Took me a little under 14 hrs to beat it, and another hour and a half to get the remaining exits.
This is the 2nd time I've beaten it, with the prior time being on a borrowed cart from a friend 20+ years ago. I'm normally not a fan of platformers, but I had fun with this. Having save states with the Classic Edition is nice as it is a time saver, not needing to go back to areas with either the item you want or if you feel the need to farm lives. Speaking of lives, as with Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, what's the point of having them if you get put back to the default 5 when you reload a file? In the same vein, what's the point of points if you start at zero when you reload?
The levels are almost too short, but there is a good variety of them and you get a change of pace with decent frequency. None of them were too difficult, with Soda Lake being the biggest challenge for me. I only had to look up a couple secret exits, but those were just to get the time constraint to trigger the secret exit and for some reason it didn't dawn on me to go UNDER the goal to get the other exit (I tried going over it, though). At the end, I just looked up the Star Road secret exits (I don't know why I didn't search for secret exits, even though I found the Special World). I did spend about 10 min going around trying to figure out what the 1 exit I was missing, only to realize I never took out Larry's Castle, just skipping to Bowser. D'oh! After playing through it, I do remember being told all those years ago to find the Back Door, and I can see why (although most of the areas are pretty easy). I actually don't think I even tried the Front Door the first time I played it.
That's really all you get for finding all 96 exits? Absolutely nothing in game? Just a star by the file? Really??? I mean, with Super Mario 64, at least you get a bunch of utterly useless lives for getting 120 Stars; and with TLoZ:Ocarina of Time, you get the utterly useless bag of infinite rupees for getting all the Skulltulas (or whatever they're called)....
