Game:

Super Mario World (1990)

Duration: 11:42

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School is in, children. This is exactly how you don't make a pipe maze. Let's review some bullet points, shall we?

1. Having the entire level terrain consist of 7 million pipes, only some of which can be entered. The player should not have to waste time bashing their head against the ceiling and ducking every two steps to check which pipes can actually be used.
2. Having there be too many pipes that can be entered. If there's too many paths in the maze, it's going to become too much of a bog to navigate. This problem is immensely compounded when stacked with the previous one.
3. Having there be multiple rooms that look identical. This is a crime in pretty much any situation, as the player doesn't realize they are going in circles. Sure, the player might catch on when they notice that some coins are 'respawning' and some aren't, but until then, they'll be driving themselves insane.
4. Having the rooms be a pain in the posterior to navigate. If you're going to force the player to repeatedly retread the same ground, that ground had better be danged interesting and fun to replay. This is almost impossible to do, and you certainly aren't going to do it with tight, repetitive corridors filled with way too many obstacles.

This level fails all four of these points, creating a highly concentrated batch of awfulness. The most irritating thing about levels like these is that they only take two or three minutes to beat when you know how. Figuring them out, on the other hand, is just a half-hour slog of boringness and tedium. This level is a blight on an otherwise very good hack.

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