Occasionally, I see pack creators describing the difficulty of their ranks in comparison to the original ranks. For example, the first rank is "between Tame and Fun", the second may be "late Fun to early Tricky", and so on. Since a lot of packs have more than the original four ranks, but fewer levels per rank,
for the last one you usually find a description like "Sunsoft" or "way beyond Sunsoft" in that case.
Having now played through almost the entire Sunsoft rank (which I probably should have done a lot earlier, I admit ^^), I'm a little bit confused by what that's supposed to mean
. I used to think "well, duh, it just means 'as difficult as it possibly gets'", but many forum packs are already much more challenging on lower ranks than a lot of stuff I got to see in that rank.
Of course, when referring to the original Sunsoft rank, one has to factor in the execution difficulties that are rendered irrelevant in NeoLemmix. But I was still expecting more of the puzzly-type of levels that many forum members have come to appreciate - level creators must be getting their inspirations from somewhere, I guess, so I thought the "secret" Sunsoft levels were where everyone had learned their tricks from.
Instead, a lot of what I got to see were either X of everything levels, providing the player with way too many skills to make the level challenging - or levels that were more akin to what I knew from the "Troll" rank in nin10adict's CasuaLemmings.
"Everybody turn left", "Private room available", "I am A.T."... seriously? It's obvious right from the getgo what the player has to do, and it's not only a difficult execution, but also extremely repetitive.
(No offense to nin10adict here, I know that for the Troll rank, this was done on purpose
! )
There were a couple of exceptions, like "Anxiety", which I haven't managed to solve yet, or the 28th level, right before "I am A.T.", this gate-trap thing (forgot the exact name).
But overall, I don't really consider the Sunsoft rank something to aspire to anymore when trying to create difficult levels of my own.
Perhaps it's just because I don't like 10-of-everything levels, but I'll explore that in a separate thread...