Mario's Journey Through Time & Space Review
I was hesitant at first but decided to give it a chance and oooh boy...
Like the Toad hack you released earlier this hack looks beautiful but most of the level designs... Sigh...
So I breezed through the first world and was about to give up on this hack but decided to try more.
I skipped ahead to world 7. (One good thing about the hack was that you can skip worlds) Maybe I'd find a good challenge ahead.
So you used a gravity gimmick for this world. Makes sense but it is just so poorly implemented as are most other gimmicks. The platforms are placed so closely together that the player wouldn't ever need to hold down the dash button. You could have included occasional high platforms at least to complement the high jumping. Then I get to the castle and now the gravity gimmick's gone? Where's the consistency? And just look at this:
This is the last castle and all we have is conveyor belts, empty void and occasional one hit kill critters? Where are the spikes or sparkys at the very least least?
There is hardly any consistency from gimmick to gimmick too. In the pirate ship you chose to implement the wall jump patch but there was hardly any indication of wall jumping in the past worlds.
Another is this boss:
First of all, boss?
If you just stood in the space indicated you're hardly gonna be taking damage. In order to defeat this boss you needed to wait for it to spit out eggs Birdo style then toss it to her. But throughout the whole game there wasn't any indication of picking up and throwing things.
If a player first picks this game up without having played the original SMW he'd have a hard time figuring out what to do.
Okay sure we can assume the people playing this have already played the original SMW but this hack just passes for an expansion pack than its own game.
Example of your enemy placement:
This thing just stays at the bottom of the screen and hardly does anything to hinder you from progressing.
It's one thing to make easy hacks that anyone can enjoy but these just play like early programming experiments to try and see what the SNES is capable of. The platforms are placed like they might fit the original Super Mario Bros game but that game was challenging because of the extremely slippery controls.
There is more playability in Super Mario Land for the Game Boy.
You can just run through the levels, killing enemies occasionally if you want to but the death animations are all the same. The only challenge I found in this hack was that hit detection of most enemies is pretty bad notably the Koopas in Giant World ant the spinning heads in the space world. You'd have to hit them in the head dead center so it's best to just avoid them.
Another HUGE flaw this hack has is the knockback. You try to run past an enemy but just keep taking hits because of the horribly short recovery time.
Also what was the point of providing a mushroom powerup if it doesn't increase your health?
What happened to spin jumping, climbing, picking up things to use as weapons?
In conclusion, if you're looking for a hack with beautiful backgrounds and heavy gimicks (but not necessarily implemented nicely), this hack is for you.
I'm not writing this review to piss on you but I've played some beautiful levels in your previous hack, Toad most notably the Mushroom Cave Maze. That level was just brilliant. I just feel you got bored with actually making some levels and just decided to make a hack purely based on gimmicks when you know you're capable of so much more.
a