Doctor Shemp wrote:I'll post here because I'd been thinking about this privately for a while. This could be a decent to good idea if approached properly. In much the same way that Chaos CompleXX parodied the worst of SMW hacking in 2003 and Mock 2 parodied the worst of Doom mapping in 2003 (2003 was clearly the year of parodies) there's potential for a parody of the worst of SMBX mapping in 2015. Of course the challenge is in making something that looks terrible while still being playable and not frustrating garbage - something Chaos CompleXX succeeded at, as did AUS' level for A2XT, but something Mock 2 occasionally failed at. There's also of course the problem that, unlike SMW hacking and Doom mapping, the main cause of bad SMBX levels isn't technical incompetence, it's design incompetence. That's harder to imitate without committing the same errors. All that being said, I think the potential is there.
I find that one big trap a lot of parodies in general fall into can basically be summed up with "Hey, you know that annoying thing you really hated? Well, here it is in our parody, perfectly preserved in all its annoyance. Except, since we're being completely tongue-in-cheek about it, that makes it funny, rather than horrifyingly annoying!"
No. No, it doesn't.
Let's say there's a dungeon in an RPG where your characters are constantly poisoned and blinded due to a toxic fog within the area. You're constantly taking damage, and your physical attacks frequently miss, so even the simplest of random battles in this place are a gigantic chore. It's roundly hated, cited as the game's low point by far, and given a prestigious entry on TV Tropes' "That One Level" page. Now let's say you have a wAaAaAaAaAacky parody RPG in the works, you remember that dungeon you hated, and you want to parody it. But the only "parody" ends up being that the poison gas is actually a toxic *fart cloud*. You're still blinded and poisoned, and the dungeon is no less annoying than it was originally, but hohoho, a *poison fart*, man! That should take away all the annoyance because it's just so silly and wacky and random! ... Sorry, no. You may have tried to make it funny with silly text, but you still *recreated that thing everyone hated in the first place*!
That, in a nutshell, is where I feel like many parodies end up failing. I'd say, If you want to parody something properly, it would be better if it was in such a way where it makes fun of that thing, while managing to avoid making its same mistakes.