You're looking at this too technically, Mathelete.

What they mean is that people don't go out and buy a Mario game for puzzles with a little action as a side dish. They buy them for action, with good gameplay.

While we aren't Nintendo, look at what they've done. They made fun levels that don't have to be puzzles all the time. It's what makes Mario a sign of many peoples' childhoods. It's the reason this site even exists. I can safely say that if I was two years old, my first game was SMW by the way, and I picked up SMW just to find a puzzle, I'd have either given up on games altogether, do ended up one of those people who thinks that not shooting or slashing things is immature in a game.

The reason I hack Mario was that I had fun with the game since I was two years old. Even now, I have a shelf with the game above my head and my old SNES no more than 5 feet away from me, still in working order.

I don't speak for everyone, but I think Mario shouldn't need puzzles to be fun...


....WOW, we got SIDETRACKED.

Since you were TWO? Wow, you're a beast.

So this is something that's been on my mind for a while now. Have we gotten to the point where we're making our hack levels too long?

Our hacks basically remake SMW in our own images. But we seem to forget that despite whatever we load on to the rom, it's still SMW.

The original SMW never had a time limit that exceeded 400 in game seconds which is basically around 5 minutes of gameplay. Even so, the odds are you'd complete the level with time to spare. And even then, a time limit of 400 didn't become common till extremely late in the game. Before that, most levels had a 300 second time limit.

In many hacks which I play, I find that levels are exceedingly long and the maximum time limit is bypassed... a lot... Heck it's gotten to the point where we have a patch to allow times beyond 999 seconds.

Compared to when I play SMW, I find myself saying 'Okay, I get it. Am I done yet?' a hell of a lot more in hacks. In my opinion, level designers are focusing so much more on making their levels span out rather than filling it with amusing content. You can sometimes even tell towards the end of the level where the designer runs out of ideas and starts throwing random objects and sprites at you just to get an additional 100 seconds out of the level.

SMW had 96 exits which is a hell of a lot of gameplay, even if the levels are what one would call 'short'. In comparison, another popular franchise such as Mega Man could get away with making longer levels.

Why is this?

Well, compare the number of levels in Super Mario World to the number of levels in your typical Mega Man game. Looking at old school Mega Man, you typically had 9 robot master stages and then 3 or 4 end game stages. So really, you'd have about 12 stages.

Each of these stages could very easily pan out about 10 minutes each provided you didn't die. The stages also typically had multiple checkpoints so you wouldn't have to go through a tonne of the same level again which, considering the game's difficulty, was a smart move.

Unless you're Mega Man god, I'd estimate at least 3-5 hours of gameplay out of an old school Mega Man game. I'd estimate about the same length of time for Super Mario World too (if you're going for 100% exit coverage), unless, again, you're a god at it.

When people say the game needs to be longer, I think people take the idea of that too far. Not only do they cram more levels in the hack, they also make the levels needlessly longer than they should be.

What I'm saying is, pick one or the other. We don't need long and high quantity levels. Just long or high quantity. By all means, don't completely remove long levels but don't cram them everywhere, make them uncommon and only make them common for end game material.