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[REMOVED] "The Amazing Super Mario Bros. 2: Legend of the Rare Coin" by MCJ32

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File Name: The Amazing Super Mario Bros. 2 Legend of the Rare Coin
Submitted: 2014.08.10 ~ 01:18:51 by MCJ32
Claimed: 2014.08.12 ~ 15:18:52 by Counterfeit
Authors: MCJ32
Demo: No
Featured: No
Length: 20 exit(s)
Difficulty: Hard
Description: The sequel to Amazing Super Mario Bros. The Mario bros must figure out the mystery of the rare coin.
Tags:
Rating: 3.3
Your rating:
Download: Download - 294.74 KiB
32 downloads
Logo looks a little messy.

The title screen shows Mario walking in and standing on a rope above water. The menu text eats the title, but the background and music are good.

The intro starts with a text message. After pressing up, HOT KETCHUP AND MUSTARD. Something more gentle for those hills, maybe, like pale yellows and greens? :(

The overworld is shaped fine, but there are some oversights in the cliff where it's not smoothly dual-tone and some areas where the lines suddenly end. The grass shades have too much contrast and it'd look a lot better if the shades were closer together. The next island has a wonky perspective on the right side and a weird palette.

Toadstool Castle has three Yoshis in eggs - not a good idea since you can drop down a powerup and grow a Yoshi and trigger a glitch where adult Yoshi's face is overwritten by baby Yoshi graphics. Inside the castle, the Toad graphics are crude - their bodies blend into the background since there are no outlines. There are rips of Toad from other games in the ExGFX section and I believe the NPC sprite comes bundled with some Toad frames. The outside background is really harsh like the intro's. Also, giving the player all 3 powerups at this point of the game? I dunno about that (also holy shit it's the return of the deformed green zombie pistol o_o)

Pleasant Plains has a good background palette - it takes the foreground land tiles, but it makes them very easy to distinguish as background objects with the subtlety and similar color tones to the backdrop. The foreground palette is kind of gross, though: the shadow is reversed and the bush outline is white. The level design is not bad: it's simple and focused, and gives powerups where appropriate. One problem is if you lose your cape before the big gap which you're expected to fly over or go to the clouds above, I can't find any obvious way to the clouds or around the pit. It might be a good place to stick a pipe and a little room that leads you around that, or use coins to point out where the hidden blocks could be.

Pear Hills has a foreground with too much contrast, and a background that looks borderline NES. Each mountain should use a similar shade from the center to the edge. The foreground would probably look fine with a darker green. There's a cutoff problem caused by putting coins on layer 1 dirt - they can't overlap like this and it's easiest to build around the coins. Clouds placed on top of dirt ledges instead of ledge tops is really unappealing too; there's no purpose for the dirt so I'd have free-floating clouds instead. The level design doesn't really take advantage of the Pokeys except when you have an area of five blocks where the Pokeys can close in on you and almost guarantee damage if you don't get out in time. This level is full of coins. Coins, coins, coins.

Neon Mushrooms has a good FG and BG palette, but the enemy palettes are messed up in the first room. The tide rooms have a problem with the tide scrolling with the camera - if you can execute the level without vertical scroll, that's one way of doing it. The other way is using this sprite. I feel like the platform-type enemies in the first room could've been taken more advantage of to lead you to other places, and that the two tide segments felt the same. I'd cut it down to one tide room, and use the mushrooms in such a way that the jump paths of the enemies are less predictable and more dangerous.

Berry Cove has a lot of repetitive platforms in the start and that water segment floating in the air later on. Volcano Lotuses are either laid out along flat stretches of land, or used in a cool manner underneath ? blocks. This level has a big cutscene, and it should set the timer to 0 during these cutscenes so you can't die, and it should disable the status bar so we can see all the words. Palettes here need some work, such as the green cement blocks beneath the Toads and the airship, and the Power Coin itself.

Ship Chase goes from Barney Hide-and-Seek easy to Contra hard when the flying fish generator comes in. The level design is a lot of water, timed lifts, and fish. It's very bare-bones, and manages to be boring at first then frustrating later with no fun in between. I like Chrono Trigger, though... so I enjoyed the music. The goal post was too short for the sprite's movement.

Cannon Lagoon has that tide problem and it interferes with playability because it's so deceptive. The level design is enjoyable apart from that and the music is kick-ass. I personally would've switched the cannons' palette row to make them grey/black but their palette is still sensible.

Pirate's Way has a bad background execution: the clouds are repetitive and the blue area doesn't look at all like water. The door to the cutscene seems like a weird way of doing things - while it does give the player the option to skip the cutscene, it masquerades as another room in the level. I feel like it'd be better to force the player through the cutscene because it's short and let them potentially press another button to skip right to the main level with a custom block. I noticed now that balls come out of the ass-end of the cannon (yes, I realized how bad this sounds.) The layer 3 tide contributes to a lot of slowdown in the more sprite-heavy areas, which makes me think you should just use layer 1 water. In both rooms, there's some grey on the wooden part of the ship which looks bad (maybe you have to move some stuff around but I see no reason why it can't be brown.)

Bay Down Under has a low FG/BG starting position. There's too much swimming through an uneventful sea of fish until you get to the pipe. The underwater portion has a good BG palette and a poor FG palette (I believe the bright green parts in the dirt are supposed to be darker. Having platforms that have only one tile of space in between the floor and the top cause some wackiness when big Mario hits the ceiling because he moonwalks backwards through the tiny space. The level design was so-so - it didn't offer a lot of exploration or variety but the coin placement and the fish did just enough to make it passable.

Reef Coral has the right foreground palette. YES! The background palette is erroneous, though. This level is too wide open and thus it's hard to absorb its intricacies, as everything is easy to circumvent. There's a P-switch you need to get through a pipe at the top of the level, so feeling out the corners of the level is important in the end of the first room. If you fail it, you have no alternative route, so I think making the level more closed-in would be very helpful. Going into the ship, the pipe and wood floor and barrels have weird palettes. The cannons blend in, and the background has a huge black bar. This room is also too wide open and feels low-substance and repetitive. The level also desperately needs a midway point, as a slow-moving underwater level of this length is frustrating to repeat.

Ship Inside is the first level with two exits. Dry Bones has mismatched graphics between the collapsing and the upright frames. The second room feels very flat and plain along the bottom route while the top has enough action to keep interest.

Ship Inside 2 has mismatching Rex tiles: the crushed frame doesn't match with his other two statuses. There are some palette problems with the foreground in all rooms.

Haunted Dock breaks the game entirely because of a bad custom song, thus the hack has to be removed. It can not be completed with an accurate emulator. I recommend upgrading to AddMusicK, as it will refuse to insert broken songs. Design-wise, it feels boring because of the huge amounts of uneventful back-and-forth to get to the door.

- Mario has an incorrect frame on his feet while swimming.
- Buoyancy is often not enabled in underwater levels.
- Palettes need a ton of work - you can copy palettes from one level to another, as explained in the palette editor of Lunar Magic. I can personally help you fix palettes as I really like working with colors.
- Avoid repeating segments or too much back-and-forth in levels
- Try to close in your water levels more to establish a clear direction
- Use the sprite linked under "Neon Mushrooms" to fix the tide
- AddMusicK. ZSNES is fine to play hacks with but never to test submissions with because it lets things that don't work on SNES slide through.
- You've established a great story. The flow of gameplay reminds me of Revenge of MetaKnight, except less blowing up parts of the ship on your end and less complaining from Captain Klondike's crew's end.

Difficulty: Easy
+1:
Wakuku
AnOkukuGoomoo

Just look above you...
If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!
Aw this hack is kind of messy as the logo would suggest.

The level design is mostly bad. I'm not much impressed by this as overall; it's not everything bad anyways, I honestly liked a few sections (in the late game mostly), but for the rest, there is lots of work to do. If I could suggest you, I'd say to add more variety to each level, since the main issue is that they are terribly flat. If you somehow manage to come up with nice ideas and to develop them in a decent way, I think that everything will be more acceptable.

Aesthetics is another factor which needs lots and lots of work. Almost all the palettes look very bad: bad colors, silly matchings and weird cutoff, which are pretty frequent (well small Mario's head is a cutoff too, so I guess we can't be more frequent than this). Try experimenting with palettes more, and ask for feedback: in these cases, a wip thread would help you a lot. So yeah, here too, overall not good.

This hack has lots of misc issues too: slowdown occurs pretty frequently, music incompatibility with accurate emulators, already mentioned cutoff here and there and silly behavour of the layer 3 water levels. There are probably more of them, which I forgot, but these ones are the major ones I think.

Difficulty is normal, some parts are kinda challengy.

Due to level design, aesthetics and misc issues, I'd reject the hack. If you plan to fix it, you have lots of work to do. Again, I'd suggest you to open a WIP thread, so that you could ask for feedback, especially for your palettes.
Suika Ibuki - 25107
Well... My first impression was bad, this logo.... i guess i do not needed say about this i needed?
Well i guess when making this hack you have evolved a bit your level desing, because in the very last stages the level desing was pretty good if we compare it with the start.
Overall this hack was not good to be in hack section, i don't get much bored of small slowdowns but they're a bad point(in special a few areas with a medium slowdown)
still talking about level desing you can either,find nice ideas for the levels or improve your level desing. Talking about the graphical side of the hack... Well those palletes was a bit ugly no offense, i'am a fan of hacks with graphic changes. but if you are going to do that do right! put a few nice palletes for your hack, use a variate set of sprites and add chalenging areas, put coins they make the player jump it will evolve a lot the level desing, and i guess this hack will be a lot better. Also i have found a few bugs like those 3 baby yoshis, if i give to they an item of my item box the head of the grown yoshi will glich.
Your OW also are not bad but they have a few bad palletes, not all of they are 100% ugly palletes but they can be better if you decrasse a bit the saturation. Also a few graphic changes..... Look at they, do they looks good? to me original smw gfx can work better in things such as ths "fireflower"
At all i find a few good things in this hack, but they are so much small if we see all the hack.
Also Counterfeit is trying to help you in a really bad problem, please do not lose a good chance like that. I am not saying you needed accept but will be good if you do it
I'am going to REJECTION but waiting for next versions
The difficult was Eazy.
Do not desist, keep improving it,follow mine and other suggestions and it will be a nice hack.
Good luck to you! And do not forget, do not matter where or how we are always learning new things, it can be in level desing graphics anything, but we are always learning.
You can also now get back in the firsts levels and make changes, since i guess your level desing is evolving in a goof way, keep this!
But still think about find new gimmicks, they are a good plus in how the hack is enjoyable.
Also you can try aj6666 Level desing tutorial
#unbanMB980
The graphics have improved in places, such as the characters (Toads and King) without outlines that blended into the background in previous versions, but the mushroom powerup graphic and the pirates (all forms) are crudely drawn. The green zombie gun thing was replaced with the classic Fire Flower, but now Mario shoots bouncing lasers. o.0

The music problems were fixed - I no longer get a crash in Haunted Dock.

Many palettes are still quite bad, such as the overworld palette and some places with ExGFX that have conflicting palette rows which can be remapped. There are a lot of nasty-looking custom sprites in levels such as Neon Mushrooms. The overworld needs an awful lot of work still in this regard.

Graphical glitches still exist: the tile used in sprites as a blank space needs to be remapped so scores don't garble. Yoshi's swallowing graphic in Neon Mushrooms is messed up. Big Mario's running graphic has the wrong 8x8 tiles behind him and is either the problem of switching the graphics' location (more likely) or remapping Mario's extended tiles (less likely.) Ship Inside 2 has bad Piranha Plant stems.

Cannons still shoot out the rear and not the barrel end. (One-way bullet generator is a good solution.)

Levels with a lot of cutoff tiles (e.g. Lotus Cove) are still that way.

Level design problems that have been fixed:
Yoshi eggs in Toadstool Castle

Reef Coral feels like it's been improved... it feels shorter than I remember it and the first room a lot more focused. The final room is pretty substanceless though.

New level design problems:
Cannon Lagoon is unbeatable if you fall in the water at the bottom of the level. Death is forced. It'd be cool if you could climb an anchor to get back up.

* The barrels are stacked really high but the level's not unbeatable - it just requires precision when jumping on the cannonball, and because there's a ledge right under you, you can retry if you fail.

Levels I did not review in the last version:

Cannon Lagoon 2 has some poor layer 2 rain graphics that don't look like rain but rather growing and shrinking stripes. I have no problem with the foreground palette - the white waters make sense to me in context of a storm and I'm rather impressed overall with the cleanliness of the palette here in context of this hack because that's the major point this hack suffers in is palettes. Slowdown is persistent near the end of the first room. The design is kind of bland - it's a ship level in a ship world but there's nothing outside of the aesthetics that set it apart from the other pirate-infested levels.

Bonus Game has a rough FG palette (the red stripes have a bad intermediate shade) and the top of the level is cutoff.

Haunted Dock has a long area of running side to side in a repetitive set of corridors up to the next room. The palette in the blue room is ugly, as are all the ghosts made black. The second to last room has a great palette and I like the P-switch run as a change of pace. In the final room, there's sprite tile memory problems which cause the goal post to only show half its graphics. It's not a good idea to use a ghost ceiling generator in a goal room for that reason.

Cargo Deck really needs a midway point. The palette is bad and I see a lot of blood red in the FG - it looks kind of creepy. The Star seems thrown in for no reason since everything in the room is immune to it. In the third room, you can get permanently stuck in here:

This level in general is pretty unforgiving. Some areas have slowdown which need to be resolved, and areas of extended flatness with repetitive streams of spear-wielding enemies, such as the one blocking a door.

Ship Inside 3 has a missing goal post and a spoopy message about how we'll never leave here alive. The screen goes black and I can't proceed from there so this hack is going to be rejected for this reason especially. Going the other way, I find myself scaling many staircases and it's a kind of repetitive vertical design. When I get outside, the mist obscures layer 1 and I can only see layer 2 through it and not myself - this is bad and needs to be fixed.

Sky High Sail has palettes that conflict, such as blue-shaded clouds against an orange or very dark blue background, and bright orange windows. Aside from the periodic pipe that you get launched out of, it follows the same cookie cutter structure as the other levels: platforms of varying altitudes with a few pirates on them. I don't feel like the hack is evolving enough as I progress. The difficulty is flat.

Midnight Cruise starts like any other level but for the first time, autoscroll gets used. Forcing the pace prevents backtracking so you have to commit to your path. The lower path brought me into a room full of coin blocks. There's a bouncing item block but I didn't realize I'd have to fly - not a good idea to combine autoscroll and flying because the rate of movement prevents you from seeing what's ahead of you as you fly, and the Bullet Bill generator means a cheap unavoidable shot can send you to your death. This happens more often than not and I've lost my patience with this level. It's too luck-based. The star doesn't last long enough even if you come into the level with a cape.

Verdict: Auto-reject due to game breaking in Ship Inside 3 and 100% luck-based level in Midnight Cruise (I get hit by things I can't see half the time in mandatory flight and die each time.)
Difficulty: Normal

Also: Try to fix a lot more of the things mentioned in this review and the first review before resubmitting and /test your levels/ before resubmitting because I'm sure you would've caught the problem in Midnight Cruise if you did.

Just look above you...
If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!