Best Fangames?, What are the best?

Hi, I am DemonSamurai, and I run outer-heaven.co.cc. It is my personal site, which is an outlet for my modding, gamedev and graphical arts hobby, as well as my opinion on those subjects.

The Super Mario series is probably one of the most well-known games out there. It probably also has the largest number of fan made remakes than any other game (with the exception of probably Doom and a few others). But quite a number of Mario fan games have brought a reputation of poorly made, rushed and sometimes just plain lazily made games. Some games are excellent, and, I want to find out what these games are, play them. I will then offer a critique of them on meh blog along with an excerpt about fan games in general.

So, if you lovely people could point me in the direction of what you feel to be "the best of the best of the best sir!"

I also plan on making my own fan game (with help if I can gather it), but that is another story for another time .

Its kind of hard for me to recommend some of the best Mario fan games as most of them are some of the earliest fan games that don't really hold up well today. It was more of a "you had to be there" kind of feeling. For these newer games, I'd definably check out Mario roots, Super Mario Blue Twilight, Mushroom Kingdom Fusion, and Super Mario Theta which I thought was really cool and innovative premise for a fan game which I would expect from an actual Nintendo game.

It's hard because it's all about opinion. Sadly, I have yet to see any "breaking" new fangames.

toad strikes back is a really good one

I've noticed the same thing with most of the fangames I've seen... anywhere, lol... Should see some of the Metroid ones... DAAAANG do they need some work, haha

But I agree with the other guys in here, a lot of them have already had their 15 minutes of fame and now they're just average like the others, or hidden away by the multitude of other games.

Hate that I forgot what it was called, but you played as a gooba with a gun. Aimed with the mouse, and shot at enemies instead of jumping on them as Mario, I thought that was really fun =)

I'd love to point you to the game I'm working on, but it's nowhere near done, but maybe you could still critic the video when we release it?... I know youtube shoots down quality, but I'll be happy to send you the straight AVI file if you get interested =D

This is it.

I agree that this game is good, but I don't agree that this topic is not in the Misc Discussion. Therefore: move.

Keep on discussing.

Yeah see that is what I meant by a certain stigma lol. For every good fangame there is a mountain of poor ones. And no offense to anyone here but, not every remake can be gold. I want to take my selection from 5 games. As I see people mention them I will try them, and those that get mentioned more than once will get top priority .

The excerpt I am writing to go along with the critique will talk about that horrible ratio. In my honest opinion, engines do more to damage remakes than anything. Like the famed UltraMario engine. People have used that to churn out games faster than most people can write a 'hello world' program. When people are forced to do it themselves it usually garners more respect, even if it is sub-par, because they worked hard vs. someone just using someones work. Which will be a major theme in my excerpt.

Anyway, I will try out some of these games everyone has mentioned and go from there.

Many thanks!

I give you the hint to look at the main site and list the Full Games by Score.
Those should be good for the start.

imo some of the games' scores are kinda... inflated

Can't be helped. Some games get good scores even though they're not so great.
But I don't know many games that are great (9/10 worthy) but didn't get a good score.

this could be true if it wasn't for the massive amount of glitches

Maybe Theta is still in Beta.

in case you missed this post

It's hard to say what the "Best fangames" are. It depends on the genre and the reviewers personal taste. There's still many who give games straight 10/10's for the most descriptionless reasons. Aside from that, I haven't really played too many fangames in the past year to say. Most are all made in GM 6.1, which I cannot convert therefore cannot run on vista.

Back in the days of 2003, I remember playing Mario's Mansion 2. The game was insanely difficult(landing on enemies killed you, no savepoints, default platform engine), however I still for some reason enjoyed it. Actually that's why I initially made a mario fan game using paper mario sprites. Times have changed and standards are much higher though. As for mine, sorry I currently do not have any download links for it.( Going though new additions for all levels/then I need to playtest them etc). In due time though.

This post has been edited by kirbyhi5 on Jan 15 2009, 06:29 PM

A great game, although rather violent, would be Mushroom Kingdom Fusion.

SMW: DH
SME 1 and 2
mario quest is hilariously outdated, but it's worth a play because it's the best known mario fangame.

mario pn if anther would ever finish it >:(

Well here is what I am going to do. Since someone said some scores are slightly inflated, so I will play 10 games, and rate them like so


Graphics -

Playability -

Levels -

Bugs - 0 = call an exterminator 10 = no findable bugs

Story -

MFGG Rating -

Outer-Heaven Rating -

It will take a while, cuz I have school, work and everything else, but as soon as I am done, I will post a link! It is also including 5 wolfenstein-3d mods. I expect about 2 weeks total. Until then thought I will also hang out here

oh ho ho, that was witty and i shall admit that i laughed