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.
Bridge tiles are stock Mario 3. So you couldn't jump through them there either.
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.
I'll give you the stuck Cheep-Cheep, but placement in general can be unpredictable, depending how fast you're moving or how quickly you're killing things. World 1 being SMB1 levels was mostly open space, so there was the greatest chance of a lot of clutter if you're not just slaughtering things. Slow down, eh. There's only so much I can do in certain situations. I pushed SMB3 harder than it was meant to go. It would have required some pretty intensive rewrites of core engine code to eke out a few more CPU cycles.
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.
World 3 is hit or miss with people. Some find it spooky / weird, others find it grating. But that was software manipulation of the frequency table, so it's understood. The rest of the music in general is well-received by 99% of everyone else, so I can't agree with you otherwise.
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.
Eh, again. You're the first of anyone I've heard complain this much about it. Music in SMB3 is a chore, so it takes a lot to convert anything into it. It also tends to take a
lot of space in NES terms. So with those two things in mind, I wasn't going to do 10 CDs worth of Mario music. I had to be selective, and chose to only make new music occasionally to enhance a particular theme. Otherwise I considered the music generic and reusable, not unlike what Mario 3 did. Also I think you're missing a partial point -- this is meant to be Mario 3 acting like other games, not being other games. I still wanted it to look/sound/act like Mario 3 at first glance.
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.
Obviously not all of this is perfect, but I'm just sourcing the material. Mario 2 had at least a couple times where this was a mechanic, most likely via Autobomb. Most people found this to be a surprising mechanic that required a bit of thought on the player's part to "think outside the Mario 3 box."
Levels being inconsistent, well, what can I say? Most games are built with a team, I'm one man. There are levels I liked how they turned out, and there were ones I would have rather redone. But after I was rounding year 2 on this project, I didn't really have time to rewrite a lot of material if I wanted it to ever get released. In any case, I've noted a few particular problem areas, but you're still definitely the largest scale complaint I've had for this, ever.
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.
Each pipe raise takes maybe 2 seconds? I'm also again just taking from source material -- this is based on how it works in Paper Mario. There's also a technical reason -- the way NES scroll planes work and the way SMB3 is using them, if the pipe is not wholly on the screen, there's lots of complication to make sure it doesn't write an 8x8 character pattern in the wrong place (wrap-around.) Given I was trying to reuse as much stock code as I could this mean the pipe had to be entirely on the screen to complete the animation. I couldn't really trust a player running around or else it might have puked bad graphics. That happens enough due to the scrolling-sliver glitch that pops up once in a while.
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.
World 6, very specific example, bad job on my part. That one consistently confuses everyone. I wasn't going for hard, it was simply a poor choice.
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.
Again, you're griping about stock Mario 3 behavior. You could do this same death in stock Mario 3's Ice World IIRC.
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.
Yeah, lame representation of what happens in Super Mario World. But Mario 3 didn't have sloped lava tiles, and honestly in the tile set you're talking about (Underground), there really isn't room to add a lot of new tiles, nor is there graphics space for a lot of new animated patterns. So the overall effort would exceed sensible design in this case.
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.
Noted bug. It never came up in my testing (which included my non-technical and out-of-band sister playing it innocently), nor did it come out during the month-long "beta" period when I sicced the Internet upon it. I didn't see it until other people played it post-release. Again, major companies have the benefit of a dedicated QA crew who just manage to find such things.
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.
It's a wedged in mechanic, and not without its issues. I've never seen the flag pole one, however. Again I blame trying to make SMB3 do lots of things it simply isn't designed to do. The gravity was implemented as a wide invisible object, and that its effect range. If you manage to slip outside of it, well, bye. But SMB3 didn't have way to define a "field", so I did the best I could. I only know of one level where something overtly unfair can happen. Otherwise casual players don't seem to have an issue.
Same with Yoshi. Neat, but felt forced. Doesn't even have an animation for going down pipes, and over all just seemed clunky sometimes.
The way pipes were done in SMB3 was using a hardware trick, where a 16x16 sprite was placed in "front" of the player "behind" the background tiles. It's actually an NES PPU rendering quirk. The problem is that Mario+Yoshi is a wide, somewhat complex sprite, and utilizing this trick was no longer straightforward. This again becomes a major rewrite of core, or we just bypass the animation completely. Again, noting I'm a one man team who spent years working on this including the original disassembly, I don't think this is worthwhile to nitpick so harshly.
Also, he barely runs away.
I'm pretty sure he runs away similarly to SMW. It's not like he's meant to be hard to catch.
The dinosaurs that get crushed on the first jump had a tendency to walk backwards after being hit, which always looked goofy.
I've seen that. Minor issue.
It needs a lot more play testing to iron this stuff out.
Again, see note about dedicated QA teams vs. one man...
Bowser Jr fight where he chucks shells at you? Half the time, he can just hit himself with them.
I've only ever see this happen once, and I've watched about 5 different full playthrough videos done by unrelated people. I guess you were just lucky. Honestly that battle can be a pain, so I don't know why you're complaining about an advantage.
Speaking of the bosses, jeez. One, why can you jump on Bowser? Ruins the fight.
Stock Mario 3 behavior. But see note about this is Mario 3 acting like another game, not being another game.
Two, the fight shouldn't be like paused until you are in his damn face.
Bad object placement, last castle. Probably because I redid that arena to actually take away an annoying and unfair arena that was present in the 2-World demo.
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.)
Bowser's code is
mostly stock SMB3, so he does do some unfair things. It actually used to be worse. But that's what I get for retrofitting instead of re-engineering the boss.
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.
Given I wasn't trying to be like most hacks and just be stupidly difficult, why are you complaining about an advantage??
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.
The boss is a bit quirky and anti-pattern for Mario. I've got nothing else much to say, it probably should have been done differently. The problem really amounted to I was trying to do SMW style Big Boo but removed the Ice Blocks in favor of the Penguin Suit functionality. So that's what I came up with. Sorry it doesn't jive with you at all.
And why does the little boo it's with not get scared when you look at it?
That's definitely a bug, and one that somehow I forgot to note. (Anti-scare behavior is introduced by the darkness in that world, and it's stuck on for some reason.) Most people just seemed to assume that little Boos weren't scared in the presence of Big Boo and took it in stride, so it just sort of fell off the radar.
The next boo/bowser jr fight was also really easy, and the sprite was ... bad. It also looked poorly drawn.
I didn't think it was THAT bad, but certainly a bit dodgy. But hey, I'm one man, no dedicated art team. My brain's in the code, not the pixels. The community is free to patch and enhance this as they see fit, but I'll bet no one ever does.
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.
Not exactly. While it's true they are random, there's also a timing to it. In general you need to move to where bombs were instead of remaining where they are. It is a bit of luck and a dashing of unfairness, so, again, could have been done better. But there's also only two cycles of it, and you are sort of meant to take hits occasionally in a Mario game.
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.
This is in one part, the World 2 Airship, and it's done right before the pipe to the final room. All you have to do is move quickly and you're fine. It's meant to instill a touch of panic, but I don't think it's as bad as you're saying. There's another stage where they can take out a bridge, but again, it's not an "entire stage." You're exaggerating.
Other things: Why have ghost houses in Mario 1 and 2 themed worlds?
Because the Not-Ghost House in World 3 wouldn't have been funny otherwise.
But seriously, this isn't meant to be "I'm playing Mario 1/2", this is "This is SMB3, sort of themed like Mario 1/2, and other stuff in general is going on."
One, the ghost houses with the limited colorset of the NES just look ... bad.
Given you have a 16 color palette to work with for BG tiles, any tile is only limited to 4 colors in a quarter, 4 are used by the status bar, 4 are used by common blocks (e.g. [?] blocks), and 4 are used by other common blocks (e.g. pipes) ... I honestly don't think it's all that bad.
The boos are lame too. Why not use the actual Mario 3 boos and edit them accordingly?
Not sure what you mean? They are modernized to how they look in almost every game after SMB3. SMB3 was the only one to have them with a "spooky ghost face", they got goofy and tongue-y after that. They were slowed down because SMB3 Boos were aggravatingly fast and nasty.
Why do boos relentlessly chase you, even while you stare directly at them?
Should only be in a level that features darkness (exception of the Big Boo boss bug), and you're warned about this in the Princess letter from World 2. If it's happening anywhere else, that's a new bug. They otherwise behave using mostly identical code, so I'm not sure if you're just sort of complaining about something Mario 3 did "wrong."
Why have a circle of boos hugging a ledge so hard, with a platform below it that you absolutely cannot see?
Not sure what you mean, you might have to point me to the area. Otherwise, the circles were definitely a large hack, and their biggest problem was that they tend to appear partially on-screen. But then, they're larger than any typical Mario 3 object, and the engine doesn't really support them completely right.
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.
I tried to be careful about this, and indicated otherwise blind jumps by coin paths. I do apologize if there are any that are completely unmarked with no fair way to see ahead, that would be a design flaw.
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.
And it IS a hack. Admittedly a large scale and penetrating one, but at the end of the day, it's still the Mario 3 engine trying to keep up.
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.
The truth of all of this is, you're the first and only outright scathing review I've seen. You didn't seem to find one positive note and just tried to throw in the "it's a neat idea, but poorly executed" line. Not saying all of your criticisms are unfair or unwarranted, but I'm suspect of how well you remember what NES games even are.
I did strive to try to make 3Mix a ramped difficulty project. All too often little baby hackers come along and build ridiculously hard and unfair levels, often that require you to take advantage of glitches rather than be straightforward. I like to think I'm not at that extreme. I know it's not perfect and I'll admit I can judge any of my levels as "Just what I wanted", "Okay but didn't really work", or "That really kind of sucked but I don't know how else to do it." And there are levels I outright deleted because they really, really didn't work. So I tried my best, but I know it's all going to come from a fairly limited perspective. But then again, that's what the "beta" period was for, and I mostly got gameplay bug complaints, not general design complaints.
Complaining about 3Mix not acting exactly like one of its target games isn't fair, if only because this wasn't an attempt to make "Mario 1 with Mario 3" or something like that. It was more like "If Mario 3 wanted to present a Mario 1 theme in a casual manner..." The whole thing was like this. It was still supposed to be if you walked passed it with a peripheral glance, you'd think it was Mario 3, not the target game. It's more of an extension rather than a full out possession.
Bugs are fair game for complaints, and I have nothing against that. I've kept a decent list since release of behaviors noted in other people's play-throughs. I'm sorry it's not perfect, but I've not once seen a play-through where they couldn't succeed reasonably. Again, we're up against several obstacles that I'd like to think you at least realize:
1) SMB3 was not meant to do a lot of what it's doing. This is someone who learned the code base and is forcing it to behave weirdly. It suffers because of this. Surely I could have just taken an off-the-shelf platformer creator and made a Mario fangame, but this is the SMB3 engine being made to do things like other Mario titles. It's not perfect and I doubt it's ever going to be. But from a technical perspective, most people find it impressive.
2) I'm one man. I played through the game something like 3 times fully, and once with my sister acting as player. A lot of bugs and unfair situations were found. Beta period came and went, more bugs and unfair situations were found. There was an honest effort to get it to a reasonable level. But I'm still one man. And I'm not getting a dime from any of this, so it's what I do in addition to being a functional member of society working 40+ hours a week. That doesn't excuse everything I failed on but I hope it awards a little sympathy.
3) I'm not an artist. Graphics are what they are. I didn't make most of anything in this game. What I couldn't steal from MFGG I got my younger brother to do on his own time, again while he worked his own job in his own life. Everything has to fit in the limited color space and capability of the NES. Sure some of it is going to be kind of ugly, but what can you expect by taking graphics from superior platforms and retrofitting them?
4) Music. World 3 doing the inverse music scales I agree was quirky and it doesn't work for everyone. I thought it was a neat effect, but hey, that's an opinion. Music that I actually retrofitted from other titles however has been to date universally received. It's not ever going to be perfect, but again, we're usually taking from superior platforms and trying to make do with the very, very few notes stock NES hardware can actually output. I also elected to use SMB3's stock sound engine and music format, which was probably a mistake, and limits the sound to what SMB3 was ever able to do. But even if I didn't, you have two square wave channels, one triangle wave, a noise channel, and the 4-bit DMC. The first four can be used by sound effects at any time and override the music. Nothing can be done about that because that's all the hardware can do. The DMC is limited since it can only source from a particular range of memory, and SMB3 was not designed to use it for more than basic percussion noises.
I don't really want to say "I've seen about 5 news articles written praising this thing besides tons of YouTube comments and other emails that had more praise than complaints", but, yeah. I think I would have been more invested in your review here if you could have at least found something positive about your experience. But I'm thinking you don't really know what an NES game is like, or what NES SMB3 is like, or you've forgotten somehow. I also don't think you saw what my vision was, which was just to make Mario 3 act like other games, not be other games. And finally there's a lot of quirks that just come standard with Mario 3, which was to some extent, a bloated and buggy game all by itself. Slow down / lag happened in Mario 3 just the same as 3Mix, it's just somewhat aggravated, and sometimes I think situational given that I'm making Mario 3 do things outside of its design.
Anyway, your legit bugs are noted, some of your gameplay complaints seem like they just don't fit my artistic vision, and I'm sorry it was overall a bad experience for you. I guess I can't win 'em all. I'm still personally happy with how it came out.
