Mario In Mushroom Rix Land 3 Master Thwomps Avenge

Continuing my playthrough of the Mushroom Rix Land series, I've now finished 3. While all of the worlds are based on those of the first MIMRL, the level design style is more akin to MIMRL2. Notes:

- World 3 was... Interesting. I'm not a fan of how this game or MIMRL1 used melting ice blocks, and while most of the levels using them here weren't *too* bad, I ultimately had to use savestates in 3-1 for the sake of my sanity.

- 5-2's custom mechanic didn't quite click with me at first, but after deciding to use savestates to clear it, the mechanic gradually started making sense to me. If I had the patience, I could probably beat this level without savestates.

- If you look up "PURE EVIL" in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of 7-1 (and its corresponding room in MT Rix Palace). Beat both without savestates though, so I guess they're not *too* bad?

- Normally, screen-shake effects don't bother me, but in the last level before the finale (Space Castle), there honestly felt like there was a bit too much. I don't know if it's possible to disable that in SMW hacks, but if it is, it might be a good idea to do so if you're planning to use that many Thwomps.

- Once again, the finale was too much for only one checkpoint. Unlike before, though, I don't feel any of the *individual* rooms were too long, so I only wound up using a single savestate at the start of each.

- The final boss was... Underwhelming. Like, easier than vanilla Bowser, underwhelming. With the difficulty of the hack, and knowing it would be a custom boss, I guess I was expecting something more?

4/5 stars; the good outweighs the bad here.

Enjoyed! Difficult but fair. Plenty of power ups!

wow man just way sweet

I managed to finish this hack and wow, it was quite an adventure. It started out pretty mediocre, but progressively it's gotten better and better, and it was nice to see the hack creator get better at level design over time. It's pretty rough around the edges, mostly in the first half, but overall I think it was a pretty good hack, but beware, this hack doesn't hold you hand and there's a handful of levels that are very tough.

Here's a few notable things I wanted to point out that would be worth fixing/improving in an 1.1 or the next hacks:

1. The difficulty curve is probably the largest thing that might put off a lot of players. This hack starts out pretty reasonable but challenging, then the difficulty spikes really hard in world 2, especially world 3 with some levels in there. After that, there's only a handful of rough levels in world 4 and 5, and then the rest hack is not nearly as tough.

This makes the difficulty feel very all over the place, which may frustrate some players. I personally enjoyed most of this hack, although I admit that destroying the ice walls got very annoying in the ice world. That world in general just felt very unforgiving and mistakes often ended up with death, making some of the levels basically feel like a tough kaizo stage. There's a lot of levels that had sudden difficulty spikes, if you are interested I could send you some examples in a private message or anywhere, as it'd make the comment way too long and painful to read.

2. There's been some instances of enemies despawning which is strange because the hack uses SA-1. Not sure whether it might be wrong sprite memory (I believe you need to have it set to 10 in Lunar Magic) or if it was an emulator issue.

3. I highly recommend adding the Double Hit Patch to the hack. I've died or got hit multiple times because I bounced off of two enemies at once with a spin jump, which is a bug in the vanilla game. This patch is small and I don't think it should break anything, and it'd improve a few levels that require you to spin jump off of enemies.

4. There's been a few instances of foreground being a bit hard to distinguish from background. I'd recommend trying to make background tiles either a bit darker or have more washed out colors to make them not blend in as much with actual ground. If you're curious, I can send you a few screenshots of levels I had a little bit of trouble with.

5. This one's minor, but backtracking to the starter house can be tedious if you get low on lives late in the game. It'd be nice to have some fast travel warps in later worlds, but it's not a big deal, just a small inconvenience.

Anyway, overall I think the hack was pretty fun and very challenging. There were occasional annoyances here and there, but I appreciate the effort put into it. At first I didn't feel too hyped about it, because the first 2 worlds felt a bit same-y in terms of level design, but they've gotten better as they went on and the hack has become much more enjoyable to play. Good job!