has there ever been a good level that demanded puzzle solving during an agility challenge?
Alright, so this is my least favorite level of the contest by far as well. I'll admit to being one of those people who's bad at videogames, but the timing on those vine trail plants is just too strict for my slow self. Too early, and you have to restart, too late and you have to restart, and these puzzles are full of just one tile paths with no let. Combine that with having to keep mario alive and having to wait so long for each restart, and I was miserable the entire time. until I gave up and just cheated to win. Which sucks, because I too thought the gimmick was cool, and has potential.
Side note: Putting a song with a very shrill "Dweee Dweeeee Dweeeeeeee" at the start of the song in a level where you have to constantly restart is just icing on the cake. I would have honestly been happier with silence.
Fun note, if you cheat and bring a cape, or turn on infinite jumps, you can literally jump over the entire level. Nothing extends past the top of the screen, so going over everything is real easy.
Judges nailed it.
I guess coming with a fireflower and cooking the guys would be the best solution? But the level doesn't even give you that.
The vines by themselves are not a bad gimmick. Your vision being obscured by windy bois is not unplayable, but is quite the nuisance.
When you ask the player to perfectly control a vine while also doing platforming with the same inputs, it becomes completely unfair and infuriating.
If you're going to have an obstacle during this, make it very simple – Jumping over a fish (without the unnecessary and ugly overhang wall) would've been fine!
At least give a midpoint before each of the final two challenges.
The reset doors are kind of slow too.
I'm kind of amazed that neither Raocow nor the judges commented the smoke blowers. Obscuring your vision isn't "difficulty." It's "obnoxious." It's actually kind of legitimately mean spirited with everything else going on since it adds MEMORIZATION to the mix; on top of steering the plant and dodging the fireballs and fish and all that, it also makes it so you need to MEMORIZE the obstacle layout and act on that WHILE doing everything else. Which I feel is a big part of why this level feels so bad.
There's harsh but fair, and then there's mean spirited and cheap, and this unfortunately falls into the second category. But it's bound to happen sometimes. Many people don't want their levels levels to be the kind that just blur together into a homogeneous soup of indistinguishable "That was a level" type levels. The issue is that in doing things to make a level stand out, they're gambling on whether or not they touch on the things that don't make their way into "generic" levels for a good reason. And this is VERY much one of the things we don't see in generic levels for a good reason.
… true story, by the way, I was actually ready to accuse the creator of being a sadist and trying to make people suffer, but I calmed myself down while typing and managed to edit and salvage my comment into this. So let that be a testament to how frustrating this level is to WATCH, much less PLAY, haha.
I gave this level 3 tries before I said screw this. I do not regret it.
As people have mentioned the lack of midpoints are a huge issue here but I would rather also add that the first ones 2 vine sections are built up well, not too hard or any danger of dying. But the last of the sections go from a 1 to 100 in difficulty immediately. If it had a better lineair build up it would have been a more enjoyable experience IMO
As soon as I saw the last two setups, I knew exactly why this level was ranked the way it was. Honestly, my biggest problem was the last one with the fish, it's just too much, and the plant eating itself when you turn left is especially terrible.
Squarsh! As a viewer, I had trouble keeping track of both the vine and Mario. I thought it was a cool idea though!
One level vid with angry-despair cow.
The lack of checkpoints makes this something I don't particularly want to try, but the multitasking idea really intrigues me. At least on a conceptual level, I love the decision to put in the fire spitting plants. Though I agree that that last challenge looks like a postgame challenge after a series of levels ramping up the difficulty.
If the author really wanted to include the fire trap on the puzzle section, then there’s one fix – put the vine starter block right over the pipe. That way the player is going to be able to stop the plant and do the challenge, but will know that this has become an option. Then on the next one, introduce one that might hit the player if they step wrong.
The smoke obscuring the view is just really rude on top of everything else.
if it wasn't a cramped space so you had full height with your jumps and the plants weren't bad so you could move left and right freely when it was on the horizontal, the venus fire traps would've been fair I feel and add to the puzzle, but it's just too cramped
I also get and really like the idea of what the final section is doing, making you rush through some platforming while controlling the plant, it could've been a really cool fun thing running for a little and doing light platforming that adds to the puzzle! but again, it's way too cramped and especially the water destroys your control. If it were running and jumping minding the thing it'd be fun, but dodging a fish in cramped shallow water feels awful as it is
Splingsh Nord is okay but Splingsh Sud is where it's really at.
It's a neat idea for a level, but yeah. Rough. I'm very surprised the judges didn't also call out the music choice. I feel like I would've gone insane playing this level with the combination of dual-tasking and psycho crazytown music.
This level was two or three midpoints away from being pretty great (if very hard towards the end, and asking for a type of skill that is not usually required when playing 2D mario games). I think that is the unfortunate story of a lot of levels that end up in the lower half: Kinda cool, but the lack of midpoints makes them too repetitive/exhausting.