Just finished World-e. The fact that I took like a 2-week break with little justification is probably a pretty good indicator that this is the weakest Nintendo-created Mario platforming content up to this point ^^;
It's fine, though. It has its high points.
Anyway, on to SM64DS next, because it's so much more different from the original than the other remakes that it would be a crime to skip for this not-quite-marathon. But that'll be tomorrow, I'm sleepy now.
On that note, while I'm playing on actual hardware right now, I first played these a long time ago on VBA and the input lag was *bad*. Since SMB3 note blocks require you to time your jump rather than let you hold it like SMW, that made this way more annoying than it should have been.
The most recent time I played was on mGBA, though, and that was far less a problem, mGBA is great, y'all~
...also why have i played world-e so many times it's aggressively average what am i
Seriously, "the floor is all note blocks that progressively become more randomly-placed" is such a Mario Maker level gimmick and it's really silly to see it in an official product.
Anyway, the levels are nothing extraordinary but getting all the Advance and e- coins is where the *real* challenge here lies.
This is basically DLC, but instead using a physical peripheral that isn't the cheapest. Kind of a hard sell. Its failure is pretty unsurprising.
I wonder how many plans there were for potential future levels that got canceled. TCRF says that the World-e castle has a 2nd and 3rd floor accessible if you have 9 or 17 e-Coins respectively, but you can only get 8 with the released levels. And so many never even left Japan, only 3 e-Coins were originally available in the US.
The World-e levels certainly exist. They're not like super bad-bad but their whole "borrow enemies/items/etc. from other Marios" gimmick has been done so much better in so many fan projects. :P
I think raocow put it pretty well in the last episode of his LP of these levels: "it's kinda funny to think that if nintendo was in the business of doing rom hacks, they'd be pretty bad at it. like this is a bottom-tier rom hack experience. but it's interesting because it's official."
Zeal