MFGG - Mario Fan Games Galaxy

Review Information

Game Reviewed	Somari 2, by Ryan Silberman
Review Author	DaggerHog
Created	Nov 2 2015, 10:37 AM

General Commentary and Game Overview

Somari 2 is a fanmade sequel to the very popular and very quality NES hack Somari the Adventurer. It uses one o' them Sonic Game Maker engines as its basis and boasts hand-drawn levels.

I played this back when it was still being worked on and pointed out a few issues I had with the game. Issues that actually impacted one's experience and impression of the game.

Did SMBMM ever fix these issues? Well, why don't we move into the meat of the review and find out.

Pros	+ The music sounds alright I suppose + That moon looked quite nice
Cons	- Where do I even begin?

Impressions

Gameplay 1 / 10	Did I say he used an engine as a basis? Well, I meant to say he just took the engine, changed the player sprites, tossed together some MSPaint levels and enemies and booted it out the door. First off, Somari's pretty damn slippery. He goes from zero to top speed pretty quickly but takes a bit to slow down. This makes platforming difficult and more than likely makes you fall and die. You keep wrestling with the controls so you don't fall or take damage for most of the game. Or you hold down as you speed along and win. That second one is pretty dangerous and risks losing a life though, so I don't recommend it. It doesn't help that Somari runs so close to the right side of the screen...you know, the direction you need to go to progress! This makes it very difficult to see what's coming ahead and you WILL crash into enemies or fall into pits that you couldn't react to in time. Challenging? No. Frustrating? Very much so. Level design itself is a total disaster. Checkpoints and warning signs are placed in locations where danger is immediately ahead. Like, not even one second ahead. There are awkward curves and pits that you gotta spin dash out of, and everything's just a mess. The screen size is pretty small, so you can't really see if going down will be safe or rob you of a life. There's no way to scroll the camera down either. I've tried. You just have to hope for the best whenever you go down, and that's a pretty big problem. Enemies are a hit-or-miss. You either destroy them or they hurt you. They're also very uninspired, lifeless and boring. They move left and right and SOMETIMES shoot if they're feeling bold! There's little variety too; the first zone pretty much shows you most of the enemies you'll be contending with for the rest of this game. Their placement is pretty dumb, too, they just happen to be standing in your way in a nice patch of land you're speeding on, and if you're not rolling, you're getting hit. That's cheap, especially considering the aforementioned player-to-screen position. All this really boils down to the fact that SMBMM really didn't change or fix anything from years ago; he simply added stuff to make it more complete and submitted it. So, he put out a demo so folks can tell him what they found wrong with it, but he didn't do anything with this information and decided to kick it out the door without making any modifications whatsoever to the core game or engine. Long story short, the issues from the demo years ago are still here and no effort was made to fix them. Also the boss still sucks and is unchanged from the demo. A+ work, friend!
Graphics 2 / 10	Baaaaaaaaad. When SMBMM said he drew his own levels he sure wasn't lying. Just about all the graphics in the game look awful, including the edited HUD and Somari sprites. The enemies are badly designed, the levels themselves were freehanded in MSPaint, complete with jagged, awkward lines and curves everywhere. This game isn't eye candy, I'll tell you that. Unique, yes, but a visual travesty. The colors just hurt my eyes and because this game forces fullscreen, it wasn't fun to stare at this game for extended periods of time. I'm not lying when I say the moon in Cheese Valley is the best graphic there is in the entire game.
Sound 3 / 10	Musically, the game's fine. I don't have a problem with any of the tunes in the game besides that they're pretty forgettable. They're there but at least they don't hurt my ears. Sound wise, it's pretty mediocre. It just sounds like SMBMM ran SFXR/BFXR and used whatever randomly generated sound it made for X event without any modifications whatsoever. That's pretty lazy!
Replay 1 / 10	If you want to subject yourself to this game's problems once more, I don't see why not. I personally wouldn't touch this game again and can't recommend it to anyone else either.

Final Words

I don't see why you bothered to complete this.

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Comments

	MegaCDFan235 Nov 14 2015, 3:29 AM
What is SMBMM, and what is SFXR/BFXR?


	DaggerHog Nov 20 2015, 3:50 AM
SMBMM is the oldish username of this developer, and SFXR/BFXR is software used to make sound effects, typically for games.

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