Super Mario Bros. Odyssey
| Super Mario Bros. Odyssey | |
|---|---|
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| Developer(s) | Smbmaster99 |
| Announce Date | May, 10th 2012 |
| Release Date | Feb, 9th 2014 (Chapter 1) |
| Genre | Platform |
| Players | 1 |
| Input | Standard keyboard |
| Medium | Game Maker |
| Platform | Windows |
| Status | Chapter 1 complete, series on hold |
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Super Mario Bros. Odyssey was named Game of the Month in February 2014. |
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Super Mario Bros. Odyssey is a series of Mario fangames by Smbmaster99 that retell the story of the first few Mario games, with new cutscenes, ideas, levels and graphics, amongst other things. The series was originally intended to be released as a complete package with all Chapters included, but decided to take an episodic format after the developer realized how ambitious the idea was.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 is a retelling of the first Super Mario Bros story, which sees Mario and Luigi, then no more than simple plumbers, begin their never-ending quest to maintain peace in the Mushroom World. It features both Mario and Luigi as playable characters with different abilities and attributes, a cutscene system to tell the story, highly colorful visuals, Star Medals which can be collected to unlock 8 secret levels, and a level select, which is unlocked by beating the game. If the player gathers a total of 10,000 normal coins, then an 8-Bit Mode is unlocked, which renders all the graphics, sound effects, and music to retro NES-style representations.
Being based on the first Super Mario Bros game, its level design is rather linear. However, Smbmaster99 used a large number of decorative tiles to make the levels seem much more appealing on the eyes, and tried to make each level feel unique and fun, which it was praised for. Every level is fairly lengthy, sometimes split into multiple parts with varying terrain (E.G. the level starts on a mountain side, transitions to an underground portion inside the mountain, then ends on a sandy beach on the other side of the mountain).
Some levels are too long however, which is one of the main points people brought up when being critical of the game. For example, the next-to-last level, which has a rather high difficulty, is 3 sections long and has a boss fight at the end. Initially it was only 2 sections and a boss fight at the end, but it was so long that it became too difficult, so Smbmaster99 shortened it. Even so however, the first section of the level by itself is over 50,000 pixels wide (at least 156 times the width of the game's horizontal viewport), which for comparison, the longest single level in Super Mario Bros 1 for the SNES was 6,256 pixels wide.
Series' Current Status and Future
Super Mario Bros Odyssey is still on hiatus while the developer works on other projects, but he has expressed concern with its name, as the official Super Mario Odyssey by Nintendo has now been released. Smbmaster99 still plans to work on the fangame, but aims to re-title it before reintroducing it to the public so it will be less susceptible to possible DMCA takedowns. He has said that he is thinking about scrapping the chapter system altogether and just making a bigger, higher quality fangame with references to what would have been chapters following Chapter 1, and brimming with content.
