I finally got some time to watch this! First of all, congratulations on finishing such an anticipated run! This must have been a lot of work, especially to plan out a route for how to tackle all (most) of the known glitches in the game. Overall, I really enjoyed it - even as a veteran of the game. Despite the intimidating watch time, I would recommend it, especially to anyone who doesn’t have much knowledge about smw as a speedgame. There’s plenty of surprises here, even to people who know the game well.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the concepts are stretched so thin that some of it can be a bit of a boring watch, and a tiny amount of it is even slightly annoying (I’ll elaborate below). I think there is a lot of room for improvement here. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 - it may have been hard to foresee these things when creating the run.
- The watch time - 3 hours is *way too long*. A lot of these bugs are showcased in smw96, which is less than half of the watch time, but I don’t think this run is twice as entertaining. (Definitely in some places, but mostly not.)
- It feels like the run is rushing to check everything off of a checklist rather than a conscious effort to make the run as interesting as possible. I suspect this is an intentional choice to showcase everything you could in a reasonable timeframe, but the run suffers as a result. It would be much nicer to pick a subset of the known bugs that are particularly interesting and can’t be seen in the other runs on the site, and show these off while naturally progressing through the game.
- There is *a lot* of time-wasting. Revisiting levels (sometimes up to 4 times!), backtracking within levels for little reason, pausing the game to show off 1F graphical glitches, shell juggling/getting 1-UPs from hopping on enemies, etc. None of these are inherently bad by themselves but after a while, it gets a little dry.
- Poor route planning - in a run about being as entertaining as possible, I was surprised to see how many water levels and autoscrollers were visited. To me these were the lowlights of the run, and some of the water levels were even entered multiple times. I couldn’t see any bugs in the water levels that couldn’t be done elsewhere, except the buoyancy glitch with a star.
- Over-reliance on Yoshi. I know that Yoshi is the root cause of a lot of glitches in this game, but it seemed like 95% of the run was with Yoshi! There were times when Yoshi was ditched and I was hoping for some small-only entertainment, but usually he was obtained immediately after.
- Minor annoyances - for me, the 30hz item box trick was used way too frequently. Once you’ve seen this once that should really be enough (and again, this is in the other runs on this site). The elephant in the room, however, is the mosaic effect that lasted for way too long. This was kind of hard to watch.
- I couldn’t figure out why the game was set to 2P mode - twice. I might have just been missing something really obvious. My first guess was the wrong warp that occurs, but I don’t think you need to be 2P for that? I couldn’t see anything Luigi-specific, either.
- Crashing - this is really subjective, but I don’t really like game crashes. The music and graphics when this happens is just really harsh. Luckily, I think there’s only two in this run (might be miscounting) so it didn’t bother me too much.
- Ending. Using what I assume is ACE to finish this run over a traditional Bowser fight feels like a bad punchline to a huge amount of buildup. There’s a lot of potential in the Bowser fight, too! What about using the Lakitu Cloud from reserve to mess with his timings? Or destroying the Bowling Balls with the cape slide? I’m sure there’s more things.
Sorry if I’m being nit-picky here. As I said before I did enjoy it overall, I just feel like the run had a lot of potential some of which was missed.
Overall level comments (mostly positive!)
- c1 - Hitting Iggy off screen was very nice, I forgot you could do this!
- tsa - Dying here, the safest level in the game, is a really good joke.
- dp3 (first visit) - Wow. This is my favourite level in the entire run. Spawning Koopas out of nowhere with the grey platform null spit was amazing. This is the first time this bug is in a run on this site, I think, and it looks great. The bonus room was great fun, and exiting the level by getting the switch palace exit was very surprising. Great job here.
- vgh - Clipping through the brown blocks by using the POWs is a great joke. I was laughing out loud at that.
- vd3 - Killing all those Yoshis, then clipping through the pipe to kill Mario, was really funny. I have absolutely no idea what happens at the end of this level with the yellow sprite zipping around the screen, but it was great.
- cm - Yoshi in the Bonus Game with the winged key was really cool. Never seen these bugs before.
- cba - The screen going to black, but still playing the game, was so great! I had no idea what was going on. Minor gripe would be when doing the palette-swap, it didn’t really add anything to show the entire overworld..
- sw3 - This is a massive highlight in the run for me. Such a small, limited level stretched to its absolute limits. Swapping the goal and then dying, despawning the goal, just all great. Collecting the Yoshi Wings and hitting the goal tape I have never seen before
- sw4 - Was that a Boss Boo kill? That’s amazing!
- sw4 (again) - I legitimately cried with laughter when you jumped on the Koopa and it went “beep”, and Mario just stood there. I had to rewatch that a few times. Great.
- sw5 - Voting no because spelling “TAS” is traditional!
- way cool - reset to the title screen - incredible. Most WTF moment in the run for me.
- funky - nintendo’s super secret exit. Was hoping to see this and it was executed really well.
- vs2 - JOIEN RA G. Getting 00 (or is it 100?) bonus stars was very funny. How is that even done - the Bob-omb?
- foi1 - Hyperkinetic flying key + star was very funny
- foi4 - Going *up* the up-pipe I had no idea was possible, fantastic.
- gsp - death by corner bug against the switch, very good
- ci1 - wow... turning the level into an OW sub-map? I have absolutely no clue what is going on, but I love it. The music is grating but this is so interesting I don’t care.
- c6 - star power during the Castle outro cutscene is great. I think we did that during our proof of concept run?
- valley fortress - ha, a walkathon speedrun! What a neat idea! We don’t really get to see this anywhere else, so it was nice here. I don’t typically like walkathons but as it’s just one level, it’s a nice treat.
Ah I wrote a lot... All in all - thanks for your hard work. Somewhat tentative yes vote.