The music really is the highlight of this fangame, but the soulcrushing unfairness that is passed off as difficulty really ruins it. The fangame itself is hindered by what seems to be an evergrowing list of glitches, accompanied by questionable level design that is more frustrating than fun. This is no challenge. If you ever plan on listening to criticism and addressing these difficulty issues, entire levels would have to be reconstructed to deal with this. No one will be interested if you continue designing levels at this same rate of difficulty. Just because there's a pipe, doesn't mean you absolutely have to add a Piranha Plant in it.

As far as this current demo goes, as it should be entitled the "Halloween Demo" and not the "Halloween Version", there are a few issues regarding the map screen. When you select new game, you're taken straight to my revision of your map screen that I sent earlier, the one I designed solely for demo and debug purposes. This wouldn't be a problem, if the levels were actually added to this map screen. Right now the only level you can enter is the Red Switch Palace. You can also enter the Toad House, but no item has been set for the treasure chest, and as a result, this ends with a game-breaking bug that forces you to abort the program and start over. This is more or less my fault, as I added that Toad House, but I didn't add the creation code, and I wasn't sure if you were going to jump on that for me or what. Clearing the Red Switch Palace will take you back to the old, less polished map screen, and from there you can enter the various levels. Gunlava Valley (listed in the source as "Lava Valley") remains one of my favorites, although I honestly can't get past the first half of the room, let alone beat it. It has quite a few leaps of faith here and there, and some enemies, like the YI Bill Blasters that fire the golden Bills, can continue to spawn long after they're out of your line of sight and offscreen. Enemy placement is sketchy, and could really use some work, and the amount of podoboos is absolutely ridiculous. At one point there's a rather large body of lava and several podoboos spanning it. Unsure how to cross, I spin-jumped onto the first, but instead of jumping across the others, which would more or less be impossible, given they appear at different random times, I rode the podoboo straight up and onto a bridge placed high ahead. A YI Piranha Plant can be defeated with a blue grab block placed a few ways back, but at the point I landed on the bridge, with the podoboos and Bullet Bills everywhere, it was much more of a gamble to go after the grab block, leaving me to either take the hit from the Piranha Plant or spin-jump over it (the latter being the more difficult option, but more rewarding as you can keep your current power), or go back after the block, which pretty much ensured an imminent death at the hands of a Bullet Bill. If you can make it past the Piranha Plant, there are red Snifits that can pose quite a big problem, for at this point you have no other option than to think fast, because a Wild Ptooie Piranha lies ahead, and his projectiles will head straight towards you if you're within a close distance of him. This is usually the point where I die, trying to dodge the Ptooie's projectiles and finding myself face to face with one a bit too late. I did, however, make it over it once, only to blindly fall for a bit before landing straight into a pool of lava and dying anyways.

I like your levels. I like your ideas. And I like your designs. And I don't want all this to go to waste. Next time, if you're releasing a demo, it's common sense to remove whatever you were testing, as well as actually testing the demo first.

The problem isn't the challenge; rather, the issue is the game's tendency to derive its difficulty from unfair traps and glitches. Games like The Lost Levels or DKC 2 are tough, but they don't come across as unfairly tough. In contrast, MS has places where the game is just plain frustrating - like the level where you have to make a long jump onto a fast-moving, narrow block, or the several instances where you have to jump down to a lower platform that doesn't come into view until you're about to fall into a pit. Glitches also rear their ugly head in several levels, like the tendency to slide through the bottom of slopes, and I got stuck in a pipe in the Surface Pipelines level. Also, you really should give the game a proper loading screen and intro logo. And please don't use the same lopsided Switch Palace design that everyone uses in Hello Engine games and its derivatives. MI shows great promise - I like the feel of the diverse environments of the islands, for example, and the music fits nicely with the vibe of the game - but it needs a lot more work if you want more than a small niche of people to enjoy your game.

I like the new maps and stuff, but this game is still unfairly difficult - I couldn't get past the halfway point of the second level. Once I lost firepower, I found the YI Piranha Plant (thanks to its enormous sprite mask) to be impassible. Also, this is a game that's in desperate need of saving after every level.