This was another one of my puzzle games for the Hoover Public Library's game night in a similar vein to the jaunt into Aperture's lab that I presented in a previous few blogs (you're more than welcome to experience Part One, Part Two and Part Three of GLaDOS's escape at these conspicuous links if you're so inclined).
Predating Aperture by a month, Super Mario P.I. was the first time I'd attempted to create a kind of system of puzzles. My template was Goofy's Mystery Tour, which was an awesome event that the Walt Disney World Resort used to put on (and possibly still does, I'm out of the loop). I've always been a huge fan of puzzles, particularly the ones from the golden age of GAMES Magazine that managed to weave some semblance of narrative into them. For a few vastly superior examples of this relatively untouched subgenre, may I suggest The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco by Dennis Shasha and the egregiously incredible The Maze of Games by Mike Selinker.
I'll admit I used an online program to help with the word search in Stage Four and the Criss-Cross of Stage Five, but as I mentioned it was my first time designing puzzles; you have to make the mistakes to learn from them. Daisy's Stage Two puzzle took me a lot longer than it probably should have, but even though the difficulty isn't really there I'm quite proud of my flower. But my favorite one was Peach's Stage Three recipe. Again, the difficulty factor isn't really there but the convolutedness of it really makes me smile. And I had a really good time trying to infuse the dialogue bubbles with the different characters' personalities.
So I'm actually stalling here because blogger will paste the images below on top of the archive listing on the right if I don't pad the paragraphs out. When I presented the game at Game Night, it was mildly successful. I seem to remember a few people figuring out who the culprit was (with a small amount of shortcut abuse).
Nobody found the Star Road on their own. Any takers?
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