Pop Quiz time!
Which of these three things do you think took me the longest?
A) Making it through Murder Death Place Zone
B) Defeating RPGfan's Flandre battle
C) Winning five ordinary, run-of-the-mill levels with Snake
Okay, it was A, but my point is that none of these were all that far off from each other. I may have had a couple nitpicks about Bowser, but Snake is a whole other beast. Since I've never played Metal Gear Solid, there's a chance that I missed things though. After I played for about 40 minutes, I realized that it would take a while and moved on to some other characters so that I wouldn't lose my momentum. I came back at a later date and continued attempts until I won.
I'll mention what exactly happened on the last playthrough (the part after the over-the-top transition) because I cut a lot out of the video and the counters at the bottom-right corner may not make sense at first glance.
1. I beat some SMB1 style level from the Princess Cliche. At the end of this level an error occurred, which may or may not be the same one that happened in Chaos House. I restarted the Mario Challenge because of this error, although I reduced the number of exits to four to compensate for the level that I already beat. This brought me back up to five lives, admittedly, but I'll take that as payment for dealing with the bug.
2. After rerolling out of impossible levels several times, I came across the library from A2XT, which I could just walk out of. Sometime between this level and the third, SMBX gave another error. This time I forgot to reduce the number of exits though, so my counter says 1/4 when it should be 3/5.
3. I came across CastlePokeMetroid's automatic level from MAGLX. This level turned out not only to be doable (albeit difficult), but it also contained a life farm to reach 99 lives. This was necessary both to beat this level and to ascertain that the next few levels were impossible.
4. Yoshi's House
5. A slightly different Yoshi's House
6. Since my level counter was incorrect, I planned on godmoding through a level to get a proper ending screen. However, I came across Luna Tower, which meant that I could just skip to the end anyways.
I captured one error message with Snipping Tool since it wasn't captured by OBS. However, that stack trace doesn't correspond to either of the errors that occurred in this video. I can dig the footage that corresponds with my image out of my archives if it is helpful though.
Leaves are allergic to Snake apparently. They fly off to the right instantly after they spawn.
Snake can also use Link's upstab attack if he jumps out of water or off a note block, which I assume is unintentional.
Snake also can't bounce high off springs at all. I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but it prevents him from beating a lot of levels.
And finally, some observations:
-Searchlights don't appear until the enemies spawn. Normally when enemies spawn you still have to walk half a screen to reach them, so running into them is unlikely. But avoiding the searchlight is more difficult because it already extends across a third of the screen before you know it is there, so you only have about a sixth of the screen in breathing room before you touch it.
-Very few Mario levels seem to offer stealth options, so often the only tactic is to run up to the enemy and kill it ASAP before anything spawns.
-Sometimes enemies take a while to spawn after I touch the searchlight, but sometimes they spawn directly on top of me almost instantly. I thought that waiting a while between triggering searchlights might prevent this, but it doesn't seem to. This means that I have to cross my fingers that I won't die every time I trigger a searchlight.
-Avoiding searchlights is extra difficult because Snake's poor mobility prevents him from doing things like jumping onto objects to get over them, or jumping over searchlights entirely.
-Snake likes water levels a lot since he has 2D movement and more cover than usual, allowing him to use stealth sometimes.
-Snake's C4 powerup is difficult to use effectively except against single enemies that I really need to avoid.
-Using C4 against, say, three Goombas walking towards me across flat ground is pretty tedious.
-C4 gives no way to attack remotely, which makes it harder to use than the standard fire powerups.
-C4 can kill Boos (and similar enemies) though, which is nice.
-Tranquilizer darts are pretty cool, although they are more or less strictly worse than ice balls since the enemies will eventually wake up and the bullets travel
really slowly.
-Althletic Armor allows Snake to jump higher. In other words, it makes him *almost* as good at platforming as most of the other cast members.
-This is often very much needed, and I always choose it over the other powerups if given the choice.
-Playing Snake with the Athletic Armor is not only easier, but also more fun than playing with regular Snake because I feel like I have more options for stealth (and I don't have to reroll the level every two seconds).
-The Stealth box doesn't give Snake the Athletic Armor's benefits like most Tanooki powerups do. :(
-Somehow I never acquire a Hammer Bros. Suit the entire time!
-Only having two hits doesn't help either, but it's fitting for Snake.
-Overall, it feels like Snake doesn't work at all unless levels are made specifically for him, since he's very underpowered compared to the others.
-This may not be the biggest issue ever in a full game since Snake could be forced onto players only in levels that suit him. However, in the Mario Challenge he is nearly unplayable.
A Suggestion:
The most common places I got stuck with either Bowser or Snake were places that I just needed to jump a tile or so higher to get past. I feel that if there were a way to jump a tile or two higher that is really awkward to use for platforming in most circumstances, it could prevent many unwinnable situations while preserving their status as "characters that don't platform very well".
After spending so much time writing that, I was automatically logged out from the Talkhaus. Thank goodness I never trust forums and always copy posts to the clipboard before hitting "Submit".