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Game Reviewed Bowsers's nightmare, by Wladisimo
Review Author Willsaber
Created Dec 18 2015, 3:52 AM

General Commentary and Game Overview
"Bowser's nightmare" is the result of an artist making art nobody dares to use, and takes it upon himself to make it shown. Unfortunately, though the sprites had mixed reception at the time of their creation, they don't hold up well, and this game is of equal quality and design.

The first thing that appears when the game is opened is the horrendous title screen. First of all, the Super Mario Bros. Mario sprite is used here, when custom Mario sprites are used throughout the remaining entirety of the game. There is a "Game A" drawn onto the screen (in Comic Sans), but it serves no purpose. You don't click on it to start the game, and it has no real function. For that matter, you are not told anywhere how you enter the main game. It's a waste of space which have been used for something helpful.
 
Pros - I appreciate the death sound of a Mario. It's a fun reference, has the perfect speed and pitch, and doesn't get annoying.
- Some interesting ideas
 
Cons - The title screen in a mess
- The main game screen is a mess
- The game over screen is a mess
- Unpolished game design
- Difficulty curve is much to slow for the interest I had in the game
- No pause button
- Poor choice of sounds overall
- The music is absolutely terrible
- The graphics are terrible
- Inconsistent shading style
- Title screen is very poorly designed both aesthetically and functionally
- Far too many default Gamemaker Legacy features are used
- Many more
 
Impressions
Gameplay
2 / 10
 The core gameplay revolves around various Marios running across the screen. When an area is clicked, Bowser shoots fire directly at it, from a supposedly first-person perspective. In the top-left corner, there is a health bar (drawn using Gamemaker's default health drawing system), and for every 250 points you score, you get an extra life.

Lives are used to reset the health bar to its maximum capacity when emptied. Health is lost when a Mario reaches the opposite end of the screen from where he starts.

I'll go on a tangent here, and explain why this doesn't make sense; it is not demonstrated, through implicated or explanation, why Bowser is being hurt. We could assume that the Marios who are singing are gradually harming him, but this does not explain why they only inflict damage when they reach a certain area. Should they not be passively inflicting damage? For that matter, why is the singing still occuring when no Marios are on the screen? The only explanation for this is that, in real-space, they do not spawn on the side of the screen, but rather, traverse there, in which case they should still be deadly no matter where they are.

The Marios have some clever movement patterns that are directly affected by the terrain, but the terrain is not dynamic which makes the Marios' movement much too predictable, and their physics and jumping is extremely rigid, giving off a lot of under-polished vibes.

When a Mario is hit, if it is Super Mario, it becomes Small Mario. If it is already Small Mario, it becomes dead, and flies in a randomly generated direction. This is a nice reference to how Mario typically dies in the main-series sidescrollers, but the way it was executed just comes off as lazy.

F4 and F8 retain their full-screen and pausing functionality they are given by default in Gamemaker, but I feel like the game would benefit much more from having custom key-bindings for those two functions.

When Bowser runs out of health, a game over screen pops up which demonstrates your high-score, and you can then return to the title screen.

There are a couple variants of Mario, however the difficulty scales so slowly relative to the pace that it's very difficult to maintain interest long enough to experience them.
 
Graphics
1 / 10
 The graphics are terrible. Mario looks like a stick figure (not in the good way), all of the Drawn graphics use default Gamemaker systems, Comic Sans is the only font used, and the game's icon is in a very different graphical line than the in-game art.

The shading used in any given sprite is either:
A) Non-existent
B) Dithering
C) 8-bit pillow shading
D) A jarring mix of B and C
 
Sound
2 / 10
 As stated in the funniest review of a fangame I ever read, "Not Very Much".

In all seriousness, though, the music is terrible. Supposedly it is being sung by the many Marios, but it is a Forest Mushrooms rendition sped up, and eventually played backwards. It is incredibly annoying, and is painful to listen to, not to mention its extremely rough looping.

There are some cool sound effects, like the Marios' death sound, but there are very sounds few to be found, and Bowser's breath sound effect is both much too quiet, and doesn't sound like fire breath.
 
Replay
1 / 10
 There is one high-score saved, but there's no point in replaying the game once you've experienced the little it has to offer. The game is not engaging, very repetitive, is both graphically and audibly bad, and has no identity.
 
Final Words
2 / 10
 The nightmare is that it can only be closed with the Task Manager.
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