ISRIERI'S PROFILE

ALBINO'S ARENAS

-The events that cause the platforms and lava to rise keep messing up. If you beat the fights quickly (as most will) it musses up the timing of the events and keep the platforms raised up instead of sinking back down, as I think they're supposed to do. So that's why the P-Switches keep falling in the lava.

-Therefore you're better off getting rid of those platforms and just having lava pits or something. Maybe on the walls? Or you could make the ninjis killable with a jump. I know that it makes the fights a bit too easy, but they were easy anyway.

-Which makes me think that trying to compensate by making the actual fights harder is the wrong idea. You were better off when you had shells to kick at the ninjis! It was more fun. Bad advice on my part.

-I think the better thing to do would be to make another section, and have short spurts of “regular” castle goodness. Just a corridor of tricky firebars maybe. But if you come up with anything better that's fine too. Have that part be like the “main” castle that the player enters and exits via doors from Section 2. And that can be how they progress from arena to arena. I want to make clear that the ninjis were a good idea and a lot of fun.

-This castle was less than a 1 for me at the moment. Unless you want the bump up the rating to a 2, you don't have to make the firebar corridors that long or hard. Just something to pose as a hazard.

-But something definitely needs to happen to up the ante here. Once that's all fixed up I'll declare the level READY TO GO unless more unforeseen complications arise.

DESERT PALACE

-You did well with this version! The level is really starting to shape up.

-Those boos are now a little tricky to get by if you want to nab those blue bricks. But I still think they're a little pointless at the moment. Easily fixed! Put a block at the start of the first corridor, and add some more goombas inside it so there are 9 of them. Get rid of the koopa at the start, otherwise you can just use his shell to kill the boos or goombas. Then, once the player uses the bricks to kill the boos, he can take one and toss it at the goombas to get a 1up!

-I'd also put a ? Block at the end of that corridor so that the brick hits it and makes a vine pop up. That seems to be the theme of your level: The vines. So play it up! If you put the ? Block on the floor, it means the player needs to use the brick block to make it come out.

-See what we've done there? There's 2 ways to do that first room now: You can either ignore the blue bricks and go through that corridor of goombas on your own, and have to deal with the koopas and pokeys by yourself. But if you take the time to get the bricks, you can score a 1up and have an easier time with the pokey! We've made it worth the player's while to go get the bricks.

-The second room looks much better now! You used the space more competently than before, and it's more interesting to look at and play through. Well done.

-I think the goombas up at the top aren't enough for that corridor, though. You ought to use pokeys instead. Just 3 or 4 high. Put those on the right side of the corridor going left. And have 1 or 2 koopas on the left side of the corridor. That way the player can either try his luck with the pokeys or get the koopa shells and make it easier for himself.

-Take out those coins above the venus plant in the sand. I know you did it so the player knows that a plant's in there. But they won't be going in the quicksand anyway. Savvy players might think that's a clue for a secret pipe or something.

-Take the Right border and shorten it so that there's only 3 tiles of wall showing on the right. Always remember to do that when you don't use part of a level anymore: Don't just fill in the tiles.

-If you want to, you could add a little extra something to the middle part of the room to make it a bit more interesting: Like a couple of blocks.




Kind of like that.


-You may be wondering why there's a P-Switch in there. You don't have to use a P-switch in this level, but I had an idea.

-The next room isn't good enough how you have it, because there's nothing there EXCEPT a wall you have to break with the bricks. The only reason it's there is to slow the player down, which is bad. You need to have something happen there. But it can work as long as there's something interesting going on. So I had 2 ideas:

1) With all the bricks up there, it would be awfully nice to have a P-Switch to turn them all into coins! But it would also mean they're too high up for the player to reach. You'd have to remodel the room and make them a little easier to get somehow, maybe also get rid of the vine in the big room and have platforms so the players can take the p-switch into the room with them. You could hide a 1up or spring in some bricks that the player needs to hit with a blue brick.
2) Or you could could make a space at the top of the ceiling and have pipes that shoot bombs down at the player. They'd have to break through the bricks first, so you have plenty of time to realize that they'll be raining on you if you don't hurry: Then it would be okay to make the player have to break through some walls with the bricks. But I still don't think you should put a 2-tile thick wall in their way: Just have two 1-tile thick walls instead. If you wanted to use this idea, you might have to make the room a little bigger (just half a screen) to get creative with it.

-Either way, you may want to move the checkpoint back to the start of the tower room. It wasn't a good idea to put it in the brick room because that means the player has to waste time going through those walls again every time they die. Not good.

-I'm not sure about the bomb that shoots out of the ground. It was kinda funny, but if you want to have something like that, you ought to put a pipe under it so the player knows there's something there. I'd take it out if you go with Option 2.

-The tower room is still pretty good! I would only change one thing: The last platform before the boss gets out of synch sometimes. So its barely possible to jump to it, and only at certain times. Make that last platform go in a circle, or anything else that makes it a bit shorter. That way it's easier to jump to.

-Still love that Mouser boss. Because falling = for-sure-death now, it's a little tougher than it was before. That's another good reason to move the checkpoint back to the tower: the level won't be as annoying to play through again.

-Other than that, I think the level is almost ready! My only other recommendation is what I said in my first review of it: It make your level look really good if you made the walls of the level into larger “block” pieces. I know it would take a long time to do, so I won't make you do it. But I only think it would probably take you an hour or so. Not as long as it took you to fix the level up!




You don't have to make everything into bricks. You can leave spaces in there.


-I can't think of much else to change, so once all that's fixed up, I declare the level READY.

FUNKLEN TOMB

-You really ought to get rid of that first 1up. No one will go for it.

-I took a really close look at the level in the editor this time. Because I wanted to find out where all the pipes went.

-I only just realized that you can stand on the thwomps. NO ONE WILL KNOW TO DO THAT. I'm not saying it's bad, but I'm just saying that, to most people, a resprite is just a resprite. I'll have you know that to get the hammer suit, I spin jumped off the thwomp. I'd like to see you try and do that! :P

-Therefore, although it's perfectly acceptable to be able to stand on them, I'd rather not have areas where the player needs to do so to progress. The first thwomp in Section 7 could do to be replaced by a piranha plant or something else.

-I also think that making Section 7 mandatory to beat the level is a bad move: This is a 4 for difficulty and by adding an additional room it becomes a tad too long. I would rework the warps so that this is an optional room people can find themselves by exploring. Stick a free 1up in there or something.

-You missed some shellkickers in Section 5. All of them; 1 space away from the shell.

-Other than that, I have no real problems with the level as of right now.


DR TOADLY'S APPEARANCE

-If you have the Mother Brain music for your entire level I instantly hate it. That I am biased against.

-When I said No Dr. Toadly levels I meant it. I don't know why you want to shoehorn in a stupid character like him so badly. But I don't dislike the level because he's in it: Sandflow Fortress was a level that looked great, played better, and had a lot of unique challenges for the player. This is a lot more boring because the challenges feel more arbitrary. Most levels have the player jump through hoops. But in a good level, the player won't ever feel like they're doing that because they're having fun. The level is no fun. I didn't have fun playing it.

-The tower section still isn't very good: That first jump is way too hard to make, and for the wrong reasons. When you take the level wrap into account, you only have one block to make the jump up. But the platform above you makes it a really annoying jump to execute. I learned from experience that if you want the player to make jumps off a wrap, you need to give them a lot of space to do it and make it easy to actually make the jump. Make it flow better, don't put a lot of obstacles at a jump the player can't see very well. I know that you can do better than that.

-Plus, an industrial level is kind of pushing it for what qualifies as a “castle” for me. But the boss is the worst part of the whole thing. The idea is a clever one, but it does a lot of things that bother me. It punishes you very badly for screwing up, which is very easy to do, and if you die you have to do that tower all over again and the tower isn't very good. Plus the spike guys that come out of the pipe will turn around if they bump into a bomb. So you can easily have a buildup of spinies. That should never happen. This level would have been much better off without a boss, which defeats the whole purpose of It, I think.

-Look, just trust me on this okay? First impressions are important. Most people will trust their gut feeling they get when they start the level up. No one likes levels with fan-fiction characters. If anyone played this level before Sandflow Fortress of Funklen Tomb, they would hate you and hate your other two levels. I don't want that to happen because your other two levels are very good. I rejected it because I don't think that this level is worth trying to change: The whole thing seems to based around the inevitable boss fight at the end. It's all buildup for Dr. Toadly. Therefore, the level never felt like the focus of the challenge. Instead, its just a thing you have to go through to get to the boss. There's a right way to do that, but it's not by making it difficult. And that isn't the focus of our event anyway. Save Dr. Toadly for RMN4.

PALACE OF FROZEN DAGGERS

-The way you placed the icicles underwater are a nice touch. The fish resprites are a good compromise.

-Is there a reason that you used the blue ! Blocks for a moving platform instead of using the regular kind of moving platform? If you did the latter and erased the events that move the blocks, it would cut down on the lag your level causes.

-There are still inconsistencies with what is slippery and what isn't: All the icy ground isn't slippery, but it ought to be! You have the icy ground under SM2 – Underground, and you have to manually press the Slippery button because they aren't preset by the engine to be flagged as such. Other tiles, the ones that are icy by default like the SMB3 ice blocks and the icy sizables, are already flagged as Slippery. Every surface that has ice on it ought to be slippery. I know you said you did this before, but when I played the level, everything was normal except the default icy tiles.

-The good news is, aside from the above, the level has no other problems. It's an amazing castle. Once you've touched up the tiles so all the ice is Slippery then I will Approve the castle.