A Strange Mission
wye | 2009 | 8 Exits | Download Link
Coming in at just eight exits, A Strange Mission is a fun little hack you can beat over the course of an hour or two. It’s essentially a showcase of different ASM gimmicks that the author had coded over the timespan of a year. The majority of these gimmicks have since found wide-spread use in multiple other hacks, which shows just how popular and influential this hack was around the time it was released. The fact that each level features a different gimmick and therefore a different design philosophy really is a point in the hack’s favor, as it keeps the playing experience from becoming stale. Playing through the hack, I was constantly confronted with new ideas and the way you play each level widely differs from the last one. For example, two of the level gimmicks (having a limited number of jumps available to complete a level, and a level where Mario is surrounded by bombs which cannot touch any walls) forces you to approach each obstacle in a more careful and deliberate way than I would usually do.
I have only a couple of minor criticisms: I don’t think either of the two secret exits of the hack are handled particularly well. For the first one, the player encounters a red level but doesn’t actually have the means to find the secret exit until later in the hack, which was quite confusing. Learning that I had essentially searched every inch of the level for nothing wasn’t very fun, and I actually felt a bit cheated when I later learned that I had completely wasted my time. The second secret exit isn’t hidden in a great way either, since it forces the player to replay a somewhat basic but still quite lengthy auto-scrolling section.
My second quibble is with the final level, which essentially consists of multiple slow-moving autoscrollers in a row. Dying near the end of the level and having to replay these sections that move at a glacial pace did not feel great. It’s unfortunate that this is the final impression of the hack, since the level design of all of the previous levels was pretty alright.
Ultimately, I think this hack is a fun way to spend an afternoon. Despite the fact that the actual design of the hack isn’t particularly noteworthy, and that nowadays a lot of the ASM gimmicks don’t seem as impressive as they did back in the day, it’s still a fun experience. If you want to be uncharitable, you could say that this hack mostly laid the groundwork for other people to use these gimmicks in more interesting and elaborate ways, but I think the hack deserves to be appreciated on its own merits too.