Save Luigi

Was having fun with this but then wow man what in god’s name is up with that ENORMOUS difficulty spike on the later levels?? Didn’t feel like pouring hours into it so I had to cheat my way through the rest of the hack, kinda wished I hadn’t wasted my time on this. Sorry 3/5

I thought this was bad. I should have quit much earlier but ended up pushing through to the 28 exit finish. This hack seems to want to "go big" with its high exit count and complicated puzzle, but it falls apart on basic design. I feel like this screenshot captures my issues with the hack pretty well.



If you can't tell, this is text which doesn't fit on the screen, so the player has to run to the right to finish reading the first line, then back to the left to start reading the second line, and so on. This could easily have been done better, but it requires attention and play testing that is lacking throughout.

Here's an incomplete list from memory of more or less objective bad design in the hack:

- At least two levels can be cheesed to skip more than half. One cheese is so obvious that Takemoto even guarded against it in 2007. There are also several examples of smaller cheese that skip individual obstacles.
- At least one level has no save prompt.
- In the extremely long final level, if you start select out (easy to do accidentally on many controllers), the game forgets your checkpoint and sends you all the way back to the beginning.
- Many specific tricks and trolls repeat often, with half a level repeating (literal copy/paste) with a different background! The final boss is the same as the mid-game boss with one new obstacle.

And here are some subjective things that probably many would agree on:

- Obstacles are not spaced well, and the level design feels very cramped.
- The aesthetics in some levels are hard to comprehend and cause unnecessary deaths. A few rooms in the final castle are like this (e.g. the mole room, the cape copy/paste room).
- Tricks vary wildly in difficulty even within the same level. My general feeling was "pretty hard shell/item abuse, very easy platforming".
- There's an unbelievably massive difficulty spike on the motor-skills/thumb-shredder and final castle levels, where exits go from a matter of minutes to a matter of hours.
- It's lame that the switch palaces are totally empty.
- The practice door system in the castle is insane. All the doors should just be at the beginning of the section (ala Mario Maker), or better yet just have checkpoints after each room.

For me personally, I'd ease up on custom blocks, as they are visually confusing and give obstacles a contrived feeling. I also don't see the need to recreate standard Mario Maker #TeamShell levels in SMW.

Sweet little hack. I found out that the yellow shell in the first level (where you use it after jumping off the rope) is not needed as you can jump directly from the rope up to the munchers.

I enjoy it very much!

Just to note: if you don't do the puzzle and instead just open the text document, you'll end up with 28 exits instead of 30.

The hack is very good with very easy challenges, but it also has many bugs that need to be fixed, which is making it very difficult to pass

That sure is a version number in the title