The Hotdog Laserhouse

After everything I’ve said, I guess some people still don’t get it.

I absolutely, unquestionably, hate it when somebody out there says, “I’m going to port one thing to another thing and I’m also going to make it more difficult for absolutely no reason.”

Like this armchair hobbyist is so much smarter than the dude who’s been in the videogame industry for decades and has dozens games under his belt. That he knows, “if I add an extra enemy here, more spikes there, and raise the score ranking difficulty, I’ve made it a better game.”

No. That’s not how it works. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto. People who do that are making something for themselves, when they need to be looking at the broader picture. They need to consider everybody, everywhere, and make sure their game can be completed by more than just the ultra hardcore 1%.

I almost entirely stopped caring about rom hacks because of that stuff. ANYBODY can make a rom hack that increases the difficulty. It is actually one of the most simple, easy things you can do to a game. An idiot could do it, and a lot of idiots do. You have to take control and be better than the idiots.

I’ve been making games in some form for more than 15 years. I remember a lot of people telling me some of my earlier games - like MarioWeen - were too difficult. I shrugged those off at the time because well gosh I guess people will just have to learn to be better at my game, right?

8 years later, I go back to MarioWeen and realize, “Wow, this game is kind of cheap and stupid.” Everybody was right.

Unless you are making your game about difficulty, like Super Meat Boy, Spelunky, La-Mulana, or anything else, you have no excuse for extreme difficulty. It means you are letting yourself be sloppy and lazy. Period. You can not defend this. I will have no arguments.

Especially when you are converting levels from one game to another. There’s a hack for New Super Mario Bros. on the DS called NSMB3. I figured, hey, that might be cool, because I wouldn’t mind playing a version of Super Mario Bros. 3 in the NSMB engine, if it was done properly. Surprise: It wasn’t. This dude completely ruined the game by trying to “improve” upon it by making everything ultra-difficult, with a lot of stupid levels that obfuscate certain elements for absolutely no reason at all.

When confronted with what you do to fix one of the greatest games of all time, your answer should be “nothing”, because you probably aren’t qualified to improve the game. It’s one thing when you are working around the limitations of porting content to another, completely different engine, but when you are going out of your way to crap up level design because your ham-brain thinks that’s “better”, you probably shouldn’t. Just don’t.

Super Mario Bros. 3 sold 18 million copies. It is one of the highest grossing games of all time, having made $1,700,000,000. It does not need to be more difficult. If you think it needs to be more difficult, you have played too much Super Mario Bros. 3, and you have to realize that not everybody knows the game as well as you do, and it is ludicrous to expect everybody to learn how. Not everybody has the time or the dedication. Preserve what people loved about the original game and stop getting your grubby fingerprints all over the stupid thing.

That, if you aren’t picking up on it, goes for all hacks and ports, by the way. Not just NSMB3. It is one example in an endless sea of them.

Yes, the ranking is just a letter. It is, in the grand scheme of the world, meaningless. But that also means that all leaderboards in every game ever made are meaningless. It is meaningless to rescue Princess Peach. It is meaningless to finish a race in Gran Turismo in 1st place. All goals, in all videogames, are meaningless unless you think they are important to achieve.

I spent a lot of time getting “good” at Sonic Unleashed. Thanks in part to Tristan decreeing I needed to review every piece of Sonic Unleashed DLC, I ended up playing the game for almost a full year solid. I had, in my mind, mastered the game. And then I went and did it all again when I accidentally deleted my save file.

Twice I climbed to the summit of that mountain, and it wasn’t easy. And then, somebody went and added another 2000ft to that mountain, steeper and more deadly than ever, and said “I bet you can’t climb THIS!”

It’s not a matter of can’t, it’s a matter of won’t. Your additions are stupid. They remind me of a lot of other stupid additions I’ve seen in other games, like NSMB3. It is bad design.

I love Sonic Unleashed. I had, in some way, hoped for The Unleashed Project to be a way for everybody to see why I loved Sonic Unleashed. The porting team worked so hard, did such a good job, and then they let themselves be sloppy right at the finish line.

And they dare tell me that I’m wrong. I find that to be disrespectful to my decade of game development. You are telling me that I don’t know what I am talking about, when I have been there myself, and learned that lesson already. Stop letting your ego tell you that “well I guess the rest of the world will have to adjust to MY way!”, because you are wrong.

And it’s such an easy fix, to boot! So easy, in fact, that I am taking matters in to my own hands. It’ll be out as soon as I get the promo video for it ready.