Tag: design

Retro Game Mechanics Explains Mario 3’s Minigames

Let’s get the video embed out of the way first. Pow!

Super Mario Bros. 3 has two significant minigames (outside of two-player mode), and the inner workings of both are explained in this video.

In most worlds there are “Space Panels,” which provide a slot machine minigame for extra lives. If you’ve ever tried them, you might have noticed that it’s extremely difficult to win anything at it. Well, the video explains why that is: there’s a significant random element to stopping the wheels. In particular, the last wheel has so much randomness in when it actually stops that it’s actually completely random what it’ll stop on! So much for timing!

I have a theory (which I explain in a comment on that video) that the slot machine game was made so random because of the quality of the reward (it’s possible to earn up to five extra lives at it), and because they had played around with life-granting minigames before. Doki Doki Panic, which got reskinned for overseas markets at Super Mario Bros. 2, has a slot machine game, “Bonus Chance,” that appears after every level. With good timing and practice Bonus Chance can be mastered, earning up to five extra lives for every coin plucked in the level. I have managed to abuse that game to earn so many extra lives that the game ran out of numbers for the tens’ digit of the life counter, sending it into letters of the alphabet. There’s certainly no danger of that in Super Mario Bros. 3.

The second minigame has the player match cards from a grid of 24. Each pair of cards found earns a modest prize, from as little as 10 coins up to a single extra life. Most of the awards are powerups for the player’s inventory. The player gets two tries, but if they don’t clear the board it’ll carry over to the next time they play. Attempts at the card matching board appear every 80,000 points the player earns, making it the only Super Mario game to actually reward scoring lots of points.

The card matching game is one of the most interesting minigames in all of the Mario series. There’s only eight layouts for the cards, the second and fifth cards of the middle row are frequently both the 1UP card, and the last three cards on the bottom row are always Mushroom, Flower and Star, in that order. This means the minigame can be mastered, and even if you don’t memorize all eight layouts to deduce where the prizes are, knowing the three cards that never change usually means it won’t take more than two or three attempts to clear the board, netting lots of powerups.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained looks into why the card matching game works the way it does, and discovered some interesting things. There’s actually code in the game to do a much more thorough randomization of the cards, but it goes unutilized. The full details are in the video, but in summary:

  • The board always begins in the same state,
  • the last three cards on the bottom row are left unchanged, probably on purpose,
  • the first way the other cards are scrambled shifts them one space in sequence, and is only done one or three times, three times in total,
  • and the other method of scrambling them, which involves swapping around three specific cards, is done exactly once between each shift.

The only variation in the steps is from the choice of whether to shift once or thrice, each of those three times. Thus, there are only 23 possible layouts, that is, 8. There is a loop in there to potentially vary the number of times the cards are swapped (the second way to scramble the cards), but the way it’s written the loop is never used, and the cards are swapped only once each time.

All of the layouts for Maro 3’s card matching minigame, from the Nintendo Power guide. “The key is concentration” alludes to the traditional card game “Concentration,” which is played in a similar manner.

What I also find interesting is, this isn’t the only Nintendo to use a minigame that involves mixing up hidden prizes. Kid Icarus’ Treasure Rooms also have a limited number of layouts, which vary for each of the game’s three worlds. The player can open pots in the room to collect minor items, but if they open the wrong pot early, before opening all the others, they find the God of Poverty, and lose everything they’ve found. If they can save that pot for last, though, the final pot will instead contain a pretty good prize, which can even be a Credit Card item that cannot be obtained otherwise.

The way they’re designed, both Mario 3’s card-matching game and Kid Icarus’s Treasure Rooms have tells, specific spots that can be revealed to identify which of the limited number of boards that version of the game is using, and that the player can use to get all the prizes. Also, there are Nintendo-published guides that reveal all the layouts, in Nintendo Power for Kid Icarus (recounted on this charmingly old-school webpage), and the Nintendo Power guide for Super Mario Bros. 3 (on page 10), so Nintendo had to have been aware of the limited nature of the board layouts, and may have actually intended them to be defeated with a good strategy.

SMB3 Roulette & Card Matching Games Explained (Youtube, 20 minutes)

The Design of A Robot Named Fight

For this perceptive podcast, I sat down with Morningstar Game Studio’s Matt Bitner to talk about the development of A Robot Named Fight, and his next game Kop Killer 22xx. We discussed the challenges of creating the structure of Fight, from procgen to balance, and then talked about his plans for Kop Killer.

Masahiro Sakurai talks about Kirby Air Ride

Just about everyone respects Masahiro Sakurai! I’m no different! He’s made some wonderful games, and even his more obscure works are really cool and fun!

I’ve linked to his series on game design before, released on Youtube with Nintendo’s help. It’s really popular! We try not to link too frequently to the same series or blog, instead waiting to find something in it that connects with me personally, in the hopes that whatever it is will be something that connects with my readers as well, and that’s why I’m linking to him talking a bit about Kirby Air Ride.


Like The Speed Rumbler, I feel like I have to say something really specific and detailed about KAR. (What a cool and appropriate acronym, both in the context of Kirby and Speed Rumbler!) Especially City Trial, which I think is just waiting for some interested party to revisit an expand. In the meantime though, enjoy Sakurai talking about what may be the most unique Kirby game, even in a series containing Star Stacker, Pinball Land and Tilt ‘n Tumble.

Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games: Kirby Air Ride (Youtube, 7 minutes)

Roguelike Celebration: Common Pitfalls With Roguelike Traps

From Roguelike Celebration 2022, Reed Lockwood’s talk on trap design in roguelikes. Traps are an essential part of a D&D-style dungeon exploration sim, but are very easy to get wrong, either by making them too strong or, conversely, too weak. Some interesting ideas here!

The Bubble Bobble Info Pages

There was once a time where game information was really hard to find on the internet.

Before Fandom née Wikia started automatically generating wikis for everything in existence, before even GameFAQs, which started in 1995 and is still chugging away after all these years, became sorta-big, there were the shrines sites. Some enthusiast (obsessive?) would build a website to document literally everything about the game they could find. Early free hosting site Geocities was a haven for that kind of thing.

Geocities is gone now, although much of its content has been preserved through the efforts of Archiveteam. By the way, if you’re feeling nostalgic for those days, or wasn’t around then but think it sounds like something you’d like to get involved with, I will just drop here this link to Neocities.

Not all of these sites were on Geocities, or other host short-lived free host. Some of them survive today. I personally think these sites are an essential part of the soul of the World Wide Web (yes, I’m old enough to call it that), and proudly link to some of them from our hard-wrought Links page.

One of my favorite of these shrines is the Bubble Bobble Info Pages, created back in 1998, and its companion site the Rainbow Islands Info Pages. It’s not just their old-school web design that I love, although that’s hugely charming to me. It’s that it’s the source of a great quantity of information on a couple of extremely opaque games.

The arcade game Bubble Bobble is absolutely filled with mysteries, most of which are practically undiscoverable without diving into the game’s code, and it’s known that even its manufacturer Taito lost its source code many years ago. This leaves BBIP as nearly the sole source for a lot of important game data.

My favorite of these facts is the information on how Bubble Bobble decides which special item to generate each game. These are not random but chaotic, influenced by unseen patterns, that gives a kind of sense of them. Some items tend to be generated on certain levels, but they’re not hard-coded that way, so that the player’s actions can influence them without relying on them.

The game keeps count of a huge array of things that the players can do or cause during the game. The number of times they jump, the number of times they shoot bubbles, the number of times the pop bubbles, the number of times they jump on bubbles, the number of steps they take, the number of times they wrap the screen, and so on.

At the start of each level, the game goes down the list, finds the first value that exceeds a certain limit (which generally increases with the game’s difficulty, both explicitly-set and dynamically-rising), will set that item to generate during that level, and resets the counter. Some of these things can only happen in certain levels, like screen-wrapping or popping water bubbles, and that gives the history of generated powerups throughout a game a shape, that the players can influence, even without knowing exactly how. These counters are not even reset when the game ends! They carry on to the next, and in fact a few of the counters probably won’t trigger for several games.

It’s a significant factor in what makes Bubble Bobble so much fun, but interestingly, it means it’s more fun when played in an arcade setting, where the actions of past players contribute to add uncertainty to the powerup schedule. This is a terrific design pattern that I don’t think nearly enough developers know about, and one of the few places in the world where you can find out about it now is the Bubble Bubble Info Pages.