*X3 WINNER CONGRATS TO ENJL* the one with the seasonal allergies

[Kapus]

the judge comments are the most entertaining part so far

i wish they werent part of the game at all but go off lmao

I kinda see where you're coming from (I think), but I personally value them a lot because it gives insight on the judge's reasons for their scores. As a participant, I value that a lot.

That said, of course, the levels so far have been pretty shitposty and as such the comments have been equally goofy. Which I instead just find lighthearted and entertaining.

[Grounder]

you can switch to the mafab boss images by pressing alt-run

you didn't make a note of trying or mention it in the tags so

[Zephyr_DragonLord]

Okay, before I start. There's something that I feel like I need to address real quick. Without judges, we wouldn't have an order of levels to go through. We wouldn't have structure. That's why the judges are here. They, in large part, make MaGLX possible. I appreciate them. Take or leave their comments as you may please, you don't have to like everything on display there. (I personally enjoy them, but you all knew that already.)

Now for my own commentary.

148th: A Familial Meltdown - Woah, not too much to say about the level itself. Tragedy is a... particularly difficult subject to tackle, and I can personally respect anyone that tackles the subject. Of course, a short, brief level's usually not going to land amongst the stars.

147th: Lazily-Made Lagoon - Hey, the title's got it right, so seems good there. Nothing offensive here. Just a short jaunt near a beach, and the kind of level that's nice to see down in the lower rungs. But hey, don't feel too bad about placing in the lowest tier. We can appreciate the neat things here regardless, and knowing that the next effort will be powered by your earlier ones.

BOSS: Boss Bot Blue - Not an offensive boss, but it doesn't stand out as anything impressive, either. It does suck that the boss will zip out of its own arena, though.

146th: Malicious Militial Madness -

I appreciate the I HOPE I JUST KIDDING quite a bit, honestly, though it could also not be killing Mario. That would be nice.

This is a nice little level. A touch rough to get through, but nothing in comparison to the earlier entries on display. Not terrible at all, so I have high hopes looking ahead.

[Crow]

i hope the rest of MAGLX3 is exactly like this video.

just keep playing these levels over and over and over again. forever

[Chongas]

Fun little episode today with a handful of not offensively hard/long levels for a change

The military training level sure looked like it was going somewhere with the introductory obstacles. I'd rather see those ideas further developed than the subsequent bouncing fiery mess that came right after though.

I also didn't hate the MAFAB Boss, specially considering this was placed last.

[PSI Ninja]

(1) It takes a long time (and a long runway) to reach P-speed. I always thought that it took forever to accelerate in SMB3 compared to SMW, but it seems even longer in SMBX.

SMBX pro tip: unlike SMB3/SMW, you can accelerate in the air. Not to P-speed levels, but if you start walking, jump and keep holding right/run, and land you'll usually reach P-speed a bit after landing. I think the game might even be coded to only let you start "running" on the ground even if you accelerate to max speed in the air. This is a HUGE sore spot for me when going back to SMW hacks where you have to actually run before hand to even do a nice long jump, let alone fly.

Ah, that might explain why those far Koopa jumps in Sedron's level are possible.

I never knew that you could damage enemies if you spin jump on them while they're frozen. That would have made the boss fight a lot easier for me. I did it the regular way, and most of the hits I took were from the large ice block shattering in my hands. And I really liked the Zelda II aesthetic - it just fits well in this engine.

[Draexzhan]

These are the kind of bad levels I can get behind. Silly and inoffensive. The kind of levels that make you go "Okay that was not a good level but I don't dislike it and I appreciate the effort." There's no malice towards the player at all in these.

As far as joke levels go, A Familial Meltdown gave me a little chuckle, so brownie points for that.

Lazily-Made Lagoon and Malicious Militial Madness both suffer from "I started a level and kind of gave up halfway." Lazily-Made Lagoon has a lot of random enemy placement in it and poorly placed graphics, combined with no real enemy theming, a buggy pipe, and a very abrupt ending, and Malicious Militial Madness felt like a tech demo in the first half, and "I'm bored now here's a gauntlet of flame and bumpers" in the second half.

Boss Bot Blue(MaFAB2 Edition) felt fairly forgettable all around. Nothing particularly bad stood out, but nothing particularly good stood out either. It had strong "first miniboss" energy in that regard. Like you're fighting a recurring miniboss before it knows any of its attacks.

[Chirei]

that boss fight accidentally created comboing in smbx

[TaviTurnip]

That spin jump strat on the boss lmao, that is easily the coolest way I've seen to beat that

[camwoodstock]

say, where DO you get a download of maglx3 actually. is it even out for public scrutiny yet??? ik that sounds ridiculous but like. i am very much new to maglxes and i totally wanna play ngl. seems up my alley. also Oh My Gosh It's A Normal Joke Levels!

A Familial Meltdown is just kind of a joke with the level themes, but it's. Honestly kind of a funny joke. gotta love how adjective is "Alive" and everyone is In Fact perished. it's morbid yeah but for the joke it's going for? Perfect Length. which is "really short", but like. if the joke is meant to be short i'm not gonna knock the level for being short. but how do flurries burn to make fire??? are they not Ice??? these are some spicy boys ig...

Lazily-Made Lagoon is, well, i don't think i can knock this level for what it is! i was told it'd be a lazily-made lagoon and By Gum. I got a lazily-made lagoon. ik this is gonna sound silly but it kinda feels a bit like the level wasn't lazily-made ENOUGH if that's the joke??? i was expecting the adjective to y'know, be "lazy" or "sloth" or maybe "procrastination", not "Tart" though. that's pretty funny!

SIKE THIS ISN'T MAGLX3. YOU HAVE FALLEN FOR MAFAB2'S TRICK. there's bosses in these and they're their own entries and they're based on Randomly Generated Assets!!! ok for real though this is a neat addition??? ik maglx2's was based on trading card game cards--i wanna say magic the gathering but i am Not A TCG Guru--but raocow LP screencaps out of context is a Really Cool Idea!!!

Boss Bot Blue(MaFAB2 Edition) is surprisingly Not A Joke to my knowledge! but it sure is lowkey incredibly easy. pretty much the only threat is running out of Ice Power and getting softlocked. it's also. very much tanky, making losing all your ice power and getting softlocked is. Very Much A Possibility. also apparently it breaks but as raocow shows it certainly works on some level. i feel like if there was gonna be an Ice Only Boss you'd want some sort of endless ice source? probably not actual ice hearts but more along the lines of, say, turning those Fireball Rinkas into Iceball Rinkas that you can bait the boss into for bonus damage! that'd be clever! and as raocow notes; if this was meant to be the "worst" boss? i can see potential here! this has a chance to be Not Bad! ALSO NO HONK ZONE PLEASE. PLEASE NO MORE HONK IN THIS CONTEST AFTER THIS

Malicious Militial Madness is kinda weird. it doesn't have any Explicit Problems in my opinion. it's just kind of having platforming challenges more or less. the problem is that it is Definitely Lacking In Presentation and it also kinda loses ideas rapidly??? like for one area you get a bouncy ring hurdle and a fire guy you gotta jump off. then you get a bouncy ring hurdle but Bigger and a rock guy you gotta jump off. and then you get a fire guy zone on top of a bouncy ring zone but Spammy As Hell, and then it's Over??? c'mooon! you had a pretty good level idea of a parkour zone in a circus-like theme under the pretense of it being "military" and you just had to realize it but it Didn't Do It!!! it feels like a dang shame because this Totally Had Potential???

[Rednaxela]

say, where DO you get a download of maglx3 actually. is it even out for public scrutiny yet??? ik that sounds ridiculous but like. i am very much new to maglxes and i totally wanna play ngl. seems up my alley. also Oh My Gosh It's A Normal Joke Levels!

Yep, it's out for public scrutiny. See the first post of this forum thread right here. Note to heed the red text there.

[WinterSweater]

I hope we get a fanfare at the end of every video from now on.

[ano0maly]

Now that the first MAFAB2 level is shown, I would like to critique the implementation of the boss contest itself.

I've heard others say that the gimmick for MAFAB2 was more difficult to work with than that of the previous boss contest. One point made was that having Magic the Gathering cards gave them plenty of materials to use (pictures, title, description text) even if you didn't know the context in the trading card game. And although the MAFAB2 gimmick was all right for me, I can understand that; with vaguely presented screenshots you might not even realize what's going on in them if you don't know what games they're from. Some kind of video/game source identification could have helped provide more information to back up the pictures.

I did have issues with the instructions. This was what was sent to me (with the boldface) alongside the gimmick pictures:

'Video game bosses normally come from video games. Here are random screenshots of video games. Let them inspire you some form of confrontation. Be very free and use as little or as much as you want, but when you submit your file, for the sake of clarity, explain in a sentence how the images informed your work.'

What does the first boldfaced part mean, though? Do you get maximum points for using all six, or can you get the same max score by going all-in on one? This wasn't clear, and it contrasted with the very clearly laid out rubric and instructions for the main contest. I just felt that if we have another one of these side contests, it should have the same adequately detailed instructions that the main contest has.

Also, I don't know if this tripped up anyone else but I was finishing up my boss level and I didn't know how to end it; the MAFAB2 signups page didn't explicitly state using the SMB3 star exit, which was what I did after quick asking around.

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

As people have been saying, I appreciate having levels like these after the first few levels. They're definitely not masterpieces or anything, but at least there's not anything in them that makes the experience unfun (I tried to look up a better word for the opposite of fun, but the best I got that matched what I was going for were this and 'woeful').

- Level Comments -

A Familial Meltdown: I laughed. Also I found the author's notes to be funny.

Lazily-Made Lagoon: I don't have much to say about this one. I guess I can point out that there's another hammer suit in the one block raocow didn't hit at the start of the underwater section, in case that wasn't easy enough, although the bloopers do make it a little bit awkward to get.

Boss Bot Blue(MaFAB2 Edition): I didn't encounter the issue of the boss glitching outside of the arena, which was fortunate considering my strategy involved throwing the boss at the outer walls the entire time. After my first attempt had me just kind of flailing around until I died I decided to play things super safe, so I took the time to take all the pots to the left side so I didn't accidentally collect any of the powerups, then I would throw the boss at the right wall, refreeze it, then run to the left to bait the rinka shots so they didn't get in the way.

Malicious Militial Madness: For how short this is I had a good deal of trouble with the part at the end; in my experience it's really easy to bounce on a flame that's low enough for you to get hit by the one right in front of you. Also for some reason after one of my deaths it took around 5 minutes to reload the level (I wish I was exaggerating); I had a few other somewhat lengthy loads that day so maybe my computer was just bad that day or something, but in any case it was rather annoying.

For some reason this level doesn't force you to be Mario even though it's plainly impossible as some of the other characters. After coming short on the very last jump one time I decided to switch to Luigi to see if he bounces higher off the bouncy blocks. He does, but he ends up bouncing too high off the second one and dying on the ceiling (you can't modulate your bounce height at all between a small bounce and a big bounce). I didn't try as Toad, so I don't know if his bounce height also differs from Mario's, but if it does I suspect that that also causes problems. And of course, Peach can't spin jump so she can't even make it past the first hopping flame.

- End of Level Comments -

I was going to say that the nice thing about these levels being so short is that I can write some short comments, but that didn't end up happening. In the end it just gave me more time to talk about what I would normally just gloss over as a small detail in a larger level.

[Dragon Fogel]

And although the MAFAB2 gimmick was all right for me, I can understand that; with vaguely presented screenshots you might not even realize what's going on in it if you don't know what games they're from.

Hi, yes, this was my experience. Basically, I got:
-an overworld screenshot from an SMW romhack
-a very generic screenshot from an SMW romhack with a saw on rails (in retrospect I might have been able to use the saw as a feature but the shot was so generic it didn't even really register for me)
-Zero in a room with explosions happening all around
-Boki in a room with explosions happening all around
-an SMW hack with a graphic replacement and some kind of custom blocks I couldn't identify the function of
-a screenshot of what was probably an SMB3 E-Reader level with some kind of platforms I couldn't identify the function of

So I got pretty thin ideas. I think I might also be generally more likely to find inspiration in words than in images.

One thing that might have worked better would be linking to the original video, so you can look at it for context and maybe you opt to refer to something silly raocow said around the time of the screenshot. At least I would have been able to figure out what the custom blocks did and that might have sparked something.

[Rednaxela]

I feel like my experience with the MaFAB2 gimmick was pretty much the opposite of you two. I found it easier to work with than the MaFAB1 gimmick. Two of the images weren't so helpful but four of them had objects/concepts that pretty quickly/easily inspired me. The associations I made were sometimes loose though, but I mean, loose associations are fine. I tend to free-associate in approximate ways pretty readily though in general (to a degree that some teammates find troublesome when I play the game Codenames, hah)

[TaviTurnip]

Yeah I kinda fail to see how the way it works would be troublesome. The only reason I didn't participate is real life was really hammering me for time, unfortunately, but MaFAB's design gimmick looked just as great as the first time around. I'm really looking forward to how people put it to use.

[ano0maly]

Having an open-ended gimmick can be fine, but it still needs some clear instructions. The main MAGLX3 signup looked like a breakdown of how your level will be evaluated, whereas, maybe it's just me but that quoted paragraph I got in my PM for MAFAB2 basically just read "Here, go do it." I need more than that to determine what the host is looking for.

[kitikami]

I think the "I HOPE I WIN" joke in Malicious Militial Madness is actually really clever in how the "JUST KIDDING" hits right as the level itself completely devolves. In fact it is the text of the joke itself that turns the otherwise inoffensive jaunt into a mess. For such an oft-repeated joke, seeing a novel twist that weaves its implementation into the level design itself is surprisingly refreshing.

[Mata Hari]

Deliberately implementing a broken tile from SMW into another engine is somewhat cursed behaviour

[Rixithechao]

Honestly, I agree with ano0maly and Dragon Fogel in that having sources provided with the images certainly wouldn't have hurt things. Being able to interpret and recognize the screenshots isn't the only important part of deriving a workable concept from them, but it is still important, and without that context it kinda gives the edge to long-time viewers and folks who would otherwise be familiar enough with the games to recognize and parse the screenshots. Doubly so for people who teamed up like Chaoxys and me, since between the two of us we were able to source all of our images without too much trouble.

With that said, making your main priority tailoring entries to what the host seems to be looking for or aiming to get the most points possible doesn't really sound like it's in the spirit of the whole thing. And asking for more thorough instructions about how the entries would be judged presumes the judging criteria for MAFAB2 was as concrete or fleshed out as the criteria for the main contest, when raocow outright stated in last night's video that he purposefully made the rubric simple.

Folks have already been arguing at length about how these contests are generally treated more as workshops and exhibitions than straight competitions. But let's take it a step further: I think the MaGLs and MaGLXs work best when approached as engine-specific, long-form game jams. That especially seems to be what the MaFABs are going for with how much more freeform they are compared to the main contest (also didn't the first one happen on extremely short notice and only offer a week-long submission period?)

I've never actually entered a proper game jam like Ludum Dare or the GMTK Jam, but from the outside looking in they seem like fun workshop/exhibition-type things and wellspring for cool and creative game concepts to the point where it's easy to forget their entries are being rated. So with that in mind, I can't help but feel like having the word "contest" in the title and playing up the rankings is ultimately to our own events' detriment.

[raocow]

for what it's worth the modern version of the script *does* source the video titles

capture_006_15032021_152520.jpg (685.46 KiB) Viewed 980 times

[Zygl]

Honestly, I agree with ano0maly and Dragon Fogel in that having sources provided with the images certainly wouldn't have hurt things. Being able to interpret and recognize the screenshots isn't the only important part of deriving a workable concept from them, but it is still important, and without that context it kinda gives the edge to long-time viewers and folks who would otherwise be familiar with the games to recognize and parse the screenshots. Doubly so for people who teamed up like Chaoxys and me, since between the two of us we were able to source all of our images without too much trouble.

I'm... not sure I agree, personally. Knowing the sources does certainly help give some direction if inspiration doesn't immediately strike, but I feel like sourcing them almost defeats the point of taking inspiration from screenshots, y'know?
Plus I can imagine something really funny happening if somebody just kinda guessed what stuff in their screenshots did. There's potential there. Especially since we were explicitly told to use as much or as little from them as we want and just explain what we did; it doesn't have to be based on what's actually there if it's based on what you thought it was.

(Disclaimer: I did enter but I didn't submit anything, I got a screenshot with three big coins and one with the SMB3 slot machine and I didn't have time to build the slot machine boss I was clearly destined to make.)

e: Also re: "the instructions weren't clear enough", I dunno about you but the screenshot PM I got from Sturg very clearly said:

Let me know if you have any questions!

If you didn't let him know if you have any questions that's on you :T

[RudeGuy]

A Familial Meltdown feels like just the kind of joke level i'd expect from these lower tiers: very short with a single joke that also gave me a chuckle. and honestly, i like how it used the names, even if it was in a morbid way.
Malicious Militial Madness felt like a serious level at first, with the 1f0 gimmick, but then the author quickly gave up, it seems. i wonder what happened to him? (i imagine he got bored or something). that said, i think there's potential in using those flameys and bouncers together, i wonder if there's a level down the road that might use it.
as for the other levels, i'm not sure what to say. they all felt kinda lazy.

re: mafab2 gimmick
i think i can see where the people who got troubles with the gimmick come from. i haven't partecipated myself, but if, for example, i had got 6 screenshots of mario walking on a grassland or some other generic stuff, i'd feel pretty bummed. that said, i imagine there was some decision about which screenshots to send, wasn't there?

[Rixithechao]

I'm... not sure I agree, personally. Knowing the sources does certainly help give some direction if inspiration doesn't immediately strike, but I feel like sourcing them almost defeats the point of taking inspiration from screenshots, y'know?
Plus I can imagine something really funny happening if somebody just kinda guessed what stuff in their screenshots did. There's potential there. Especially since we were explicitly told to use as much or as little from them as we want and just explain what we did; it doesn't have to be based on what's actually there if it's based on what you thought it was.

Well, yes, but like, I do remember there were people who sounded like they didn’t know what to do with the hands they were dealt. So maybe not have the sources provided to everyone by default, but they could still be available when asked? idk.

I guess my main thing here is, if having the context is the difference between someone not being able to come up with anything and submitting a boss, I’d rather folks be able to get that info. Even if the resulting inspiration chain reaction snowballs off into something too indirect or detached to count toward the gimmick adherence score, that’s still only one part of the rubric. And, again, at the end of the day it’s Make a Fun Awesome Boss, not Make A High-Ranking Boss.

Of course, this is still all in theory for if the gimmick gets reused in the future. It sounds like the source video of each screenshot wasn’t documented in any way back then, so the info probably couldn’t have been provided for MaFAB2 regardless.