Review Information
Game Reviewed Super Mario Bros Attack of the Bloopers (SMB2011), by BuzzNBen
Review Author HylianDev
Created Jul 20 2014, 10:30 PM

General Commentary and Game Overview
Difficult level design meets bad physics and poor polish. Conceptually, it's a SMB game with a little bit of Paper Mario storytelling thrown in. Could have been done a lot better.
 
Pros - Interesting concept, though not the most original
- I'm a sucker for SMB games
- Level design is interesting, though it's not amazing
- There's a little bit of silly humor that made me chuckle
 
Cons - Hello Engine. Not necessarily that it uses the engine, but that the engine isn't very good. The physics are pretty bad.
- The game really lacks polish in some important areas
- You have to download the music. I chose not to.
 
Impressions
Gameplay
4 / 10
Hello's physics aren't very good. It doesn't feel like a Mario game, which often results in you making a silly mistake, like running off a platform or not jumping far enough.

As far as a lack of polish, it's obvious from the beginning. The buttons you use to answer the questions when you start a new game are ugly, and the buttons for the last question show up on the next textbox.

Then, there's the intro cutscene. It isn't skippable first of all, but since Ocarina of Time also has an unskippable intro cutscene -- and a longer one -- this can slide. But once it's over, the first time I played I had no idea that there was a boss battle with Bowser, so I died. There was no indication that you were suddenly in control. The second time I played it, I figured it out from pressing buttons to skip the text.

The reason I had to play the intro cutscene twice (which is when I figured out that it was playable) was because I set the game to autosave, and it didn't save after the cutscene. Another minor problem, but it's good service to your players to not make them watch that again.

The level design was fun, but quite difficult right from the start. The Hello physics really give you trouble. Plus, there's a bug with the text box: if you hold down the run button and hit the text box, then you're going to have to re-press the button after reading it, or you'll end up walking instead of running and not jumping far enough to clean the gap that's literally a tile away.

The difficulty in this game is way too high, though it wouldn't be so hard if there weren't unfair difficulty due to controls. This game is so hard in fact, that I actually never made it past the second level.
 
Graphics
6 / 10
The graphics are a mix of SMAS rips (some recolored) and customs. The customs are okay (not great), and the rips don't seem to clash all too badly, but they're not from the same game.

The first cutscene has some ugly problems. Characters simply disappear instead of walking away (I assume they were supposed to walk away? idk). The movement of the characters has a lot of issues like that; this goes right along with lacking polish.

There's a bit of a graphical glitch when you get in a horizontal pipe where you can see Mario behind it for a second. This is probably an issue with Hello Engine.
 
Sound
7 / 10
As far as sound effects, it's pretty decent. There are no sound effects for the text, though. The characters have voices which can be turned on and off, which is neat. If you turn it on, you'll hear Mario's signature failure yell every time you die.

A sound-based glitch that occurred was that, when the lightning flashed in the second level, it played the game over music. That was strange.

About the music, though -- you have to download it yourself. I opted out of this and played my own music while playing the game. I don't know how good the music is.
 
Replay
5 / 10
Would I play this again? Maybe to see what level 3 and beyond looks like if I were ever curious. But there are other SMB-copying games out there with better engines than this one.
 
Final Words
6 / 10
In conclusion, this game could have been a lot better had it not used the Hello engine, or had it included the music, or if the cutscenes had more effort put into them. It's definitely passable.

Comments
No comments have been left.
Pages: | Last Unread