STAR ROAD ROUGH DRAFT v1.1

Super Mario Star Road begins, in direct contrast with Super Mario 64, by dropping the player directly into the game without any semblance of a story.  Although this might seem like a poor choice, it’s important to highlight that the player base of Star Road is entirely comprised of people who have already played Super Mario 64.  As such, wasting the time of already experienced players with tutorials and cutscenes is only a poor choice.  The game benefits greatly from allowing the player to begin the actual game seconds from loading the file.  In a similar line of reasoning, Star Road offers the player 3 main courses, 1 secret course, and a hidden star all directly accessible from the very beginning of the game, in direct contrast with the required star in Bob-omb Battlefield in Super Mario 64.  This greatly speeds up the beginning, making Star Road even more replayable than Super Mario 64 was.


This takes us to the first set of accessible levels.  These levels are easily some of the best made found throughout the entire game.  The first one players are likely to come across, Piranha Plant Pond, does an excellent job of this.  The first star requires side-flips, wall kicks, or some other form of a high jump in a tight space.  Although this tower is as forgiving as can be, it still requires more precise movement than anything seen in Mario 64, even extending into the late game.  Likewise, long jumps and wall kicks are required in Bob-omb Islands, even though the worst that can occur from this is getting dropped into the water.  The hidden level even goes as far as to require a triple jump dive, something rarely if at all utilized within the original Mario 64.  I think requiring more dextrous movement from the start but still within safe areas is a genius decision and helps elevate Star Road above other hacks from the very onset.


My first major gripe with this game, then, comes from Skyland Resort.  Skyland Resort, unlike the other levels, has bottomless pits that can instantly kill the player.  While the actual difficulty of the platforming is roughly equal with the other courses at this point, the more punishing design of this level is enough to set it off of the difficulty curve by a long shot.  I’d be remiss to neglect that Mario 64 attempted something much similar with Whomp’s Fortress, but the execution in this case was much better.  In Whomp’s Fortress, few of the jumps actually fall directly over the void; instead, most drop the player back to lower parts of the level.  The spread out nature of Skyland Resort means this is almost never the case, and that makes this level much more punishing than it should be.


The later levels in the first main hub area do a fine job of upping the ante from the levels prior, Gloomy Garden more so than Chuckya Harbor.  Both levels require much more out of the player than the levels prior, sometimes even more so than levels later.  This is a fine step, since it requires the player to truly perfect the controls of mario before allowing the player entry into the challenges to come.  This allows the designer to assume total competency with the controls as early as stage 6, which allows for much more creative and challenging level design to be placed earlier on.  However, it’s disappointing that Chuckya Harbor is as forgiving as it is, where Skyland Resort was too punishing.  Later on, Large Leaf Forest is way too forgiving for the location in the game it comes at.  This is a trend throughout all of Star Road.  While Skelux does a good job slowly requiring more and more dexterity of the player, he fails to gradually increase the punishment for missing a jump.  The result is a difficulty curve that spirals out of control throughout the game.  However, it’s not a big issue since, as I’ve said, the actual challenges themselves increase in difficulty logically.


The last thing worthy of note at this stage of the game is the cap switches.  The placement of the first two cap switches within Star Road is perfectly fitting.  The first 3 stages do a fantastic job at tantalizing the player with the unavailable cap blocks, even more so than the earlier stages of Mario 64.  The player is made abundantly aware, come Chuckya Harbor and Gloomy Garden, which stage contains the cap switches.  Within the stages however, the cap switches are extremely well hidden.  The fact that players of Star Road know that the cap switches exist allows the game to get away with hiding them as well as it did.  The locations themselves are ingenious; they take a gimmick already introduced to the player and follow it to its natural conclusion.  The same can be applied to the other secrets levels of Star Road as well as the toad stars; all of them encourage exploration to a much further degree than Mario 64 ever did.  The final 9 stars are the natural culmination of these secrets, and, although sometimes a bit excessive, their creative placement made for a good bonus after collecting the other 121 stars.


The first Bowser stage is enjoyable and well designed, but relatively unremarkable compared to previous stages.  The most important thing to note about the level itself is the choice to go for a unique boss fight, which is a welcome shift from the overuse of Bowser fights in Mario 64.  The actual level is a perfect example of the effective usage of color in Star Road.  The entire level is painted with heavy use of greens and browns which really sells the swamp environment.  Care was taken in selecting the color pallet in each and every one of the levels, whether its the use of light blue and white in Skyland Resort or the use of black and dark gray in Bob-omb Battle Factory.  All in all, the art of this hack really brings the levels alive, as does the music custom to each stage.  The vastly improved art and music found in the game would not have been possible without the added capabilities of modern emulators, and Star Road certainly takes full advantage of this.


And so, we finally enter the castle.  The level design choices here is much in line with that present in the second main overworld area of Mario 64.  Most of these levels serve to provide meat to the game before bringing out the more creative level designs towards the end of the game.  It was effective in Mario 64, and it remains effective in Star Road.  Looking closer at the actual levels, the shell ride and baby penguin in Melting Snow Peaks, the tornados in Koopa Valley, and the crazy box in Mad Musical Mess stand out as creative implementations of game mechanics that went completely unutilized in the original Mario 64.  Even the levels that are only platforming have enough variety in the terrain to fully utilize Mario’s movement.  Lastly, particular attention must be made towards Mad Musical Mess.  Although brutishly difficult for only around half way through the game, Mad Musical Mess is an incredibly creative stage that is truly the pinnacle of level design in Star Road.  Not only is the stage memorable for its absurdity, but the stars themselves are creatively designed to reflect the stage, the highlight being shooting out of the end of a flute to reach a star.  The middle game culminates the Retro Remix Castle, a level that is creative both in the environment and the use of Mario’s movement, much like most of the middle game in Star Road.  All of this serves to create a varied and enjoyable middle game that might even rival Mario 64’s.


It is unfortunately at the end of the game where the level design of Star Road begins to fall apart.  Before the negative tone shift, I wish to note that most of the praise so far still applies to the end game.  The levels are still vibrant, creative, and enjoyable to play like previous levels.  The problem here stems from the level design itself in these final 5 levels.  In what I can only conclude was an attempt to make the end of the game harder, most of the levels here involve much more linear content.  Although the levels are still technically open world, the level design removes all potential for alternative routes present in earlier stages, instead opting for essentially immutable routes to each of the stars.


To show what I mean, I’ll go through the stars of Colossal Candy Clutter one by one.  The first star requires the player to race a penguin down a slide.  The only reasonable way to reach the penguin is taking a pole from the left of the starting area, and then jumping to the platform on the left.  The second star is nothing more than a linear set of platforming challenges culminating in the star on top of the candy pile.  The only reasonable route to reach this star is to travel first into the town, up the stairs, scale the right tower in one of two ways, and lastly navigate to the top of the left tower from there.  The third star, requiring the player to locate 5 secrets, is the only one here that truly has multiple possible paths, but the only area to control is the town area which amounts to only about half of the entire level.  The fourth star requires nothing more than a cannon shot.  There is exactly one cannon and there’s one massive target to shoot to, so there’s really only one way to do this star too.  The fifth star is at the end of another focused platforming section, only this time up near the penguin of star one.  Again, no alternative routes exist for the star, the only challenge is for the player to reach the top of the poles. Although the red coin star is of acceptable quality in Colossal Candy Clutter, the red coins only exacerbate this problem in other levels, where often the red coins are placed in obvious locations along a linear path, amounting to no difference from one of the other stars.  This problem is exemplified in stars from both Fatal Flame Falls and Cloudrail Station that require the player to do nothing but allow a platform to transport them to a star.  At least in Colorful Coral Caverns the boat added some novelty to this experience.


I wish to mention though that these platforming challenges are not poorly designed.  The majority of them are still fun to play even with the slight hiccups.  The point I wish to make here is that, in an attempt to make the stars more challenging, all semblance of exploration was lost.  Mario 64 is beloved primarily for its level design allowing for multiple valid routes through a level; this is one of the biggest advantages in designing a 3D game.  Star Road, although off to a good start, fails to capitalize on this in it’s final 5 levels.


This aside, Star Road at times feels like two separate games.  One one half, Star Road offers exploration beyond what was present in Mario 64, and levels that are more open and more interesting to explore.  On the other, Star Road is a game offering platforming challenges that truly stress the most out of the impressively complicated physics engine in Mario 64.  The issues come in the weak and often non-existent connection between the two competing styles of gameplay.