Ranking the Hello games

From best to worst:

1. SMB: Shine Expedition
2. SMB: Kingdom Troubles
3. Super Luigi & the Golden Shrooms
4. SMB: Bowser's Terror
5. SMB: Shine Pursuit
6. SMB: Kill Bowser
7. SMB: Adventure Journey
8. SMB: Koopa Chaos
9. Mario's Journey
10. SMB: Dual Dash
11. SMB: Journey to Peach
12. SMB: Mushroom Journey

I've beaten all of them except Super Luigi & the Golden Shrooms (still missing two mushrooms). There are still a lot of Hello games I haven't played yet, so stay tuned in case of future updates for this post. And, of course, I welcome your own rankings.

This should go in the Miscellaneous Discussion

Bottom scratcher: Hello's Engine

it's all the same, slightly modified, but still the same game. It's not as heavily modified as say the people at Valve modify their Half-Life engine, this is literally the same game over and over

A part of me would wish it had never existed

i absolutely LOVED kill bowser

You're right, the tilesets of most for Hello's game are repeating and the player and enemies are always from sma4 and smb3, so the graphics is boring.

He should try maybe making a new game making an engine from scratch. Hmm, a SMB1ish game kinda like SMBDDX would be cool.

Not only the graphics, but the game play as well

I want hello make SMWish game, or games that is not based on mario brothers.

This post has been edited by Saturn on Aug 10 2009, 06:43 PM

I want hello to make an original game.

I think hello is a great game developer. He just needs to tread some new grounds and he'll be even better. He is clearly capable of producing great games, but much like this, a funny joke isn't funny the 30th time.

I'm a certified Hello addict. He does need to use more variety in his games, but they are among the best-crafted games on MFGG. And no one questions he's prolific.

Hello needs more original games. More variety. Although, I will admit that he has been getting a lot better recently.

I would like to see a hello game that uses a new engine with different graphics. I loved his games, but after a while they started getting boring and repetitve.

I don't even see how it is possible to rate his games when it's near impossible to tell them apart.

I envy Hello's (large amount of) motivation.

Yeah, he's a guy who really loves doing this, and you can tell.

Just watch, I'm sure he'll surprise us soon enough.

I think Hello should try make a game with Wario and Waluigi.
Maybe even a game like Toad Strikes Back... starring Toad or Toadette.
It would show that he can do something different too.

You've gotta give Hello credit for creating so many fangames, some of which are pretty good.

As I've stated, I love Hello games, and every few months I'm seized by the uncontrollable desire to go back and play one of his games (especially one I haven't beaten).

However, the more you play Hello's games, the more you notice just how unoriginal and repetitive he can be sometimes. A few examples:
1. As far as I know, Hello has used SMW tilesets exactly 0 times in his fangaming career (every once in a while he slips up and uses SMB 3 tiles instead of Black Squirrel's, and SMB blocks show up sometimes on the bottom of flagpoles). SMB 2 tiles are only used in his now-outmoded SMB 2 Engine.
2. Almost all of his platform games that have overworld maps follow a set pattern. There are almost always four worlds, usually based on Worlds 1, 2, 6, and 8 of SMB 3 (in that order). Moreover, every single one of his games (except the violent ones, which I haven't played) opens with a grassy/hilly level, and the second level is almost universally a cave.
3. As for games that lack overworld maps (Revenge of Bowser, Luigi & the Golden Shrooms, etc.), you can rest assured that certain level types are going to appear - grassy/hilly, cave/underground, desert, pyramid, waterfall, pipe maze, ice, and dark. Forest and sky levels are common, too, and usually there are some fortresses, tanks, and/or airships, too. I just don't see how it could hurt him to do something - anything - new, like a battleship level, a vertically-scrolling tree level, a volcano, a SMB 2-style warehouse, or even a SML submarine/airplane level (I must say Revenge of Bowser has a few innovative levels, including a superb Sunken Ghost Ship).
4. Hello has been using Hammer Suits in his engine since almost the beginning, and every Hammer Suit out of a [?] Block or reserve box still shows a couple of extra blue dots from the original sprite sheet that should've been removed.
5. His game thumbnails almost always include a scene from the opening level. Typically, Mario is jumping in a semi-random way.
6. The first part of the opening level in SMB: Kill Bowser (cross a bridge, climb down a vine, and use a pipe cannon to a higher ledge) has been repeated, with slight variations, at least four or five times in Hello games.
7. The first level in each of his games (the grassy/hilly level) uses the big hills background seen in World 1-2 in SMB 3. (Just about) always. Because most of these backgrounds come from SMA4 instead of SMAS, they tend to look like they've gone through the washing machine 50 times, so they look slightly washed out, especially in comparison to the bold Black Squirrel tiles.
8. Since 2007, virtually every room Hello has designed has been 432 pixels (27 blocks) high. This size works well with the SMW backgrounds, but it is possible to design a level that's just a single screen high every once in a while, or even a vertically-scrolling room (seen only in the final room of SMB: Dual Dash). Also, it's sometimes easy to bypass most or all of such levels using tailpower, and these high rooms increase the risk of lag on slower systems.
9. When he used the Ultramario Engine, several mistakes occurred repeatedly: a laggy HUD display during room transitions, a tendency for Mario to "stall" after running up a slope, and not knowing how to use the castle torch-drawer object. You can figure out how to fix all of these by examining the sample rooms included in the Ultramario Engine (or by asking me). Except Hello never goes back and improves older games, unless it's fixing a major bug. I'd like to see him merge some of his older, shorter games into one bigger game with his latest engine; this should be easier to do once a stable GM 8 is released.
10. In his older games, the same songs show up time after time (especially that SMB 2 remix, which appears at least thrice). And I'm puzzled why he used MP3s for songs from games like Yoshi's Island and Super Mario 64 when identical-sounding (and smaller) MIDIs were available. I love most of his recent Ogg Vorbis music, though.
11. Enemy sprites are always based on SMB 3 designs, and nowadays he avoids using SMW sprites even for SMW-exclusive enemies (Rex, Rip Van Fish, etc.). Banzai Bill, oddly, is the lone exception. He doesn't have to do the same thing every time.

But why should I even complain? Hello has given us more great games than any individual MFGGer probably ever will. Hello's are the only fangames that consistently come close to being as good as the originals. And the great Hello Engine 3 lets us all make games relatively easily, and even if it's overused, at least no beginner is going to spend two hours trying to get their jumping Paratroopa not to fall through the floors.

You forgot to mention Bowser's Recruitment in the rankings.