Just finished playing through this game on “hard” mode over the last couple of nights. Overall, a very fun experience and quite possibly some of the best graphics I’ve seen in a SMB3 hack. I think the primary source of my enjoyment was marvelling at the sheer amount of effort and love that has clearly gone into this hack. It really is a fine tribute to the childhood game we all know and love.

The level design was quite creative in parts - particularly some of the puzzles and unusual uses of blocks and sprites later in the game, however, the first few worlds felt kinda repetitive and oversaturated with powerups (having 6 powerups and 4 lives in 1-1 is perhaps slight overkill).

Other than that, I felt the difficulty scaled quite nicely - I was hovering between 20-30 lives for most of the game, before losing a few in batches in the 8th world which has some long levels (though the 8th world felt kinda short overall?). The game is beatable without savestates, but I admit to using them a couple of times late in the game, not so much out of difficulty, but because a lot of levels seem to be designed to be completed in a certain way and would be peppered with reset pipes for when you failed, which led to a lot of repetitive playing through the same areas.

The boo buddies, electrodes and bullet bills were among my favourite new graphical changes and world’s 5 and 6 were probably the most fun to play. There’s definitely some replay value here, so I think I’ll probably give it another play in the coming months. Congrats on all the hard work and finishing this beautiful project!