[REJECTED] Rise to the Challenge by AxemJinx

Well let's just get right down to it and start this off by going through aspects of this hack in no particular order.

The music:
Its well picked out with some of the songs being rather catchy and the tunes fit the levels, however the music is overused a bit and end up getting a bit old pretty quickly especially when you get stuck on parts and have to play them over and over.

The challenge:
Like the name suggests the game gets pretty challenging at parts even within the first few levels and it's not necessarily a bad things except the challenge comes from the same obstacles being used over and over again, but the difficulty curve is fair and nothing is too over the top.

The Looks:
It's a vanilla hack, there's not much to say about it, Each levels has a distinct feeling and the hack uses minor edits if any at all though it does suffer from some pretty bad palettes from time to time and not all levels are that great to look at.

Level design:
I have some mixed feelings about this as it was fun and challenging but it really didn't stand out all too much when it comes to actual game play as a lot of levels are pretty bland and flat while reusing the same gimmicks over and over along with relying on similar sprite in a lot of levels that make a good majority of the game play the same.


In this case I feel that this game although fun is just not worthy to be featured so I have to vote for rejecting it.

Deadline December 31st.

Wasn't expecting this level to get the chance to be featured or not.
So, this is a pretty old hack (8 years ago) with a pretty rad challenge and awesome music.

The author offers a non-boss hack with a bunch of levels that have some texts scattered through the map. The paths conect to each other making a loop (making the completion harder to find the non-completed levels), and some levels are harder than others (like the fuzzy+saw infestation in one particular level).

I don't think this game is for everybody, since the last time I've completed it was using savestates. Based on that, the game should be rejected.

Alright, it's time to be brutally honest here and tell you exactly why this hack isn't good, and why it should be avoided by any casual player out there.
This hack was probably very impressive for what it was in 2008, but in todays standards, I really don't see this as a good hack.

First of all, to get this out of the way, seeing as this is a legacy hack the music inserted into the game is broken on accurate emulators (Snes9x, bsnes, higan, etc) and only works properly on ZSNES and possibly older(?) versions of Snes9x.

Second, the level design was horrid; there was nothing worth looking for. The levels were very bland, empty and generally just very boring.
What the author also seems to be doing a lot is placing tiles on the one single row that isn't visible in the game, which almost made me miss a secret exit in the second level.

What bothered me the most about these levels is the enemy placement. While it may not be so bad in every single level, I find that most of the levels suffered from this, making it impossible to evade certain enemies visible on the screen. This is a perfect example of unfair enemy placement, while it may look fine here, keep in mind that the trees have tile priority set to On, making it almost impossible to see where these enemies are going.

I feel like most, if not all, of the levels weren't tested by the actual author of the hack himself as the difficulty really feels more like "Very Hard" to me instead of just "Hard". It's always good to have someone beta test your hack before releasing it as they will point out any bugs, flaws or parts in the game that's extremely difficult to get past.

The palettes also varied a lot per level, which is always a good thing, but they weren't exactly what I'd call "pleasant" to look at. While not all of the palettes were bad, I feel like the author could have done a lot better. Something worth nothing about the second level is that most of the sprites were either green or blue, this includes the mushroom being blue, the fire flower being green, etc, Mario also had a green outline in this particular level, it's not that any of this necessarily threw me off guard, but a lot of people could end up being confused by this and mistake these power ups for something else.

Apart from the many issues the levels have, there are some positive things I have to say about this game.
The overworld was well designed, there was plenty of effort put into it and there's a lot of variety available in every submap.
The music that was inserted sounds good, but may get a little bit repetitive as you progress through the hack; a lot of the songs were re-used in later levels.

I've struggled, fought and tried my best to play through this hack and give it a positive rating, but alas, I can not do that. I am voting for this hack to be rejected.

Same.

Final verdict is a rejection.