See?! I told ya, it's super super easy.

I mean, realistically, the same could be said about you? The whole "opinion is pretty out of date" thing. You seemed to have garnered this dislike of me from the days of yore, again, simply because I called out the bullshit, and from that it's never really gone away. Hell, I'd even go as far to say that I've been pretty civil with you, realistically speaking. Again, I made ... what... one comment to someone? The funny thing is, I wasn't even like "HEY DON'T TRUST THIS BITCH, GET OUT NOW, SHE'S SO NUTS SHE SHOULD BE WORKIN' AT CRAAZZZZY BLAZE'S AUTO SALES," but instead, was pretty much just like "look, this is what I've witnessed, just a heads up, don't get hurt, that's it." Bam. Done.

The fact that you hate me (which, by the way, that seems a bit strong, don'tcha think?) because I  "barely know you" seems unwarranted. First impressions are long lasting, and unfortunately, all of your impressions, from when I've been around, have been bad. Can you really blame me for having the view that I do? You can say "I'm a different person now !!" and sure, you might be, but at the same time, you can't blame me for judging you the way I do, if it's all I've ever been greeted with. Hell, I'm not so petty that I wouldn't "give you a chance" or whatever.

What's so interesting about it? At the times of those ... situations... I very clearly expressed my respect for those involved. At the time, it was certainly much lower, especially when they clearly saw the amount of drama they were wrapped up in. That being said, it's only natural that I'd judge you differently than I judged them. For them, I've known them for ... 14 some years?  Their respect had been gained and built up. I knew who they were/are as people. They got wrapped up in some drama, sure, and I let them know that they were being dumb or whatever during those times. You, however, were the CAUSE of the drama. A lot. I've seen you move through the lives of ... what damn near 7 people that I'd known for years?   Not that I cared for ALL of them, but, regardless, at the source of all the dumb drama and situations was always one person. You.

We're all held accountable for our actions. Whether we have changed or are better people or not, things from the past are bound to come back and haunt us or pop up. You can't be surprised that I'd hold you accountable, or judge you accordingly, and therefore "warn" somebody about what COULD or MIGHT happen based off of past situations, can you?  I gaurantee if you get fired from a job, that shit will leave a lasting impression on your resume in the future, wouldn't it? Whether you're a better employee/worker or not, people are still going to question, just in case.

Why do you hate me so much?

Over all, I think worrying about the show you put on is pointless. People will either be drawn to you, or they won't be. It took us two and a half years to get partnered, but I know people who have done it in a year or less. I think consistency is the most important thing, though. We stream pretty much every day, but because it's split between my friend Ian and I (granted, I do the bulk of the streaming) it helps lighten the load.

A nice overlay is pleasant, but not necessary. I like them, because I like to have an onscreen chat. Makes viewers feel they are more a part of the stream.

We do have a stream team now at twitch.tv/team/battlebuddiesgaming so if anyone streams somewhat regularly, I wouldn't mind adding you.

I wish OBS was .... better. It has a LOT of issues, might try switching over to X-Split, I dunno.

The experience is neat, but man, you certainly learn a lot about random internet people. I thought I was already pretty WELL VERSED in how people are, streaming has proved otherwise!

28. Jeez.

Yeah, it's definitely a work in progress. I am working on the next video, just wish I knew how to promote this one a bit more. It's one of those weird things where like, you don't WANT to bug people for views or comments, but you kind of have to if you want to go anywhere with it. And that being said, it's a littttttle frustrating when your friends or whatever watch it but don't ... buffer the comments?

Like you said, without any, it feels lonely, so it'd be nice if when people take the time to view things, if they attached their opinion to it too, just to help the over all "view" (as that also helps get it views too), but again, can't ask for too much, I suppose.

Aha, I just did a Mario Marathon like 5 weeks ago. I regularly play NES games, as well as Mario games, so, it's not like I've suddenly "forgotten" what they are. Again, this wasn't just ME with these complaints. Five people played this game, and various others watched. So, these complaints weren't just me throwing random insults around or whatever.

I would rather point out the flaws in something creative than the positives, because that's how progress is made. I realize the limitations of the NES, which is why I say that in regards to making things like this, if you too realize the limitations, rather than try to push it and have it visually appear at like 40%, why not just not do it? It's one of those things, where, yeah, the idea is cool, but if you can't get it to look proper, don't do it. It looks bad. Or ... use a source game than can handle everything you're trying to put in it (World, I guess).  Saying that I don't understand the limitations as an excuse when I point out that things look bad is just that, an excuse. Hence where that "cool idea, poor execution" comes into play.

My intention isn't/wasn't to hurt your feelings or whatever, but brushing aside criticisms just because they aren't peppered in with praise is dumb.  If I notice more things wrong with a game, then yeah, I will point it out. What can positive notes can I say? I mean, the engine is pretty tight because he's Mario 3's engine, so, it's not like I'm going to bother pointing that out.  I genuinely like some of the stages,  but more bad ones stuck out in my head than the good ones. The penguin suit was a nice touch, but I wish the ice mechanic worked a bit better (if you get hit, the enemy instantly reverts back to normal if frozen, and it would be nice if you could pick them up like a shy guy or something, as opposed to having to run into them to kick it) but it was still neat. But again, being invested in a review only if there if there are more things to stroke your ego or whatever is dumb. I couldn't care less what 5 news articles or YouTube comments full of praise say, if there are bad things design choices or poor execution, it's going to be pointed out eventually. Wouldn't you want that? And, yeah, I can't sympathize with working a 40 hour job and all that, because we ... all do.  Yeah, I get that you're doing this in your free time, but, it's like you said, you weren't getting paid, meaning, there wasn't exactly a deadline, regardless. Maybe I am too hard for expecting a higher grade thing, but I guess when I view hacks like this, it feels like it's 2004 again. I guess I just figured that by now, with so many bad hacks out there, and knowing the limitations, there would be no need in trying to push beyond them to the point where it looks like it's a low grade product.

I recognize the reasons as to why there could be errors (not an artist, one man, NES limitations, etc) but I don't like hearing those used as an excuse. It's not meant do do what it's doing? Sure, do what you can, but don't push it to where the game runs slow, or is buggy. Do what you can do within the limitations of the confines where the product will still look like a professional done game. You are one man, sure, but that was your choice. Ask for help for what you can't do as opposed to saying "well it was only me, so that's why there were bugs!" If it's preventable, prevent it. Sure, things can't be perfect, sure full retail games have their glitches and errors, but still, don't use that as a crutch for mediocrity.

I already stated my opinion on the level design. Nobody seemed happy with backtracking. It's hardly a Mario standard, and it's tedious. It's one of those ways of artificially extending a game, and isn't fun. Some of the levels were bland and poorly designed. And yes, these are opinions, but they were shared with others. Take of that what you will.

As long as you're happy with it, that's all that matters, but questioning if I/we even remember NES games etc simply because of pointing out things that weren't liked is petty. It also doesn't invalidate the things that were found.

Hm. WELL...

We played all the way up to like World 7, then it got really late. The game actually wasn't really well received, between those playing and watching. I wish I had recorded it all directly onto my computer, because there were a LOT of glitches or just signs of poor game design that we kept encountering. I'll try to list out what I can remember though:

Checkpoint locations. While the checkpoints are nice, the locations are awful in a lot of levels. Take level 1-2 for instance, where mere seconds after starting you can be killed by a flying fish. I mean, almost HALF A SECOND later you can be killed. This checkpoint would have been better used if it had been moved farther left before that bridge. There was another stage, one of the pitch black ones, that upon starting the level from the checkpoint, have enemies just a few pixels away from you on both the right and left side that just sort of pincer attack you.

You can't jump through the bottoms of bridges, as one would normally expect to be able to do, but you can jump through the bottoms of the "tree" tops, which you weren't able to do before.

Bad enemy placement. A lot of spots where the enemies just clutter the screen, and slow things down. If you're working with an engine that can't handle it, maybe work around that, and cut the enemies back. It's not entirely necessary to have 3 koopa troopas walking hand in hand in various spots. On top of this, sometimes, the placement was just weird and caused unnecessary deaths. For instance, in I believe the first underwater stage, there are cheep cheeps swimming left and right in a pattern, however, one of them slightly swims over a tower, and gets stuck, glitching out on it trying to turn left and right before eventually popping back out. Not only does it look bad, but it makes things really unpredictable.

The MUSIC. asdfasdf. Man, I people actually yelling at us to turn off the music, and honestly, I agreed. The biggest gripe was in World 3, with the weird like "spooky takes" on the music. It came across so bad, and so grating, that it was actually getting people angry listening to it. It sounded like trying to teach a child to play piano or worse, a recorder (those shitty plastic flutes) and they kept hitting the wrong notes. I understand the idea behind it, but the execution was very poor. You could tell that it wasn't put together by somebody who has a strong musical sense, mainly because of most of the notes were like oil and water.

On top of that, the poor selection of music in some stages over all. I know it's nitpicky, but man, in the Mario 2 stages, a nice Mario 2 remix song would be great, not the Mario 3 athletic theme again, or WORSE, practically ANYTHING from Super Mario Land 2. When we all wanted to hear a song from Mario Land 1, we got one of the worst, being the underground theme. Again, nitpicky, but bad music can ruin a game.

Level design is up next, some of the designs were good, some were just bad. Really bad. Making us ride a shy guy across a screen with literally NO DANGER for almost a solid minute isn't fun. It isn't enticing, it isn't good. It's bad. Also, this being a remix, it's a chance to pull the GOOD from the games and get RID of the bullshit, but in this 3Mix's case, it was like it was all or nothing, so if a level in one of the original games had kind of a shit design (Mario 2's in particular) that was just repeated. Mario 2 was built to be a vertical game, screen scrolled at proper times when going up, in this, when climbing a long vertical screen, you could blindly jump straight into an enemy.

On top of this, backtracking and pointless searching. Jesus, the backtracking. Play through a level, hit a switch, walk backwards through the level and wait for that awkward pause when a pipe raises from the ground. This was ESPECIALLY unnecessary in a ghost house where THREE pipes raise up, and you have to go through all of them to get to the end. By this point, you're just so tired of the stage, you want to hurry up and finish it.

Mario games, are hardly about searching all over the damn stage for a way to ... continue the stage. There was an airship where you go down a pipe A. You come up pipe B and to your left is a check point and some ? blocks. To your right is what seems to be an impossible jump (it is) and a wall and a pit. So what do you do? Can't go left, can't go right. OH, go back DOWN Pipe B and magically appear in Pipe C, the room before the boss battle! How are we supposed to know to do this? Why make us sacrifice lives to find this out? It isn't "hard," it's annoying. Another similar situation is in one of the third world's levels, you hit a P block right infront of a pit with some of those pincer enemies. They turn into coins, leading anyone to believe that there is a secret down there, so you jump to grab them annnnnd die. Great. Thanks. That wasn't a "hard" nor a "fun" thing. It's a lame ass death that makes you replay the beginning part of the stage again and artificially continue onward.

If something looks bad, by the way, take it out. I mean that visually. For instance, in a moving (ugh) stage, there is a spot where the  ground kind of goes up like steps, and what happens below it? The lava has the same pattern! But boy oh boy does that look stupid. Solid, square, lava steps. Have you seen that in Mario? I haven't. You gotta look at things and decide if it looks professional or not, or else it comes across a just a kid editing a game thinking to himself how "cool" and "original" he is being.

The GLITCHES were some of the worst. I watched a friend of mine midway through a level hit a row of ? boxes, then suddenly bam, level over. He beat it somehow. Course Clear. Meanwhile, I grabbed a flag pole and beat a level in the Galaxy themed ones, only to have the gravity switch and send my character flying off the top of the screen to DIE making me replay it AGAIN. The gravity thing, while a neat idea, was poorly executed and you hardly had any idea if it was going to work or not. Same with Yoshi. Neat, but felt forced. Doesn't even have an animation for going down pipes, and over all just seemed clunky sometimes. Also, he barely runs away.  The dinosaurs that get crushed on the first jump had a tendency to walk backwards after being hit, which always looked goofy. It needs a lot more play testing to iron this stuff out. Bowser Jr fight where he chucks shells at you? Half the time, he can just hit himself with them.

Speaking of the bosses, jeez. One, why can you jump on Bowser? Ruins the fight. Two, the fight shouldn't be like paused until you are in his damn face. Three, again, GLITCHES. I had a time where I hit the switch to drop the bridge, Bowser, not giving two fucks, jumps over to me tossing hammers and fire, and what can I do? Nothing. Die. Because he was able to do that. Because the scripting there is terrible. It doesn't even pause the screen or anything, you can still walk off the ledge after you kill him (that is if he doesn't kamikaze you first.) The Wart battle is suddenly this weird step up in difficulty, until you realize you can just hug the left corner and jump straight up and wait for the shy guy to walk to you. The weird ... big ... boo fight. WHY? WHY have that if you CAN'T DIE? You make me do a fight where I HAVE to freeze a dry bones and awkwardly kick it into the enemy (when keep in mind that there is almost NO ROOM to do this effectively) but at the same time you supply UNLIMITED suits! Where is there challenge? This took longer than it should have only because of getting stuck in the suit on/suit off animation when it kept coming up the pipe and I was on the damn ghost. You're invincible in that fight. It's just dumb waiting. Waiting for a really dumb opening, but if you get hit? Who cares? FREE SUIT. And why does the little boo it's with not get scared when you look at it? At least that would keep the two SEMI separated as opposed to being hand in hand. The next boo/bowser jr fight was also really easy, and the sprite was ... bad. It also looked poorly drawn. Going back to that one where Bowser Jr throws shells at you and drops fire pillars, in between each hit, he seemingly drops random bob-ombs down. There is no pattern to this, meaning there is NO safe spot to be, because sometimes you will be on the left side and they will ALL fall there, trapping you, can't do anything, just ... die.

Speaking of bob-ombs, there is part of a stage built entirely of material where they can destroy it by blowing up. The whole stage is destructable and they are EVERYWHERE. So they can just blow the entire stage apart. Does anyone need to say why that's bad? Or a poor choice of idea? Sure, if you want them to blow up PARTS of the stage, sure, okay, I guess, but don't build entire sections out of desctructable blocks.

Other things: Why have ghost houses in Mario 1 and 2 themed worlds? One, the ghost houses with the limited colorset of the NES just look ... bad. The boos are lame too. Why not use the actual Mario 3 boos and edit them accordingly? Why do boos relentlessly chase you, even while you stare directly at them? It just leads to getting trapped in certain areas sometimes. Why have a circle of boos hugging a ledge so hard, with a platform below it that you absolutely cannot see? Blind jumps are all over this game, and some of them, if you take them TOO far, you either die, OR pass up a check point because little did you know you were supposed to blind drop from the cliff.

The level design a lot of the times was just riddled with us (and viewers) questioning "why?" This is all I can actually say purely from memory, but if I had taken the time to write it all down as it was happening, or went back and watched the stream again, man ...

I will say this, the idea is really cool. It was a great idea, but poor execution. Maybe everyone was being too harsh, but I mean, over all it was just not well-received. It's probably better than a decent amount of hacks, but it still feels like a hack. It is still presented like a hack.

I feel pretty bad having such a large list of stuff here, but at the same time, I'm a pretty firm believer in constructive criticism. I hyped this up a lot before showing everybody, so maybe the expectation on mine, and their part was too much, but over all I won't say I HATED it. In fact, I'll probably still finish it, but it just felt so incomplete, and very amateur at certain parts.

So uuhh... Take of that what you will.

Eh, like you said, it's a large grey area regardless.  Which, in a way, is kind of amusing in the sense that to advertise for something you created, you literally have to turn a blind eye to the fact that everybody who is playing it, probably acquired it illegally to do so. (The ROM that is)

Anyway, gonna stream it toooooniiiiight with some pals. Should be a good time. I played a bit last night to test it out, runs pretty smooth, but gets some slow down if there is too much on the screen, in areas where you wouldn't expect it (the spot where you get the superstar underground in the first stage, for instance), but other than that, I look forward to seeing the rest of it

Stream SHOULD be live around 8:30 or 9:00 PM EST.

http://www.twitch,tv/battlebuddiesgaming

Hopefully we can do your hard work some justice and complete a fair chunk of it.

I do plan on still streaming this, tomorrow actually. But like, it's not that they are "difficult", it's just tedious because regardless of how you look at it, editing the game is technically "illegal" anyway, so... might as well just throw the ROM up like all the other millions of video game hacks out there.

Kulock's comment. Oh man.