The Malstrom Discussion Thread

[Mr Khan]

LordTheNightKnight said:

Mr Khan said:

And this is what i don't grasp entirely. "Star Finder" Mario was more about freedom initially, and retained that to a degree in Sunshine and Galaxy 1. It was Galaxy 2 that really went with the "Hamster in a maze" route, and that was in deliberate effort to approach 2D Mario, which isn't as free-form as we're emphasizing.

The Galaxy 2 route is correct, but what they need to do is seamlessly integrate between stages: you keep powerups "permanently" as you move between levels, allowing you to play differently, but the linearity of Galaxy 2 was not at fault in that case.

The alternative to restoring freedom to 3D Mario is to go back to the Mario 64 standard, where you're just put in a sandbox and can pursue some stars out of order

I stated that it started with 64, and why.

Ahh, but Tick-Tock Clock would be my example of freedom in that game. To this day i remember how i got the second star in that world by accident, not by running the gauntlet of swinging pedulums, but by making a strategic long jump from a higher platform. You didn't have to stop the clock for any of them, really, it just made it different every time, and indeed two stars (numbers 4 and 5 i believe) required you to have it running. Some of the tricks you could pull in 64 were unintentional sequence breaking (like the easy way to get 100 coins on tall tall mountain: go through the inside secret slide, then ignore the star at the end and start back up the mountain), but it's there nonetheless