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The winner was very technically impressive, but needed to do more with the conceit to justify the win in my eyes.
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Oct 13, 2017 21:55
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| # ? May 10, 2024 08:36 |
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What I want to know is how those colors were achieved on a technical level. That doesn't feel like the kind of thing you could do with palette swaps.
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Oct 13, 2017 22:02
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Ignis Fatuus is the latin term for Will-o-the-wisps.
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Oct 13, 2017 22:36
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That #3 level was amazing. I would've never thought of using water for space, and it looked amazing too, as did the fire planet. I agree that it deserved to be #1, the other two were undeniably good, but not as good. I still really enjoyed the aesthetics of the last level though, but it didn't look that fun to play. I hate being blinded though.
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Oct 14, 2017 02:26
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I think what impressed me most about #3, in a way, is that it's one of the levels in the contest which I, as a super-ultra-mega-casual-barely-ever-plays Mario player could look at and go: "Huh, it looks like I could play this without wanting to gnaw my keyboard/controller in half from frustration." #2 felt a bit meandering, and #1 felt... yeah I didn't really see much actual gameplay there. Just graphical neatness.
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Oct 14, 2017 07:43
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#3 had a great gimmick and looked fun to play. #1 had a great gimmick and looked like a pain in the rear end. #2 was just kind of there.
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Oct 14, 2017 12:02
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I'm impressed that a water level was made so good. Also it reminded me of Doomsday Zone from Sonic & Knuckles.
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Oct 14, 2017 12:06
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Why did that last level look so familiar?
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Oct 14, 2017 12:45
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:Why did that last level look so familiar? There was another level earlier on that used a similar coloured-outline gimmick, though it didn't do it quite so well. Edit: This one. Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Oct 14, 2017 |
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Oct 14, 2017 14:58
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I really wonder how well those levels hold up to the cement block test. Third place actually looked like fun to play and something you might actually find in a real game.
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Oct 14, 2017 15:52
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Geemer posted:I really wonder how well those levels hold up to the cement block test. Third place actually looked like fun to play and something you might actually find in a real game. Is that "replace every sprite with cement blocks, is the level still interesting to play"?
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Oct 14, 2017 19:14
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The first place level needed to let go of the auto scroll and just you run free with the star. If you're giving people a string of stars like that, you might as well let them go full speed and enjoy it. But yeah, chiming in to say the same thing, third level looked to be the best overall.
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Oct 14, 2017 19:21
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Bruceski posted:Is that "replace every sprite with cement blocks, is the level still interesting to play"? Yep. While aesthetics can enhance a level, if they're the only thing that a level has going for it, it really can't be called a good level, which is what that's for.
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Oct 14, 2017 19:27
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So how exactly is that moon in the 3rd place level vanilla again?
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Oct 14, 2017 19:47
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Mak0rz posted:So how exactly is that moon in the 3rd place level vanilla again? Nope, i went and googled the map, apparently it's the hills from yoshi's island 1 mirrored on the x-axis with some air bubbles layered on top of it using the same color pallet for 'craters'. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Oct 15, 2017 |
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Oct 14, 2017 20:05
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The third level is the best level of the bunch from a gameplay perspective, but I completely understand why they rated the first place one as they did. As we saw with the levels with alternately glowing platforms and obstacles that FP couldn't complete, it's pretty drat hard to make a level with that kind of gimmick playable. But the two guys who made the 1st place level did.
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Oct 14, 2017 21:16
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No it isn't, you just have to have the important bits not spend long stretches of time completely invisible.
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Oct 14, 2017 22:34
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Honestly, if I had judged this, I think all of those top 3 levels would have made my top 10. Even with all the "irregularities" this ended up less contentious than I thought it would be. My #1 pick would possibly have gone to something like Dry Ice or Nightswimming, because I just love that "same area but something's changed" design so much. Dry Ice explored the gimmick in more depth and had some really clever puzzles, but Nightswimming was aesthetically flawless and so artfully subtle that you don't even notice that's what it's doing until it does it.
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Oct 15, 2017 02:08
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Were the different world themes (Ice world, Cave world, Spooky world etc.) pre-defined at the start of the contest, or did they just group everything together into what the most sense after submission?
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Oct 15, 2017 02:47
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C-Euro posted:Were the different world themes (Ice world, Cave world, Spooky world etc.) pre-defined at the start of the contest, or did they just group everything together into what the most sense after submission? From the way they talked about things, I get the impression these themes have existed for awhile. Like, they mentioned some levels having been clearly aimed at being in Abstract World.
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Oct 15, 2017 02:57
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Interplanetary is clearly meant for Space World.
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Oct 15, 2017 05:38
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That's an awful lot of coins, deaths, and mario. Thanks, FPzero! I would love to play these levels myself but I am nowhere near good enough to make a dent in them without crying into my keyboard. Plus I still feel it's bad form to have bits where you have to spinjump on enemies, surely the point of spinies, podobos etc is that you're not suppoed to be able to jump on them safely. I'm also a little surprised that the soundtrack for interplanetary wasn't a chiptuned beastie boys cover.
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Oct 15, 2017 12:45
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Crazy Achmed posted:Plus I still feel it's bad form to have bits where you have to spinjump on enemies, surely the point of spinies, podobos etc is that you're not suppoed to be able to jump on them safely. It was one of the new abilities of the game; like the cape, it was rarely explicitly required, but was often very, VERY helpful. There are several places where it's explicitly difficult to advance without abuse of that move, especially in castles where saws, podoboos, and sparkies are common. If I'm remembering right, there's at least one place where you would explicitly need it, unless you have a cape or the right switch palace activated, but even the special levels generally don't require its use, with the exception of the spin block digging level which seems to be designed to showcase part of the functionality of the spin jump and offers several mushrooms to ensure you can proceed.
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Oct 15, 2017 16:47
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I'm replaying Super Mario World right now because I got my hands on a SNES mini and all these Romhacks made me want to just play the drat game again, and I was thinking about the spinjump thing too. As far as I can tell so far (and remember), you can probably finish the game without any spinjumping at all (the required digging level is the first star world one, iirc), but it is mandatory for a bunch of secret exits. You might cheat some of those with a Yoshi who can lick up keys through walls, but I'm not sure about all of them. Irrelevant because of the star world level where the entire level is based around it. I think what's often overlooked is how loving hard it is on a SNES controller to spinjump on the fly. You pretty much always want to hold Y (left button) to have running speed, and B (normal jump, bottom button) can easily be pressed while keeping Y held down. But pushing A (spinjump, right button) while holding Y is a completely different matter, and I don't know a good way around that barring some creative claw-handing. When I tried a few romhacks back in the day, I immediately remapped the emulator buttons so I could spinjump with L or X or something, but the original vanilla game obviously doesn't allow that. So I'm always like "good thing I now know that the spinjump is the cool tool to break the game, wonder why I never figured that out as a kid oh right because it's almost completely unusable just from the control setup, never mind" Mega Man X afaik lets you remap dash from A to L, so that's good and is the first thing I do (especially after playing so much Mega Man Zero where that's default), and I did the same for Super Metroid where the default is really weird (I think it's B to shoot, Y to run and A to jump, X deselects weapons while Select changes them). Now I can't angle the gun down when standing still but that's barely an issue. None of these luxuries are in SMW, sadly.
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Oct 15, 2017 17:36
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In vanilla Mario World Y and X have the exact same function. I X + A my way through plenty of levels. It's not hard to switch to X when you're already using Y to run. Also there's a cave level that requires you to spin drill through blocks to get through it normally. I can't remember what level it is but it's just a single width column of blocks with a sinking lava platform underneath. Yellow blocks also aren't a fool-proof Yoshi barrier because you can break them if you spin jump onto Yoshi. Mak0rz fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Oct 15, 2017 |
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Oct 15, 2017 17:44
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Mak0rz posted:In vanilla Mario World Y and X have the exact same function. I X + A my way through plenty of levels. It's not hard to switch to X when you're already using Y to run. It's a lava level near the end of Chocolate Island or the beginning of Bowser's cave that you're thinking of, I believe, and I'm not sure you DO need to spin-jump there, I think there's an alternate route down. I don't feel like digging out a copy of the game somewhere to try to find the right one, admittedly, so I guess take my take on it with a grain of salt. Having a way to remap controls might be nice, but for the basic game, there's virtually no places where swapping to X+A and back to Y+B is going to be ruinous, yeah. After you play romhacks for too long you can forget how lenient the games they're based on usually are. Simply Simon posted:but it is mandatory for a bunch of secret exits. You might cheat some of those with a Yoshi who can lick up keys through walls, but I'm not sure about all of them. Oh, right, there are cave sub-areas with an object hidden under turnblocks, including...I think it's a Forest of Illusion level that has both the key and keyhole stashed under them, making it so that, short of TAS-level clipping, you do indeed need a big-Mario spinjump to get the secret exit. Still, that's maybe three levels in the game that actually really REQUIRE the spinjump? I know my family got through most of the game entirely without the spinjump or the cape because they weren't very confident with either, at least.
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Oct 15, 2017 17:59
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Dabir posted:No it isn't, you just have to have the important bits not spend long stretches of time completely invisible.
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Oct 16, 2017 01:52
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Stuff happened, and now we're back to your regularly scheduled programming! Rockman 4 Minus Infinity #9: Our Balloon (Heavy Sigh, Kalonzombie, and Shinryu) oh, and gently caress THIS GIMMICK.  Rockman 4 Minus Infinity Hard Mode #9: Wrath of the Red Moth (Heavy Sigh, shinryu, word on the wind, and new friends dijondujour and Terror Van)
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Oct 17, 2017 17:24
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I don't get the point of these levels. It's fine to make a harder romhack, it's fine to want to test the players' skills...so long as it is in the right genre. What's the goddamn point of turning Mega Man into a shmup? It doesn't work. That sprite flickering was painful for my eyes too.
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Oct 17, 2017 17:46
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Death bullets are a thing that happens in shmups, notably in Gradius, when you played higher loops (continue playing the game after beating the game at least once), enemies will shoot a bullet at you when they die. The problem here, of course, is that they move too fast, and Megaman has his normal hitbox, which makes things entirely unreasonable. It would have been just as hard, but more fair if Megaman kept the tiny hitbox from the fortress boss for the entirety of the shmup section instead. Yikes, that's just bad.
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Oct 17, 2017 19:09
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Seems like you'd want to just not shoot most enemies, they aren't too hard to dodge themselves
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Oct 17, 2017 21:16
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It seems like your Balloon energy keeps counting down during that section, though. Is hitting zero "lose a life and start over"?
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Oct 18, 2017 02:40
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Commander Keene posted:It seems like your Balloon energy keeps counting down during that section, though. Is hitting zero "lose a life and start over"? You fall, and die if you didn't get Beat. Then you'll keep bouncing until you can grab some energy
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Oct 18, 2017 02:41
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Blaze Dragon posted:I don't get the point of these levels. It's fine to make a harder romhack, it's fine to want to test the players' skills...so long as it is in the right genre. What's the goddamn point of turning Mega Man into a shmup? It doesn't work. I think some of that was as a showcase of the romhacker's skills. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense or fit very well, but it is a technically impressive feat.
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Oct 18, 2017 02:53
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Fun maybe-fact: I believe hard mode's revenge bullets create more revenge bullets if you try to get clever and use recycle inhaler on them. This is doubly hilarious when the "official" settings for hard mode (not custom set to hard) disables item drops and you've probably gotten used to using rush and recycle for all your pickups to this point. Normally though, the shmup stage is pretty easy with any weapons that have a range of angles to fire at, like dive man's. Also in response to all the people who've been saying things like "I don't get why..." to the romhacker's decisions... Well, if it isn't obvious by now, the romhacker really loves Kirby and Gradius. Maybe to a fault. Hell, bright man's weapon is a reference to that. To a lesser degree, he's also a final fantasy fan, as evidenced by the Toad magic, but depending on what Heavy Sigh wants to do later, there'll be some more evidence for that as well.
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Oct 18, 2017 12:45
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 The levels are all done but now we need to find the postgame. Back to the Blue Switch Palace! (And some other places)
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Oct 18, 2017 18:05
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Oh. These last few levels look like they'll be...interesting to say the least.
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Oct 18, 2017 18:44
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The Terrible Secret of Worstworld.
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Oct 18, 2017 18:55
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I checked the actual ROM hack. The pipe still appears even if you haven't gotten all the exits. And nothing about that secret room changes either. I guess there's a hidden flag that gets set up there once you get all the exits? I'm not sure how they implemented that. So what makes these post-game levels different from the rest? Did we actually play all the submissions or did some of them get shoved into here?
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Oct 18, 2017 19:00
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| # ? May 10, 2024 08:36 |
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Since there are four, my guess is judges' submissions.
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Oct 18, 2017 19:16
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