MFGG - Mario Fan Games Galaxy

Review Information

Game Reviewed	N/A, by N/A
Review Author	Cap'n Coconuts
Created	Sep 9 2015, 12:43 AM

General Commentary and Game Overview

Super Mario Brothers 2015 is a game which, on the surface, seems to be a clone of the first Super Mario Bros. Why someone would clone the dated and primitive SMB1 is anyone's guess.

But not only is it a clone of SMB1, it is also a complete and utter failure. The creator claims that this game's engine is very similar to the original; after playing it, I am inclined only to believe that he lied.

Pros	+ ... What IS the point of playing this, anyway? Super Mario Bros. for the NES is superior to it in just about every way. About the only thing it can do that SMB1 can't is saving progress.
Cons	- This game doesn't seem to be optimized at all, so many players may experience loads of loading and choppy framerate. - It's riddled with bugs. - It's a clone--not much fresh content to see here. - On some computers, the game will fail before you can even start playing--or maybe it'll wait a while before giving you memory access violations.

Impressions

Gameplay 1 / 10	If I'm interpreting "made from scratch" properly, it seems that the game was made with a typical programming language like C++ instead of a game engine like Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion. Of course, someone could technically say the same for a Game Maker game that wasn't made with the Hello Mario Engine. Nonetheless, I believe it was made from scratch simply because not even legacy Game Maker in all its interpreted GML glory could screw up performance so badly and so easily. Nope, this is definitely a computer science hack job. At game start, you choose whether you want the game to be in a window or in fullscreen mode. If your computer's specs are similar to mine, you can expect a wait time of 15 seconds if you choose to play in a window, or over 30 seconds if you choose to play with a full screen. During this time, the game is loading resources into memory. Thirty years ago, Super Mario Bros. did not need to spend half a minute loading data. Alas, here we are in 2015 with these fancy programming languages and superior hardware, and dem0 needs half a minute to load a Super Mario Bros. clone. I've pointed some people in the unofficial Skype chat to this game. Some can't get it to run at all, some have their own issues playing the game, and some with very good hardware aren't being plagued by ridiculous loading times. This suggests that dem0 himself had the perfect gaming PC and didn't do any optimization at all. Yup, definitely a computer science hack job. Level design is okay. I mean, there's not a lot to expect from an SMB1 clone. Nonetheless, the claim that the engine is similar to SMB1 is false. SMB1 didn't take half a minute to load, and SMB1 didn't have platforming physics reminiscent of an early beta of Hello Engine 3, but SMB2015 sure does! SMB2015 is riddled with glitches. I'm unable to open ? blocks unless I'm directly below them--hitting the bottom corners doesn't work. I can enter the pipe in level 2 from the side. One of my Skype buddies was able to run THROUGH a Goomba unharmed and died when he simply stood still, allowing the Goomba to touch him. I was on the left edge of a platform, tried to move to the right, and somehow slipped off the left edge and died. The creator acknowledges the game is riddled with bugs, but apparently doesn't have the sense to wait until his game is half-stable before submitting it. As we all know, submitting garbage will so obviously get you glowing reviews and a respectable reputation, right? One of my Skype buddies was unable to run it in Windows 8.1--the game simply displayed one frame and stopped. There's also one person in the comments who couldn't run the game, which is awfully coincidental. Whether the game just hates Windows 8.x or not is anyone's guess. As for me, I had a slightly different game-breaking problem. I was never able to finish level 2, thanks to a wonderful little message insisting there was a memory access violation. The creator acknowledges this, too, but didn't have the sense to fix that either before submitting it. Apparently he thought blaming it on witchcraft in his info.txt file was a better idea: "Problem: "Memory access violation" Fix: No real fix. It's system specific error probably deriving from the obsolete DirectDraw platform, nothing can really be done for this. It appears on some systems more than on others so it's pretty much withcraft." Though to be fair, witchcraft seems to be as good an explanation as any for how this game was accepted on the mainsite.
Graphics 3 / 10	The game is 8-bit SMB1 theme. As SMB1 was made earlier in the NES's life, the graphics are nothing to write home about. Text, including the HUD, is displayed in an old Microsoft bitmap font, apparently because a classic 8-bit font was nowhere to be found. Since this game is horribly programmed, it can't seem to display at a decent FPS. Yet again, the game shows its inferiority to the NES game upon which it is based.
Sound 3 / 10	If you're going to make an 8-bit game, you should at the very least stick to 8-bit sounds. SMB 2015, however, defies common sense and elects to use Super Mario All-Stars sound effects--which, being sourced from a 16-bit SNES game, utterly fail to fit the game's presentation.
Replay 1 / 10	Now why should I ever play this game again? Ooh, perhaps I could time myself and see how far I can get without a yet another allegedly unfixable memory access violation! Hahahahaha NO.

Final Words

A shoddy, bug-ridden SMB1 clone that doesn't even work on some computers? No thanks.

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Comments

	craftersshaft Sep 12 2015, 2:13 PM
SMBDX can save progress, and pretty much every emulator can use save states.


	Cap'n Coconuts Sep 12 2015, 4:20 PM
Yes, that is true. However, vanilla NES Super Mario Bros. didn't. I guess it got accepted because it worked well enough for those quality control folks who got around to voting on it.

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