On September 22nd, ScarlettVixen released Mario Adventure 3, the sequel to her romhack Mario Adventure that’s been twelve years in the making. The original Mario Adventure is a classic rom hack of Super Mario Bros. 3 by DahrkDaiz (an old handle of Scarlett Vixen) renowned for its excellent level design. Luigi vs. Mario, which almost but didn’t quite become Mario Adventure 2, didn’t quite live up to that pedigree. With Mario Adventure 3, ScarlettVixen aimed for a more elaborate overhaul of the game. Thanks to the SMB3 Assembly by southbird3, she succeeded. Everything from the collision engine to the enemies to even the on-screen colors has been souped up and pushes the Nintendo Entertainment System to its very limits.
Yet Mario Adventure 3 has not been without controversy. Mario Adventure, for those unfamiliar with the title, is a very playable game. Only the last level can be said to be exceptionally difficult, and the challenges of Mario Adventure come with commensurate reward as the player feels satisfied in completing them. But Mario Adventure 3 got off on the wrong foot with a lot of gamers through the use of an elaborate tutorial mode. To put it simply, the tutorial deals with Mario Adventure 3’s new puzzle mechanics, which require the use of certain power-ups in a certain order. The trouble with these mechanics is that when Mario gets hit, he loses his power-up- which can make the tutorial impossible to complete, and the exact timing of when Mario needs to say, deflect a fireball with his tail is tough enough that gamers who aren’t that good at gaming will likely get frustrated into quitting long before even starting the game proper.
How did such an oversight happen? As ScarlettVixen notes on the official Mario Adventure 3 site here (yes, literally just marioadventure3.com), Mario Adventure 3 went through a full month of beta testing with a small team. But of course, that’s precisely where the disconnect appears to have come from. The beta testers either didn’t mind the intense difficulty or just didn’t notice it, thanks to having a granular understanding of the mechanics of Super Mario Bros. 3. Consequently, the first official release of Mario Adventure 3 was quite frustrating to fans who had otherwise been quite excited for the project.
ScarlettVixen, to her credit, clearly wasn’t joking when she asked players to use a form on marioadventure3.com to send her reports about any issues with the game. While Mario Adventure 3 only had its initial 1.0.1 release on September 22nd, the very next day, September 23rd, had version 1.2.0 with a large number of bug fixes. September 24th saw the release of version 1.3.0, with Casual Mode to make the game less punishing to players who just couldn’t get the exact timing right. The fourth version, 1.5.2 on September 26th, had more relatively minor fixes as well as the inclusion of a new ability. But at this point, ScarlettVixen appears to have decided that the next release would need to be a bit more elaborate.
Enter version 1.9.2 on October 5th, which dispenses with the binary of regular mode or casual mode and simply puts every option for managing the game’s difficulty into an options menu. Certainly, Mario Adventure 3’s original development is no small achievement on its own- but ScarlettVixen’s remarkably constructive response to all the feedback nearly feels like a comparable accomplishment. In an era where technical support even from major gaming studios is dubious, ScarlettVixen has crunched in the work necessary to ensure that Mario Adventure 3 is accessible to everyone.
This probably isn’t the last of her tinkering (version 1.9.3 came out on Wednesday), and as gracious as ScarlettVixen is to come up with these fixes so quickly, the controversy does tend to warrant a word of warning. If acquiring this game from anywhere except the patcher on marioadventure3.com, be sure to check the version number. It’s possible that the game which seems so impossible at first might become significantly more manageable with the help of an options menu.
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