VIP 4 2018 - That was fun

[Bean]

Dragon Quest V and "Thanks for saving me!" being great aside, I really liked the last level for just being pure platforming fun. It was like an extended version of a Sky Land stage from SMB3.

[Zach808]

I much prefer when crumble blocks are used like this rather than just floor traps. It’s fun to mess around with seeing what you should or shouldn’t break. I had a lot more trouble getting to the secret exit pipe than raocow, though. Not sure why.

Something seemed very... off about Don’t Be Afraid. It seems like the level was meant to be speedran, but wasn’t tested enough. Also, that last jump is super annoying.

Yeah... The castle is also not a great place to One More Level. Not as bad as the ghost house, but still bad. At least the level has the courtesy to be super easy to go long distances without dying, though. Still took me over an hour, but once I hit the midpoint the rest was a joke due to me managing to keep a cape up to Lemmy and thwacking the flames in the upper level. Looks like he’s MUCH more annoying without it.

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

This is probably going to be pretty long thanks to a certain level, but here are my comments for today's levels.

Mid-Air Shadow Running: I like the way the crumbly blocks are used in this level; as raocow said you don't really see this kind of thing. The level also seems pretty well designed. Right at the start there are two rows of the different block types to let the player know how they work. And when you hit the message block that explains the keyhole there's even a wall there in case you accidentally drop the key when you close the text box.

Don't Be Afraid: It's not a terrible level, but I wouldn't exactly call it a great level either. The main focus of the level seems to be making these big leaps, which doesn't really provide the most interesting gameplay. The two timed sections are really basic, mostly just consisting of running back and forth, and as raocow showed you can actually do the second one too fast and die because of it. The fact that the majority of the level is made of cement blocks and munchers (including a part with munchers stacked on top of one another) doesn't exactly help. I usually don't complain about graphics in a level as long as the gameplay is good, but this level's just pretty mediocre.

What a Snappy FruiTea, Hehehe: Oh boy, now that I'm playing along with raocow I get to experience the wonders of levels that are unreasonably long for myself. Fortunately I didn't have too bad of a time here, mostly thanks to the fact that I didn't have any deaths between a certain invisible block and the midpoint. Anyway, considering that this level is long and I've barely even begun talking about it I'm going to be splitting up my comments into the individual sections. Also they're in this spoiler box because they more than doubled my post length.

The Beginning: Not much here except for a few relatively easy jumps, which is nice considering you have to take the P-switch through here.

Balloon Section: This can be a bit tricky at places, so it's nice that you don't die if you fall.

Missiles: This parts pretty fun, but I feel like it could be better if it was expanded on and made into it's own level rather than just being a small part of another level (which is actually how I feel about most of these sections). I also feel like the level would have been a reasonable length if the end was either at the end of this section or shortly after, but this isn't even the halfway point.

The part where you need a springboard: Getting the springboard in the right place is tough, but fortunately it's easy enough to reposition it if you mess up. There's also the ropes you can fall through here, which just seem kind of pointless. I thought it was some kind of tutorial and that these ropes would be appearing a lot later on, but they only appear one other time, in an appearance that manages to be even more pointless than this one.

The room where the boss is hiding: I died to the invisible coin block here, but I just found it funny and started laughing. Though at this point I didn't know there was still much of the level remaining. Also I wonder if it's possible to get in the pipe where the boss is and skip the second half of the level. That would certainly be nice.

Fish Tunnel: Here's where those ropes I mentioned before appear again, though it's just kind of there, there aren't any obstacles based around it or anything. Anyway, this section's pretty easy if you just take it slow. Though if you're like me and you took a while to get past the balloon section this section can be pretty unnerving, especially with the lack of a midpoint so far (I still had over 400 seconds when I got here, but at this point I didn't know how long the level would go on).

The Water Section: Most of the level has been relatively easy, but this section is pretty tough, which is a bit of a problem considering how long this level is. I'm really glad I got through it without dying, though I did have many near death experiences, including one point where I miraculously managed to stand on the corner of a spike for a brief moment. Also the 'puzzle' at the end seems pretty silly. The hint in this translation makes it pretty obvious, but even without the hint I thought "oh you probably have to just read the letters that aren't 'mo'" as I was reading it. I can't really say for sure, but I feel like this would be pretty obvious even in Japanese. Regardless, knowing that you need a P-switch to access a door, who wouldn't bring the switch with them?

Ladders: Not only is this pretty easy (though the jumps at the end can be a bit tricky), but it's also right after the incredibly lopsided midpoint, so even if you do mess up you have very little to lose.

The Boss: Part of me wishes that I had found out that you can enter a pipe here to enter an alternate boss room, but part of me is glad that I didn't. After a few deaths I decided that trying to fight this boss with the hopping flames around was unreasonable (I might have been okay with just one, but two was just too much) and I went and grabbed a cape, which makes this fight incredibly easy.

So that castle level was a bit of a thing, and it sounds like this White Cruise level is also a thing. Yesterday I mentioned the idea of playing ahead of raocow; I'm beginning to strongly consider that now.

[morsel/morceau]

Don’t Be Afraid is one of my favourite levels to return to as it's very easy to get this fellow

VIP_4_Edit000.png (6.04 KiB) Viewed 4093 times

(if you ditch yoshi at the right moment he lines up with the brown platform--you'll know you've done it right when that becomes a chequered platform).

[Kilgamayan]

The first FruiTea death was wonderful.

[ft029]

FruiTea was an amazingly crafted level

[This Eye o' Mine]

I am really late putting this up.

Translator's note: What a Snappy FruiTea, Hehehe

This level name was quite a thing. As said in the note in-game, FruiTea is a tourism train in Japan, which I'm fairly certain from asking some Japanese people I know is the first thing somebody in this hack's intended audience would think of when reading the name. As far as we could tell though, that train or trains in general have nothing at all to do with the stage. The textbox gives a pretty clear indication that it's just supposed to be a word that the author said because it sounds funny. (One person I asked said it reminded them of Fruit Tea, which is sort of amusing if you look at it the right way maybe)

Still, we debated changing it to another famous trainline, and stuck on "TransSib" for a while, before deciding that that might be a bit too forced, and that the joke wasn't coherent or meaningful enough to be really worth making that kind of change for. The name might've been intended to give the player the first impression that there would be a train in the level, but we also decided that's honestly kind of a stretch. If FruiTea had been a famous minecart or something, we would've granted that sort of reasoning more credibility.

As for the actual level name's structure, it's kind of confusing and doesn't make a whole lot of grammatical sense, which is something I saw some native Japanese speakers comment on as well. For example, it seems to use 'FruiTea' as an adjective applied to the laughing sound we put as "hehehe", leading to at least one comment in Japanese that I came across being translatable as "what's a 'hehehe'?" (「フフフってなんだ?」)

The word we put as snappy could also be put as "thorny" or "harsh". Seeing as the main joke with the name seems to be just that it sounds funny, we thought "snappy" would be the best fit. Course now that I see it again, it might've referred to the vaguely spiky-looking muncher hurty walls. With a level name this out-there, it's kind of hard to tell really.

Oyster's Pearls:
The First Season of the Year of the Sky's Shadow

His name for: "Mid-air Shadow Running"

"What is up with these hellishly complicated names?" -raocow 2009

Oyster was what's up. This one completely stumps me. He got the 'air' thing (well, sky's close enough), and the 'shadow' thing, but somehow he must've turned ばしり (bashiri) into "the first season of the year", rather than "running". This smells of a mistaken reading and dictionary lookup, but no matter how I examine this, I see no resemblance at all to any word that would translate as such. Well played.

The Sharp Tear Giggle

His name for: "What a Snappy FruiTea, Hehehe"

"Oyster adds 'what the frick'." -raocow 2009

Okay, to be fair this was a very tricky level name, not helped by the fact that it's a bit absurd and has little to do with the level itself in the first place.
He probably didn't know what "FruiTea" was, so he dropped the 'Frui" part and was left with something that kind of sort of resembles the Japanese rendition of the word "tear". Then he decided to turn the laughter onomatopoeia into a noun.

I wouldn't blame you if you preferred Oyster's name on this one, to be honest.

[Alice]

I didn't even realize there were spikes in that ladder room in FruiTea until raocow got hit. I was wondering why he seemed to be randomly climbing around like that. Dark blue on a black background is a terrible design choice.

[Sugar]

For whatever reason, entering the key into a door switches the ON/OFF switch state in this level.

Yeah...

[Paragraph]

Someone linked a "how SMW does RNG" video recently, and the fish bobbing was one of the examples, so yeah, the very final "lottery" is actually 100% truly random. Game design!

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

So my experience with this level appears to have been somewhat of the opposite of raocow's. At first I didn't think the level was too bad. In fact I almost got to the normal exit on my first try, but I ran out of time (all I had left was to push the P-switch, go in the door, and get to the end). After that I had a few stupid deaths but I eventually beat the level. If that was all there was to this level I would probably think it was a pretty alright level, but of course there's a secret exit. Personally I don't think the secret exit really adds anything worthwhile to the level. In fact, I think that its presence actually makes the level worse.

When I was going for the normal exit, some of my deaths were due to messing up the timing on the "slots". It wasn't too bad, but while going for the secret exit I messed up the timing several more times, mostly because I was getting bored; I had already beaten the level at that point, and now I was having to do the exact same thing again. And of course the more I died the more bored I got, which led to more deaths and so on. It didn't help that the part with the fishin' boo, which was actually pretty good, got tedious after awhile. Eventually I got the P-switch but I messed up on the first slot machine, but like raocow I figured out you could just break the block with the P-switch. Then I got to the part with the flopping fish, but fortunately I managed to find a way to basically guarantee that I got it right. I would jump above the P-switch and pause right before landing on it; if the fish wasn't in the right spot I would hold the run button before unpausing so that I would grab the P-switch instead of pressing it.

I feel like this level would be a lot more enjoyable if you weren't limited to just one try at each of the slots. It's not like it would remove the challenge completely; the timer can become an issue after awhile, and to emphasize that I imagine it would certainly be possible to redesign things a bit so that it takes awhile to get back and try again.

[Ryrir]

Then I got to the part with the flopping fish, but fortunately I managed to find a way to basically guarantee that I got it right. I would jump above the P-switch and pause right before landing on it; if the fish wasn't in the right spot I would hold the run button before unpausing so that I would grab the P-switch instead of pressing it.

I feel like this is the way that room is supposed to be done. Morsel mentioned doing the exact same thing, but apparently he could react fast enough to the flopping fish to do it even without pausing!

So yeah, when you first enter the room you're going to think that it's just all dependent on RNG, but there are ways to make it "semi-consistent" at the very least.

I can sort of understand why the author would not let you reset the slots, kind of. If you could just redo all of the slots without any consequences, all of the pressure would be gone. The slots would feel like busywork more than anything.

Maybe the real problem is that these sort of slots just don't work too well in the context of an SMW hack, or at least in a relatively long and drawn-out level like this...

[This Eye o' Mine]

No real translator notes today, other than pointing out that this is the first appearance of Maks' double textbox tech, which helped a lot with cases like these where there was a lot of information to translate.
I guess I'll address the thing raocow said at the very end about whether the use of technique to get the shells where you want them on the slots was intentional. There VIP strategy wiki has this line:
頑張れば目押しも無理ではないので外さないようにしましょう。
Which basically is using a Pachinko-slot machine jargon for the technique of aiming spinning slot reels to stop in a way that lines up the icons on them, by learning the timing of the machine and being very precise in hitting the button that stops the reels.
The line here says that it's not impossible to pull that technique off if you try hard enough, basically saying "you can aim the shell to go where you want". I'm not sure if the articles on that wiki were written by the author of the level, but it's at least very likely that it was intentional.

The textbox actually never calls it a "lottery", but "slots", referring to the kind of machines you find in Pachinko parlors. I've never played one of those, so I didn't consider this while translating, but the misunderstanding of it as a lottery might actually be a product of straight-up one-armed-bandits working slightly differently and being more designed around being random than pachinko-slot machines. I'm not sure the original text ever intended for it to be considered a toss-up.

[Blue]

What the heck are the drybones throwing about? "Poor you~"?

[Piesonscreations]

I definetally expected this level to be more of a thing, but i'm glad it wasn't that bad!

[This Eye o' Mine]

What the heck are the drybones throwing about? "Poor you~"?

Actually, yes, though that graphic replacement was already in the translations of the previous VIPs.

[Zach808]

Yeah, I despised this level when I played it. Sometimes the timing would work, but sometimes the shell would just roll over the hole, frustrating me to no end. The length didn't help, nor did the fish at the end.

[Blivsey]

"acceptable game design choices"

[Sugar]

My strategy for the second part of ~htoooomS (^ω^ ) was to press the second run button while falling. For some reason it works.

[BobisOnlyBob]

.sllab fo dnik saw taht ,lleW

[morsel/morceau]

.gniht elpmis eht gniod fo daetsni yknow gnihtemos ecrof eturb wocoar hctaw ot erusaelp a syawla s'ti tuB .semarf ytilibarenluvni htiw hguorht nur neht dna sutol eht yb tih teg ,yltneg nwod taolf uoy os )drawrof yas i dluohs ro( kcab dloh ot si level dnalreztiwS eht ni trap lanif taht od ot yaw ehT

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

It looks like I may have finally found something in this game that I can do better than raocow: flying. Anyway, here are my comments for today's levels.

~htoooomS (^ω^ ): I didn't really have much trouble with this level, only having five or six deaths throughout the whole thing. The reversed controls didn't really affect me at all; The way I think of flying in this game is that you push one direction to go up, and you push the opposite direction to go down. The fact that the directions were switched around had little bearing on my playing. I will admit though that it looks like I got lucky at the end of the level. What happened to raocow on his winning run was basically what happened to me on my first time getting there. Also, after I beat the level I spent a moment trying to go the wrong way on the map because I was still thinking of the reverse controls.

Kobami Valley: A pretty basic level, though it looks like it tries to do a thing where it has an upper path and a lower path. However you often can't really see the platforms on the lower path, and the platforming is easy enough that people probably won't fall down there on accident. Speaking of not being able to see the lower path, raocow missed an area with a message block right after where the springboard is. The message block says "Step on the P-Switch if you suspect anything." which I guess might be a hint for the last VIP coin? There's also the moon, but that seems too obvious to have such a vague hint in the level.

[Voltgloss]

Can you also get through that final trap by bringing a spare feather, facetanking the enemies, and catching your reserve as it floats down? Or is there not enough room to catch it?

[BobisOnlyBob]

Can you also get through that final trap by bringing a spare feather, facetanking the enemies, and catching your reserve as it floats down? Or is there not enough room to catch it?

I think the level starts with a quick Feather + Apple to displace any spare items

[Paragraph]

[in an extremely Celeste thread voice] raocow, this level would have been far easier if you had used a keyboard, and unscrewed and swapped the left and right keys