Well, at least this one wasn’t really your fault. Don’t get in the habit of just mindlessly pressing a direction in a hallway though, remember that you can only see tiles directly adjacent to you there.
The symbol thing is how you get the clones for Impa. Using a Strong Attack (X button) on an enemy that you placed a symbol on absorbs the symbol. If you use your Special attack (the super attack that you build up the yellow meter and press A to use) it will be more powerful if you have more symbols absorbed.
Some of the other characters in this are pretty crazy in similar ways!
Jeff is TOTALLY right in his argument with Ben about the tips system for a puzzle game. It happened exactly like that with Spelunky 1 with the eggplant: nobody knew what it was for until somebody datamined the graphics and saw the Yama eggplant head, shared it with other people in the community, and the entire mystery was suddenly and irrevocably ruined. Fortunately, the sheer difficulty of accomplishing it made that event still exciting, but it could have been so much better if it was discovered organically. In one of the expansions for The Binding of Isaac there was a secret character with a cryptic method of unlocking that required the community to work together to combine a bunch of images that players would uncover piece-by-piece, and then somebody found the completed image in the game's files, spread it publicly, and the mystery was gone forever and Edmund McMillen said he would never do something as cryptic as that again because of how easily it was ruined.
@gundato: I've seen it happen before in SMB1 (in fact Justin Wong the fighting game tournament player streamed SMB1 last week and had it happen to him!) so it's not something special to this game. I don't think it's intended behavior, must be a quirk of how Hammer Bros. hitboxes work or something.
Brad's best bet for a fire flower is actually in 8-1, there are two more powerups hidden there. Not in invisible blocks, I'll tell you that much.
@forteexe21: It's certainly possible the game was simultaneously in development as the fan-based similar game, but there's a long history of Nintendo threatening fan-developers who aren't making profits off their projects, and then (coincidentally) an official Nintendo version of an extremely similar game being released very shortly after.
I suppose my biggest issue is how unneccesarily vicious Nintendo is toward fan developers. Contrast Nintendo's "That's OUR IP, you scumbags, and we'll destroy you in court" with with Sega's approach of "Well, legally we have to shut you down, but what you did was pretty cool! We may have some job openings for you on one of our teams!" and it's not hard to see why people don't always accept Nintendo's responses at face value.
The two cases I can think of are this Mario Battle Royale game and the Metroid 2 remake, and if you think the time between the takedowns and the release of the official product in either of those cases was enough to make an entire game, I've got a bridge to sell you.
I'm cool with the game using the 35 players' choices to form the level pool, but it definitely weights later levels to appear toward the end of the queue, so if you picked an interesting level like 8-2 or 6-3, it has a very high likelihood of not appearing until you've gone through 30 other levels, most of which are World 1 over and over. Most games are finished already by that point; even if you are good enough to survive that long, you need somebody else to survive that long too or else you'll never see it. Couple that with the fact that in order to unlock a new level choice you must have cleared either the level itself after somebody else picked it, or every previous level in the game, and it means you can go 10-20 games without even having a chance of unlocking anything new. I've been stuck trying to unlock World 6 levels for a few days now.
When I'm just trying to accomplish shortcuts there is no way I ever anger shopkeepers. Why risk death against a super-powered, unpredictable opponent in every single level?
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