Review Information
Game Reviewed Super Mario Starlight, by Mike Miyamoto
Review Author Vitiman
Created Aug 12 2016, 9:07 PM

General Commentary and Game Overview
There's an old saying in game design, "half of a game's quality is in its polish". So what happens when a game tries oh so hard to be polished, but fails miserably?

The result would probably be Super Mario Starlight - or an approximation thereof.
 
Pros It... tries?
The engine is somewhat functional
 
Cons Lousy, D&D "coding" that plagues most early Game Maker games
Astonishingly bad visual "effects" and polish
The fact that I had to put effects and coding in quotations to denote how poorly done they are speaks for itself
 
Impressions
Gameplay
3 / 10
There's nothing outright remarkable about Super Mario Starlight. It's a game that tries to do what most fangames nowadays try to do: be this big showcase of visual prowess and inventive gameplay that would rival Nintendo's own, but usually fall short and/or be so wildly uncreative that you have to wonder to yourself what the point even was in doing this.

Unfortunately for Starlight, it's an incredible example of how overt focus and attention on polish can crash and burn for the game. There was clearly a ton of effort in making this LOOK good, but the worst part? It doesn't even pay off! See the "Graphics" section for more on that.

The engine itself is mediocrity. Nothing offensively bad for the most part, minus a complete lack of optimization (which the game's description suggests might be the fault of the visual effects - yeah right) which tends to crop up because the game doesn't know when to not repeat an action. You'll accidentally make a dialogue box pop up multiple times in a row and hear Mario's death sound 50 times over every single time because there's nothing stopping it from happening. In layman's terms, nothing's telling it to "quit it after the first time" and as such it just loops the action over and over.

The gameplay itself was so incredibly lacking, it wasn't even really funny. Apparently to beat any given level you have to collect all the red coins, which proved more frustrating each time I attempted it as it became a relay race of getting back to where I was and then having the game's jumpy and uncontrollable physics be my demise every single time.

Blegh.
 
Graphics
1 / 10
Wow. It's almost embarrassing how bad this can get in this department. Nevermind the horrific clash between lousy customs and weird "semi-realistic" palette edits, the BACKGROUNDS are some of the most deplorable graphics I've ever seen in a fangame.

To make matters worse, they scroll at the wrong speed! It's obvious he was trying to do a parallax effect but since the background moves faster than you do, it just becomes disorienting and awful.
 
Sound
5 / 10
Eh, nothing too special. Aside from Mario's death sound repeating a million times each time due to a programming oversight, the music and sounds are just... there. Nothing you wouldn't see in a fangame from this era, so you know.
 
Replay
1 / 10
The only replay value I could see in this is to show someone that it exists. The ever-relying crutch on visual expertise that isn't even well done is a sight to behold, I tell you what.
 
Final Words
2 / 10
A poorly made fangame that tries to get away with its shoddy programming and game design with "incredible" and "flashy" visual effects. Unfortunately, it just comes across as one giant, moving eyesore.

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