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In spite of its success and huge sales-figures, Super Mario Land tends to be viewed as the black sheep of the Mario platformer lineage, though its only true shortcoming is that it's, well, short. That's why TidusRenegade's Super Mario Land X is so welcome - it's basically a new Super Mario Land game built within the same engine. It's even more welcome if you ever wanted another game like the original Super Mario Land, rather than its sequels, which went off in a very different direction.

Super Mario Land X's normal mode is nicely-balanced and a lot of fun to play through - and true to its description, it maintains a similar level of difficulty to the base game. A number of stages unfortunately do have chunks of level-design that get repeated, but I didn't find that this detracted from my enjoyment of the game.

Unfortunately, I didn't like the hard mode very much, as it's the sort of hard mode that floods the game with enemies and leans towards requiring trial-and-error in order to progress. I much prefer the sort of well-balanced game-design that the normal difficulty-mode provides, but those who enjoy the "kaizo" school of trial-and-error game-design will probably have a good time with this part of the package.

As the game's description notes, Super Mario Land X expects you to know Super Mario Land's unique physics and handling at least decently - if you don't, you probably won't get the best out of it. If you do, however, you're quite likely to enjoy what's on offer here. As the 1993 UK chart-topper Super Mario Land single by the Ambassadors of Funk featuring M.C. Mario said, "There ain't no place like Super Mario Land.", but Super Mario Land X is pretty close if you want more games like it!

I tested this game in the versions of RetroPie for both the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and the Raspberry Pi Zero W, and it worked as described above with both. I also played it on real Game Boy Colour hardware, where it also works as described in my review.

Wow man, this hack is WAY PAST DAEMONIC! Succulent job! Truth be told, I've never even bothered with the normal mode, only the hard mode, because I tried it first and it wasn't even that hard, so I don't feel like disappointing myself with the normal mode. 11/10! (also the dude down in the reviews who said the hard mode is too hard is just not used to harder Mario games, like the real SMB2)

It's good and challenging, but it could have used less repetitive areas especially down the pipes.

Don't go into this hack thinking that it's a typical level hack. The author made two separate patches and those basically amount to different level designs and difficulty setting. The Normal patch more or less is the same difficulty of the original Super Mario Land. Hard Mode is anything but. What I encountered in my playthrough, was almost Kaizo style levels with unfair enemy placement, a lot of holes and gaps that can kill you from simply slipping through them, and the fact that there's a heck of a lot more enemies than normal as well.

With a little tweaking, perhaps I'll try again but for now the Normal difficulty is satisfying me. I felt slightly discouraged as my Mario skills are on point but not with the Hard Mode patch they are. On a positive note, this graphics hack patch is compatible with this as well: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1314/ Just make sure to apply this one after the X patch.