The incredible incorrectness of this opinion is astonishing.
The new characters are probably the biggest feature to 2.0.
No. It's 100% the ability to add your own new blocks, NPCs, HUD elements and other such things, with lua support. The new characters wouldn't of even been possible without lua support.
From my experience, each character is not fun to play as, and/or feel like they don't belong in the game period
I think this is a commonly passed around idea the entire community. They're all getting revamed in the future, so you should expect for them to be at least marginally improved.
Lack of New Built-In Episode
This just sounds like laziness. Just look for episodes on the forums. Times have changed, internet speeds have vastly increased and it's incredibly easy to get what you want.
Mario Challenge is a mode that allows users to play a shuffled set of levels from episodes. I don't see why this mode benefits the game and it doesn't seem like it would make for a good casual experience either with hard/kaizo levels in the mix.
It might not be interesting for you, but it also is interesting to other people. It doesn't have to benefit just you for it to benefit the game; there are people out there that it was made for. It wouldn't be made if it didn't have an appeal.
Attempting to remove the title screen as a whole will only hinder the controller support much further. Instead of simply starting the game, players will need to select the episode or battle stage they want to play on with a mouse.
This literally just screams "I'm lazy and want to select everything with my controller, because I can't be bothered to move my hand to the mouse".
When entering a level, the game used to play the "level start" jingle and display how many lives you have left. However, this has been replaced with a silent "X2" logo at the bottom right.
This is a massive nitpick. You can see your lives in-game anyways, and a single sound effect isn't going to change anything. Loading screens can be customized with lua anyways.
SMBX is over 10 years old at this point, and it's clear that some major improvements should be made, such as make the jump to modern resolutions and widescreen, the framerate being reworked to 60FPS
That would require insane amounts of work for such a minimal payoff + backwards compatibility would be lost with older episodes.
Also, SMBX already runs above 60 FPS.
the Koopa Troopas should come out of their shells after being jumped on, the Mushroom should NEVER move left after hitting a ? block (that's just bullshit and you know it), boxes with multiple coins should be based on a timer rather than a fixed amount, and various other trivial problems and oddities.
This can simply be fixed / changed / added by code made by the community. Take
MrDoubleA's Extended Koopa Troopas for example.
but if they're attempting a 100% compatibility (which has to be impossible at this point)
It's literally not impossible. If it were impossible then it wouldn't be done.
then none of the problems will be fixed, and any potential improvements will never see the light of day.
Every "problem" you mentioned is either:
1. Not needed to be fixed.
2. Is able to be fixed by the user of the program.
"SMBX 2.0 is an update that adds unnecessary characters, lacks a new campaign, introduces more problems, and while it makes a few improvements, fails to move forward because of its insistency on backwards compatibility."
This is the most elitist, ungrateful shit I've ever heard about SMBX2.
but I refuse to believe this is an update worthy of the "2.0" name.
What gives you the right to even
say this? Do you realize how much effort has been put into SMBX2? All the new custom enemies, blocks, features, and coding support... everything they've added isn't worthy of "2.0"??
so I think it's fair for us, the community, to expect a little more.
A lot of great things have been added in SMBX2, and a lot of great things are to come. Plus the community [not the devs!] have made a LOT of fantastic stuff you can use RIGHT NOW, which you would realize if you just looked around for 5 minutes.
I didn't write this just to rant to the developers; I also wrote this because I enjoyed SMBX and want a reason to come back. Until an actually groundbreaking update comes to SMBX, I have no reason of returning to the scene.
If you can't continue to use SMBX2 despite all the new additions they've made to it, despite the actual MANY great updates they've made to the base SMBX core, despite all the new content that the community has made for use within SMBX2... then I can simply say that this community is not for you. We shouldn't have to
give you a reason to use SMBX at all. You make your own reason, no matter if it's creating episodes and levels, creating graphics for everyone to use, or creating new code structures, NPCs and other such stuff for people to utilize. You give SMBX purpose. Not us. If you fail to give SMBX your own purpose then I would suggest for you to move onto different things.
This "critical review" is the complete opposite of what a review should be: it barely mentions anything good that SMBX2 introduced while having either elitist views on certain things, discussing things that can be changed
by the user, or just straight up nitpicks.
If you want to do an actual critical review, then look at SMBX2, go through all of it, look at all of the features, and then come back and write a FAIR critical review. Thank you.