User:Athena Hawkins/Yoshi's Island Hard Mode

Yoshi's Island is honestly one of the easiest Mario titles out there, or at least, that's what I think. However, I was considering here describing how I'd envision a Yoshi's Island hard mode, with some changes to all levels, and how each level would change to become much more of a challenge.

Basic Changes

 * Instead of 20 red coins, 5 flowers and 30 stars, which made for the 100 points of each Yoshi's Island level, there are now 10 red coins, 3 flowers, and only 10 stars, which makes for 100 points as now everything's value doubles. While this seems to make the game easier, the collectibles are in harder to reach locations, and in some cases their old locations now just feature places like star clouds.
 * Thanks to this, the goal ring at the end has two less flowers for the player to land on, yet retains 10 possible landing spaces, which decrease the chances of getting a bonus challenge from 1/2 (5/10) to 3/10.
 * Levels often feature more hazards and less platforms. This includes shorter ground, more bottomless pits, and spike beds appearing as early as 1-3 and lava pools debuting in that level as well.  Thorns, however, appear as early as 1-1, inside the cave section.
 * Levels also feature more minor hazards, including incoming chomps, chomp rocks, and chomp sharks, all of which were somewhat rare before. The chomp rocks are now used to get to higher areas that were previously accessible just from jumping in the original game.
 * Secret areas are less common than before, largely thanks to the shortened amount of collectibles, but those that appear are much harder to find, sometimes doors spawned by hitting thorns with eggs or even over-the-ceiling pipes. Players must still look around with sharp eyes with collectibles.
 * The mini battle houses are still in the levels, but they're either trickier to find or require the player to solve a puzzle beforehand in order to get in, always with a key.
 * The difficulty of the bandit in the houses has sharply increased, throwing balloons much faster, having more health in watermelon seed spitting contest, stomping balloons faster, and has a handicap of five coins in gather coins and has an aggressive A.I. in all of them.
 * As the prizes from the mini battle houses are removed, the prizes are simply extra lives, often one or three.
 * Enemies in earlier levels and in some cases the later levels have been replaced by more challenging enemies to suit hard mode. For example, shy guys that normally appeared in the earlier levels of Yoshi's Island could be replaced by harry hedgehog, or perhaps even bandits.
 * Enemies that serve as major pains such as bandit and tap tap appear more often, appearing in almost every single level. In fact, the levels that feature them feature much more of them (6-2 in bandit's case, 6-4 in tap tap's).
 * There are no longer any red coin carrying enemies to avoid use of the red coin duplication glitch, but enemies holding star clouds still appear, although appear less often. However, at least half of those star cloud holding enemies actually contain something malicious, such as a bandit.
 * Enemies generally move faster.
 * Bosses have more health, new strategies in gameplay, and feature changes that make them much tougher than their original incarnations, including the final boss.
 * When Baby Mario is knocked off the Yoshi's back, the player has half the usual time to get Baby Mario back, which means that even though the star counter is at 10 like usual, the count drops by 2 for every second that passes.
 * Speaking of Baby Mario, when he turns super, his duration super is shorter, although the stars that keep his transformation up and going are more common.
 * Toadies snatch Baby Mario out from a wormhole when the counter is at 0, leaving literally no chance to get him back.
 * The bonus challenges feature the following:
 * FLIP CARDS: 3 Kamek spaces, 2 1-Up spaces, 1 2-up space, and 2 Toadies. If all spaces barring the Kamek ones are hit, the player gains six extra lives.
 * SCRATCH AND MATCH: Identical to original.
 * DRAWING LOTS: 3 Kamek spaces, 2 1-Up spaces, 1 2-up space.
 * MATCH CARDS: Identical to original, but has no awards in the cards. Getting all pairs right earns the player three extra lives.
 * ROULETTE: Can only bet up to ten lives at once, features more multiplication spaces and more zero spaces, which can make bets more insecure to place.
 * SLOT MACHINE: Identical to original, but the slots move way faster.