"The Mountains of the Stars" was pretty neat in how it made stars fall from the sky and attack you, but it's a shame the SMB3 balls o' doom the stars are based on will go to the ends of the earth to ram you down, which does eliminate some of the calm mood the level seemed to have been going for. Overall though, nice and pretty, though not terribly much else to say.
"Kagome Kagome" is without a doubt my favorite of the three bullet hell levels. It seems like what the very first one tried to be - it's difficult and frantic and leads you through a sprawling structure, but it allows far more let and keeps the survival rooms hard, but short, snappy, and doable, and the level itself knows its genre and that it's a platformer, and uses shorter, more condensed, more indicative obstacles in place of the design methodology of spitting rinkas and projectiles everywhere without rhyme or reason to it. This was quite nice.
"Ghost House" was short, sweet and had a neat puzzle in it too. What it lacks in usual Ghost House-esque trickery it makes up for with just
fun and, honestly, it makes me realize that I'm not disappointed this wasn't a typical ghost house. Very well done.
sedron wrote:I can only assume Valterri is less-than-happy with his placement/review, and I can half-sympathize with that. When my level comes up, if there's something that detracted from the experience of playing it or something that I could have improved on, I'll want to know. I think it's normal for the contestants to know these things so they understand their mistakes and placements (and can improve if they want to continue with any sort of level design.) That said, Valterri's level is still (I believe,) in the top 25% of levels, in the second-to-last world, and placed over about one hundred other levels in a contest with a lot of really good levels (even if Valterri doesn't particularly believe that.) That's still really freaking good.
I don't think being unable to explain an opinion makes it less valid, but for the purposes of a contest like this (wherein critique is mandatory,) it's really important.
While I do think he was pretty irritating in a few of his comments, I also think he is justified in being upset over the critique - it didn't exactly tell him where he went wrong, and just a bit of elaboration on that would've helped to justify why that score was given. My favorite reviews Horikawa made were the ones that went into depth about why she liked the level and why she didn't like the level rather than the ones that were super condensed and short. But, at the same time, I understand the period of time between getting all the levels and delivering the final product to raocow was really short, and Horikawa and the judges had a significant amount on their plate already, so going in-depth with each level probably would take far more time than would likely be practical. For the next contest, though, it would be nice if perhaps either there could be a longer period for judging, or other judges gave their opinions too so that, should one justification not explain a lot, others might, even if that meant taking an extra month or so to get everything ready.
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