MFGG - Mario Fan Games Galaxy

Review Information

Game Reviewed	Super Hammer Bros., by Delmore
Review Author	Black Squirrel
Created	Aug 31 2008, 9:08 PM

General Commentary and Game Overview

If you're a regular reader of my exciting and well written reviews you might notice a trend. First off, I hate games with little or no originality. Standard SMB3 clones will never get the 10/10 mark. Secondly, I hate Mario music. Well okay, I don't HATE it as such, but I'll never give a game a high score in the sound category if it's chock-a-block with crappy Mario MIDIs. I don't like games which I'm likely to forget for one reason or another. Basically, my 10s out of 10s don't come cheap.

I think the only thing unoriginal about Super Hammer Bros. is it's name. This is a VERY good fangame.

Pros	-Originality -Online high scores -Quality
Cons	-Erm... well I suppose some more gameplay options wouldn't hurt, but for once I'm actually struggling here.

Impressions

Gameplay 10 / 10	So the basic principle is you're a Hammer Bro, and the world decides it wants to kill you one day. And as such all your posse try and cause you damage for no reason. Goombas run at you, Piranha Plants bite at you, Lakitus throw stuff at you etc. Your job is to fight back, with hammers. You can run around and jump to avoid things, and you hold down control to charge your "throw meter". Charge it for a few seconds and you can fire straight in front of you. Don't charge it at all and you have a bigger vertical component allowing you to hit things above, with the expense of limited horizontal range and speed. You need to use both methods to survive. Your damage meter takes damage when you're hit and you can recharge it with coins. And they say money doesn't make you feel better. There's not a lot to say here really. It's a minigame, it works perfectly, your final score is totalled after you die and you can submit it to an online high score list where you can see that you suck in comparison to others. It's really hard to fault gameplay here.
Graphics 9 / 10	But you won't care about that. It's not the big selling point. Yes it's good, but it's not the most innovative thing ever created on the planet. It just delievers the two things I'm most impressed with, the first being graphics. Last time I checked Delmore was a pixel artist. And a good one at that. It's not all his work in this game, but none of it (bar the NSMB coin and maybe some other minor things) is from a Mario game. This is worth noting. Enemies are custom (Castor's I believe), the level's background is from the SNES game "Sutte Hakkun" and there's various other bits and bobs from other places, as well as Delmore's own work. But don't worry, it all matches seemlessly. My 10s for this category usually come from completely custom stuff, but it still ranks very highly because the stuff isn't used that much (yet). Another good example of how fangames SHOULD be made. Only graphical flaw I could really find is the bad tiling on the control setup screen. But that doesn't affect gameplay.
Sound 10 / 10	Now for sound. My god. It couldn't be more "Mario" if it tried, BUT IT WORKS. High quality music, nice sound effects etc. It's all fantastic. The main level uses music from Sutte Hakkun too (which by the way, is a really good game and probably deserved to be ported outside of Japan). I'm a fan of originality, this boasts the most out of all four sections in this review, I'm just going to give it a 10 and leave it at that.
Replay 8 / 10	Replay value is good too. It's a minigame, and most minigames are only played once or twice before they're thrown aside, no matter how good they are. But this one has online high scores, and that's pretty much the definition of perfection as far as minigame replay value is concerned. But there are still plenty of things that could be added to make it a better experience worth coming back to. Like a change of scenery. Like MORE scenery. Little things like that. And even though it's got online high scores... it's still a minigame and it still won't keep you interested a huge amount of time.

Final Words

It's good. One of the highest ranking minigames on site, I'm sure of it.

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