A Plumber For All Seasons
wye | 2021 | 41 Exits | Download Link
The first thing you’ll notice when playing A Plumber For All Seasons is just how pretty it looks. The hack takes place on the same island throughout the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Each season is represented by lovingly handcrafted graphics depicting fields, caverns, and forests. The author spent roughly nine years polishing and iterating on his vision, and that effort really shows in all the small graphical details. I especially love the rain and snow particle effects, which look simply stunning. This type of effect is hard to achieve in SMW romhacks, in part due to the technical limitations of the SNES hardware, and a lot of the ones I’ve seen in the past tended to look somewhat static.
Of course, the hack also has other things going for it in addition to the graphics: The music, comprised of custom compositions made especially for the hack, is very well put together and the level design, while staying on the easy side throughout the entire playtime, is always engaging. While the difficulty does increase in the later half of the game, there are always more than enough powerups to find to make the hack accessible even for newer and less experienced players. At the same time, the hack is also engaging for old hands. The variety of the level layouts, as well as the creative ways in which the obstacles are presented, always keep your attention, even if you’re casually breezing through a stage. The hack also features a neat system using the five star coins that can be found in each level. Collecting these star coins gives you access to one extra bonus level per world, which is a nice incentive to go out of your way to look for them.
I only have a couple of minor quibbles with the hack. For one thing, I’m really not a fan of the custom dynamic hud that pops in and out every time you get a one-up, a star coin, or a regular coin. I’m guessing that the thought process behind it is that only the information is displayed that is relevant to what is currently happening on screen. However, I found it quite distracting that something was constantly moving in my peripheral vision, and I took a couple of unnecessary hits because it distracted me, especially in the first world of the hack. Maybe I’ve been playing these hacks for so long now that anything that’s moving on screen registers as a potential threat? While I did get used to it eventually, and it wasn’t a problem at all during the final stages of the hack, I kept wondering what was so bad about the vanilla hud (or not having any hud at all).
I also think that any hack that puts a heavy focus on exploring the entirety of the level for potential secrets like one-ups or star coins is likely going to run into issues where the path splits in two and the player has no idea which path leads to a bonus and which path leads to progress. There are a couple of ways to design around this issue, such as making the bonus path harder to reach or more obscure in some way, and while this hack successfully employed them in a couple of instances, on more than one occasion I found myself backtracking through a level for a star coin I’d missed because I had mistakenly taken the “wrong” path. These nitpicks aside, A Plumber For All Seasons really is a great hack. I think the ultimate goal for a certain subset of romhackers seems to be to create an experience that could pass for an actual commercially viable game, maybe even something that Nintendo could have released themselves. This hack certainly feels like it achieves just that - It feels like a complete experience. For that reason, I think it’s an easy recommendation for anybody, no matter their skill level.