(shouting)

A2MT's downfall

Anthrax 2 Multiply Themodynamics
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S.N.N.
Posts: 561
Joined: 14 years ago
Location: Ontario, Canada

A2MT's downfall

Post by S.N.N. »

Hi guys. I talked to alex2 and asked him to leave the forum open a little longer so I could post this. I only found out that this was occurring tonight but I wanted to say some final words from an "outside" (not really) point of view.
<Alex> It's a mercy kill at this point
First of all, I want to express my gratitude to the Talkhaus community for attempting this hack. For the first few months, there was a substantial amount of interest and effort after ASMT, and it looked for sure like it was going to be successful (and quick too). It was pretty obvious after about half a year that things were going to fall apart though, and I attribute this to three real reasons:

1) Segmented and/or incompetent leadership. I'm not going to single anyone out here, but the base ROM went through such a wild game of "Hot Potato" that resources ended up getting scattered all over the place. According to alex2, nobody even knows what is going on anymore, nor have they for ages.
2) Bringing in too many YouTubers via "overadvertising" by raocow. I actually recall reading several complaints about this years ago (mostly due to awful levels were being accepted at random without any real -serious- playtesting/reviewing). It really should have been kept a niche project. I mean, it got to the point where even the Talkhaus users were making fun of how bad A2MT was.
3) There wasn't enough time between ASMT and this. Going from a hack of that scale to a hack of the same scale within like a month was not a smart idea, especially since many of the valuable team members from ASMT were still burnt out.

I think people vastly underestimate the difficulty of managing a collaboration hack when dealing with SMW. As much as I find SMBX's engine horrible, there is no doubt that it is a million times easier to work with in a collaboration sense. With SMW, you're dealing with level/exit/graphics/music overwrites, crashes, etc. When one thing goes wrong, it becomes a domino effect.

Having run SMWCP and SMWCP2 on SMWC in the past, I can totally sympathize with alex2's decision and I understand his frustrations. In truth, it may not ultimately be his to make, but he was probably the last one around here who was competent enough to handle the hack. It would be interesting to at least see a sort of base ROM released if anything, but I imagine that would lead to a lot of disappointment given the plethora of bugs, poor design, and generally unfinished stuff still present.

Good show, at least.
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