World A: Valley o’ Bowser’s ( revisited )
¿Have I mentioned that I loved making you go back to the start @ the end ( well, the end o’ the main game )?
King Koopa Kastle ( revisited )
Music: “Bowser’s Castle ( Second Time )”, Super Mario RPG
Ugh. I forgot what a pain this level is — made e’en worse by recording errors that made me have to redo a bunch o’ it, which is why the footage is so uneven. I don’t know if I mentioned it yet, but my method for taking footage is odd: I record Zsnes videos & dump them as avis. This normally is mo’ stable in that I don’t need to worry ’bout rendering mess-ups happening while playing; but on rare occasions Zsnes somehow makes an input mistake @ a point, causing all footage hereafter to be desynced & messed up. This usually leads to an hour o’ footage wherein Luigi keeps entering the level & jumping right into spikes. @ 1 point our rogue Luigibot e’en decided that he was sick o’ this level & decided to hop round randomly in “Ghosts ‘n Goblins”. Can’t blame him too much.
I should admit here that my original mortifying death to Bowser was part o’ that. Most would be thrilled to have a ‘scuse to cut out such embarassment, but since I had a dumb joke to make, I decided to reenact my failure & edit it in. If you look @ said footage, it may look as if I’m making obvious mistakes… till you see the winning footage where I was trying to win & see me make some o’ the same mistakes — just not ‘nough to be killed. I have no idea how I managed to beat all the stuff in the Green Switch but apparently have trouble gainst Bowser.
If you’re curious why I keep insisting on keeping a Mecha Koopa round after the 1st round, e’en going so far as to kill a Mecha Koopa when I only have 1 left & still 1 hit left, it’s a silly speedrun strat ( not e’en the full 1, either ) to make the 2nd, harder section faster & easier. Despite fucking it up so much in the failed attempt ( as I reenact here ), you can see that I still attempt it in the winning run — though a’least I succeeded that time.
Some o’ the deaths in the 1st section are also reenacted. It seems disingenuous, — & I take the authenticity o’ footage ’bout electronic toys with the same seriousness as war photos in major newspapers — but I’d say it’s mo’ honest ’bout the actual experience I had playing the level, which is what I wanted to show. The fact that I lost the footage doesn’t mean that the stuff didn’t happen.
As an easter egg, throughout the level I hid a bunch o’ secret mushroom blocks. I can’t remember if ’twas 30 or 50 I put in, but I could only remember where a few o’ them were, & a few others I found by surprise. I can only guess that the secret mushroom block @ the end o’ the thunder section being solid black, appearing when the screen flashes, was intentional.
This level’s difficulty is incredibly imbalanced. The 1st room is the hardest; past the midway point is a joke. ’Twas annoying, ’cause in my 1st recording I got to the vine ( ¿why are there vines in a castle? ) section quite quickly, only to die in a dumb way by going o’er the ball-&-chain’s block & nudging the top o’ the block with my feet just ’nough to lose my grip o’ the vine & careen right off. After that, it took fore’er to e’en get back to that section. Compared what comes before, the vine section & everything hereafter is easy.
That said, I think the 1st room is the best part o’ the level. I like the mazelike nature o’ the level, & some o’ the jumps are tricky — ’specially the jumps round the Thwomps. My only problem is I think the section under the Thwomps is needless padding. It’s unlikely that if you fall from the Thwomp section you’ll land on solid land — I ne’er did, a’least — so it might as well just be a bottomless pit.
1 note I will make ’bout the video is that despite all the idiotic mistakes I made in what must’ve been mo’ than 3 dozen attempts, including the lost footage, I didn’t once get hurt by the shell the Blue Koopa kicks @ you that you need to bring to the Ball-&-Chain place.
The cloudy section before the vine section is so empty & pointless that I actually forgot ’bout it when I was 1st writing this till editing the video ‘bove. I wish I sped it up in the 2nd run, since it’s far too boring to watch a 2nd time & the video’s already way too long. Sorry.
After the midway point is mixed. The autoscrolling section actually isn’t that bad. Forcing the player to duck & let the edge o’ the screen push them past the spikes @ the start is clever ( but goes on a bit too long ). It’s also why I had to change the safe way to leave this level @ the beginning I mentioned in the 1st part, as the sprite that makes you leave the level by touching the edges o’ the screen for some reason propagates to further subscreens. Other than that, I actually felt pressure to keep up with the screen, rather than in most autoscrollers wherein you spend most o’ your time waiting ( “Donut Plains 2” & “Valley of Bowser 2” come to attention ).
The thunder section looks nice, but has mediocre level design. It has some o’ the most uncreative jumps in a video game: here’s a bunch o’ rows o’ vines, & here’s a bunch o’ cloud platforms that all look the same. Actually, I take back what I said ’bout the section looking nice: the thunder effect looks nice, but the clouds look way too bright & tacky. In these red levels like this & “Sea of Sangre” I turned way too many things red that didn’t look good red.
The water section looks nice, & is a nice callback to the original Super Mario Bros., but is brainlessly easy & mostly just a slow slog, ’specially through those tunnels with the Fish Bones.
The final tower climb has no puzzles you haven’t seen before. It does have the hopping statue sprite, which doesn’t appear anywhere else in this hack; but it oft doesn’t spawn for mysterious reasons. This hack was ne’er good @ sprite management; everyone would always tell me to apply some patch, but none o’ them e’er did anything. This was ‘nother edit I forgot to make: there’s a part where you’re climbing up the vine to the top where a hopping statue finally appears. I wanted to have a word balloon pointing to it that said something like, “Hey, sorry I’m late”.
I have no idea why Peach’s dialogue’s letters are glitchy in some places. I don’t remember that happening before.
Also: no credits. ’Stead, we get yet ’nother Mushroom — ’cept this 1 gives you powerups for free & has the most useless message box in the game. The reason for the lack o’ credits is that, ’cause o’ how I edited the graphics in this game, they became glitchy. Also, it wouldn’t be too accurate, since some o’ the vanilla Super Mario World enemies like Magikoopa or all but 1 ( ¡Spoiler! ) Koopa Kid don’t show up & custom sprites like Birdo or Beezo obviously won’t show in the credits. But moreo’er, the game would end without letting the player save, & I always hated it when games didn’t save you beating the final boss; & this hack was, über alles, ’bout me avoiding all those tropes in video games that I always hated as a kid like not saving beating the final boss or lives & game o’er.
- P-Switch level count: 27 / 45
- Levels with mo’ than 1 switch: 13
- Levels with mo’ than 1 o’ the same switch: 8
We’re only 3/4ths through the levels, though. We should still have ’bout 4 or mo’ posts left.
