Tag: mario

Size-Changing Effects in Super Mario Bros Wonder

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is 15 months old now, and as is usual for games this far out, the hype around it has died down. But this video, and its information, has been in my to-post file for a long time, so let’s get it checked off of my list.

In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, every level has a “wonder effect,” a sometimes-optional event that changes the gameplay in some surprising way. Like the Piranha Plants might start singing and marching through the level. That kind of thing.

There is a level with a boss fight against Bowser Jr. where he makes himself really small (accidentally), then really large, and the player’s size changes to the opposite: really big, then really tiny. The player’s physics change to reflect their new volume.

As it turns out, this effect is, in a way, faked. During this whole fight, the player’s size doesn’t change at all! Instead, the room changes size, and the camera is zoomed in or out so it’s not noticeable. Junior’s size actually changes twice as much. The changes to the player’s physics are applied on top of this state.

Rimea on Youtube made a video, like a whole year ago, that applied the Wonder effects from the boss fight in normal levels, and the player’s character doesn’t change size at all there, there’s the physics changes and that’s all. Then they put some other objects in the room, some question mark blocks, and they change size along with the room, making the camera gimmick a bit more obvious.

Here is their video explaining and demonstrating how the effect is done (6m). Why is it implemented like this? My guess is that the player movement routines in Mario games are really complex and detailed, and any time when it comes to a decision whether to change it or something else, the developers do everything they can to not mess with the precise and exacting parts of the engine, for fear of breaking some other obscure part of the game. The player program has to be used throughout the whole game, while the boss and its room are only used in one part, so it risks breaking fewer things to put the changes all on them. That’s how I see it, yeah.

The Official Backstory of Punch Ball Mario Bros.

Back when Nintendo was a little freer about licensing their games and characters out to other companies, Hudson Soft released for Japanese home computers a strange variation of Mario Bros. (different from their strange variation of Super Mario Bros.), called Punch Ball Mario Bros. It’s pretty strange.

An example of its strangeness, recently pointed out on Bluesky by Mario obscurities blog Supper Mario Broth, and boosted by Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland. It turns a simple scenario in which two plumbers try to clear pests out of a sewer into the story of humankind’s rise as a tool-using species. Image from Supper Mario Broth and text pasted from the Mario Wiki. Check this out!

いつの頃だろうか、人類が道具を持つようになったのは……。初めは動物
の骨、石のかけらを利用した単純なものであった。人類は英知をふるい、道 具を改良していった。それが、火を使い、風を利用し、そして今では原子力 をも駆使し、高度な文明を築き始めたのである。 　だが、ある一方ではまだ石を利用しているだけの人々もいるのである。彼 らはどのようにして獲物をとり、外敵から身を守るのであろうか。彼らは強 力なジャンプ力と石の玉を持っているだけである。それをうまく利用し、彼 らの身を守って欲しい。 　ここに、そういった人々のうちの２人を紹介しよう。そう、彼らの名前は マリオとルイージ。彼らが高度な文明を身につけるのはいつになるのだろうか。
At some point, humans gained the ability to use tools… At first, they were simple things using the bones of animals and fragments of rock. Using their wisdom, humans improved their tools. Harnessing fire, wind, and nowadays even atomic energy, they began to build up a sophisticated culture.
On the other hand, however, there are people who still only use stone. How do they catch game and defend themselves from outsiders? Using only their strong jumping power and stone spheres. They use those skillfully to defend themselves.
Here, we introduce two such people. It seems their names are Mario and Luigi. Will they ever learn about sophisticated culture?

Will Mario and Luigi ever learn about sophisticated culture, or are they the same as the lowly, technology-hating hedgehog, bandicoot, and bone-headed caveman? Time will tell.

What and Why Are Super Mario Bros. Frame Rules?

Not a damnable Youtube video this time, but an honest-to-frog text post I’m linking to! A 2021 post from the blog Brandon’s Thoughts explains what you might be wondering if you watched such events like AGDQ 2025’s Super Mario Bros. race. Well, okay, I’ll give you a video (33 minutes), but it’s not the point of the post this time:

The analogy often given is to think of a bus that leaves every 21 frames, and levels can only end by getting on that bus, and so other than in the last level (which has no new level to load at the end of it), improvements in Super Mario Bros. can only happen in 21 frame increments. If you save a frame or two in a level, but it’s not enough to make the previous frame rule, it’s not enough to take the previous bus, you’ll just end up waiting for it to happen anyway.

But what a weird thing to have! Lots of games don’t have frame rules like this, so why does Super Mario Bros? What advantage did it give the game’s code to be implemented this way? Why did the game’s programmers, according to MobyGames Toshihiko Nakago or Kazuaki Morita, do it?

I’m not completely sure, but Brandon explains why they happen in his blog post. I can summarize the the details here, and give a theory.

Super Mario Bros. uses a bunch of timers in its code. Quite sensibly, they’re laid out in a region of memory so they can all be updated by the same bit of code, a loop that cycles through them and counts them all down, one per frame, until they reach zero. It doesn’t do anything itself when they reach zero; the timers are each checked in other places by the code that needs to know if enough time has elapsed, and which then resets the timer so the countdown can continue on the next frame.

Many of these timers are short, like the code that determines when Mario emits a bubble in an underwater area. But all of these timers are single bytes, so the longest they can last are 255 frames, which at 60 fps is just a few seconds.

In order to track longer periods of time, but keep the same mechanism, there’s a subset of these timers that don’t count down every second. These timers are only checked and decremented every 21 frames, which is triggered when a special extra timer goes off. The intent was probably every 20 frames, but it uses BMI, Branch if result MInus, for the check instead of BEQ, Branch if EQual to zero, meaning it takes an extra frame.

Long timers are a bit less precise than short ones. When a long timer is set, the inner timer, the one that decides when long timers count down, could be at any point in its cycle.

This timer exists to determine when the second set, of longer timers, counts down. So, those timers’ lengths are around 21 times longer than the other timers. This is the source of the frame rule. After a level has finished, the game displays a black status screen with text announcing the number of the next level (“WORLD 1-2”) and the number of lives Mario has left. This code uses a long timer to keep the message on screen for longer than 255 frames. But it has the side effect that levels can only begin at 21-frame intervals.

Other periods of time tracked by long timers, such as Mario’s invulnerability time after taking damage and and duration of invincibility powerups, are also framerule based, and can vary by around a third of a second in length.

Super Mario Bros.’ ROM space is a bit cramped, and the timers are probably implemented in this way for space efficiency. Brandon points to evidence that the game had been optimized to save space to as to squeeze in more level data. In most cases it doesn’t matter that long times vary slightly in length. Gross duration matters more than precision here, but the implication is that framerules exist. Funny, that.

Super Mario Bros. Frame Rules (brskari.com)

Bowser Generosity in Mario Party

In Mario Party games, the most dreaded spaces tend to be the Bowser Spaces, where the King of the Koopa himself intervenes to ruin your, or even all the players, day(s). It’s pretty consistent overall: prepare to lose a number of coins, or even one of your Stars, those game-winning MacGuffins.

But what you might not know is that, usually, if you land on one of his spaces and you don’t have any coins or Stars, Bowser usually gives you a small number of coins instead! It’s one of the series’ many catch-up mechanisms, designed to keep trailing players in the game.

In this video (9 minutes), Nintendo Unity shows us the result of a destitute player landing on a Bowser space throughout many of the games in the series. You see? He’s not so bad after all! Now if we could only do something about his kidnapping habit, it’s hard to put a friendly face on that one.

Romhack Thursday: Super Mario Bros. Mini

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

It’s been difficult to keep up a consistent stream of romhacks for Thursdays, due partly to the demise of romhacking.net. Although… it doesn’t look very shut down to me? In fact, it’s been switched to news only, so while it’s no longer a (somewhat) comprehensive database of hacks, through the efforts of a dedicated staff, it still passes along information about particularly prominent hacks.

Today’s subject, however, is not one of them. It’s not a hack at all, actually, it’s homebrew! It’s a homebrew remake of Super Mario Bros. for the Gameboy Color, created by Mico27.

But hold on a moment, didn’t Nintendo already make one of those? Yep, it was Super Mario Bros. DX, and it made excellent use of the hardware. But the GBC had a smaller screen, and so the levels were slightly modified to account for the change in scale. This new hack, Super Mario Bros. Mini, keeps the designs of the original eight worlds, choosing instead to redraw all the characters at a small resolution. There are other changes, too. The engine is completely different, recreased using GB Studio, with just enough of the physics changed to completely screw with your muscle memory. If you’ve mastered the original SMB, this fan remake will prove unexpectedly deadly. There are other rule changes, like awarding extra lives from defeating many enemies with a Starman and reaching the top of the flagpole, that award enough extra lives to make up for it.

While the eight original worlds are here, the main attraction is another full set of eight worlds you can access after finishing the originals. They include many new features, such as new bosses, vertically scrolling areas, and other surprised that I won’t spoil… although you can see them as the later half of this complete, 1:27 playthrough of the whole game.

Super Mario Bros. celebrates its 40th birthday next year! The players who grew up with it are aging steadily. It remains to be seen if its legacy will extend onward among new generations of players. It’s impossible to say for certain, but I think it has a good shot at it. Hold on Peach, there’s still millions of players coming to rescue you!

Here’s some more screenshots from the first worlds of Super Mario Bros. Mini, showing off some of the redrawn graphics.

Super Mario Bros. Mini (by Mico27, itch.io, Gameboy Color ROM, $0)

The Ringer on Funny Mario RPGs

Joshua Rivera on The Ringer reminds us of the history of comedy RPGs involving Mario, beginning with Super Mario RPG, then branching into the twin threads of the Paper Mario games and the Mario & Luigi series. They all share the common aspect of making Mario pretty boring, the archetype of the silent protagonist, and instead focusing on the world he inhabits.

Mario & Luigi (image from mariowiki)

In particular, the article mentions how the two of the principals behind Super Mario RPG went on to work on Mario and Luigi, and how Nintendo hasn’t made developing the series any easier with increasingly strict guidelines on how the characters can be used, like how modified versions of iconic, yet generic, types like Toads and Goombas can’t be created, possibly for fear of diluting their brands.

Zess T., a classic Thousand Year Door character who couldn’t be created today, because she’s not a bog-standard, mint-in-box Toad. (Image from mariowiki.)

The article also notes that both subseries have undergone revivals lately, with Origami King and Thousand Year Door in the Paper Mario series, and the new Brothership in the Mario & Luigi line, despite the shutting down of AlphaDream, who made them. But it’s not getting easier to make new games in either series, with Nintendo’s growing strictness over outside use of their characters and the serieses painting themselves further into a corner with each installment consuming more of the feasible possibility space.

Oh Fawful. Will we ever see your like again? (image from mariowiki)

Super Mario All-Stars Random Debug Mode

We are told by The Cutting Room Floor this interesting fact. Super Mario Bros. 3 has a debug mode that activates when a specific memory location contains 80 hex, that allows the user to grant Mario any powerup. In normal play this never activates because the cartridge initializes all of RAM to 0 as part of initialization. But the version of the game included in SNES Super Mario All-Stars, while it closely follows the original’s logic in many ways including including debug mode and its criteria for activation, doesn’t initialize memory when starting up. When the console boots up, its RAM contains random voltages that can be interpreted as nearly any value, and there’s a chance that there’ll be 80 hex in memory location 7E0160, and enable the debug mode for Super Mario Bros. 3.

While ordinarily this would be a 1-in-256 chance, some consoles are prone to favoring specific values, so some units will turn on debug mode more often. As a result a legend developed that certain Super Mario All-Star cartridges are special debug versions that accidentally got put into retail boxes and sold.

Supper Mario Broth made a short video (about 1 1/2 minutes) explaining how it works in crudely animated form:

As it turns out, Mario All-Stars has its own debug modes for each game in the compilation, but the one for Mario 3 is different, and buggier. Meanwhile the original debug mode for Mario 3 remains, intact, buried in the code, waiting for the value 80 hex to appear in its magic location to unveil itself.

Sundry Sunday: Supper Mario Broth’s Mario Compilation Video

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

The maintainer of awesome Mario obscurity site Supper Mario Broth has had a hard time of things lately. Their mother died and send them into a spiral of emotional and economic uncertainty, which the community helped out by generously contributing to their Patreon.

As part of their thanks, they posted a Youtube video to answer the question, “What is Supper Mario Broth?” and it’s, well…

It’s great! And very, deeply weird! And it’s only 2 1/2 minutes long! Every image comes from some point in Supper Mario Broth’s rich and aromatic history, and it’s a masterpiece of meme imagery. It’s here:

Every rapid-fire clip in the video is worthy of pausing on and zooming into. It’s incredibly dense! Please enjoy, perhaps with the benefit of the mind-altering substance of your choice. And here’s only a few images from the video:

Whatever Happened to Toadsworth?

Another Nintendo post. The company’s tight-lippedness, which has intensified since the days of Iwata Asks, lends itself to fan speculation about nearly everything, and part of that everything is whatever happened to Peach’s minister, Toadsworth. In Japanese he’s キノじい, Kinojii, which I think implies he’s second in rank behind Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom hierarchy. Or was.

Toadsworth was introduced as a third in the vacation party, with Mario and Peach, in Super Mario Sunshine, likely as a kind of chaperone to make sure it wasn’t Peach and Mario taking a personal trip together, which I’m sure would have been a scandal in the fungal broadsheets, their ruler traveling alone with a swarthy Italian. The kooparazzi would be all over it.

Throughout the Gamecube era, Toadsworth was a prominent element of Mario lore, racking up appearances in many games. He was in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario Kart DoubleDash, several Mario sports, and especially in the Mario & Luigi games, which fleshed out the character more than any other source.

Piantapedia on Youtube made an 11-minute video exploring Toadsworth’s history. It contains the information that Toadsworth was explicitly removed from the Super Mario Bros. Movie, replaced with a character known as Toad General, which is as good a sign as any that Nintendo is purposely not providing the character any more exposure, except perhaps in remakes like the one of Thousand-Year Door.

Isn’t it odd? Nintendo, when given opportunities to expand upon Mario lore, whenever they take a strong stab at it, often walks it back to the baseline of the original Super Mario Bros. They seem reluctant to meaningfully develop the Mario universe. Sometimes this happens in immediately consecutive games: remember how Super Mario Galaxy 2 abandoned nearly everything from the first Super Mario Galaxy, pretending it didn’t exist, when presenting its story?

The fact that TYD wasn’t rewritten to remove Toadsworth indicates the character isn’t poisonous to Nintendo, necessarily, but neither do they seem interested in giving him any more exposure. For shame! Who knows what Peach and Mario might get up to behind closed doors without Kinojii to watch over things?

Why Is “Snowman’s Lost His Head” So Hard?

Super Mario 64 has 120 Stars to collect, 90 of them from individual named missions in the game’s 15 courses. Many players find that a fairly early one, Snowman’s Lost His Head in Course 4, Cool Cool Mountain, is among the most vexing. When I played it, I found it a illustrative example of what happens when the game gives you imprecise directions, and just asks you to try. I did try, time after time, until it just seemed to work, for some reason I couldn’t figure figure out, and by that point I was just happy to be done with it.

Cool Cool Mountain is a big area with sloped paths leading from the top leading to the bottom. For this Star, some ways up there’s a snowball that talks to you, asking if you could lead it to its body, a larger snowball, some ways down. As it rolls it grows in size. Ideally you stay ahead of it the whole way, and managed to get it to crash into its body. If this happens, it spawns a Star; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t appear, leaving you to exit the course from the pause button or collect a different star before trying again.

Image from Mario Party Legacy

The problem is, you can do exactly what I explained and the snowhead still won’t collide with the snowbody. Sometimes the head seems to aim at your position near the end of its route, but sometimes it doesn’t, and even when it does, you have to be standing in a narrow region in order for it to produce the necessary impact.

As it turns out there’s three requirements. Kaze Emanuar broke them down in a two-minute Youtube video last year. It’s pretty short as far as these videos go!

The requirements are:

  • You must enter a single invisible sphere partway down, on the bridge along the route, before the snowball does on its trip. If you don’t, the snowball will continue, but it won’t even try to hit the body. You’ve already failed it.
  • At a specific spot towards the end of its route, it’ll check if you’re within a cone in front of its movement. If you aren’t, then it’ll just continue on and out off the course as if you hadn’t hit he sphere.
  • If you are within that cone, it will then direct its movement towards your location. If you aren’t standing so it’ll collide with the body, it can still miss it and you’ll fail the star.

The thing is, to a player, it looks like you’re only really needed at the end of the route. Why do you have to hit the sphere first? Even if you manage to stay ahead off the snowball the whole way, if you don’t touch the completely invisible sphere, the whole thing will break. And since it’s on a bridge, it looks like it should be fine to take a shortcut off onto the lower path.

Further, you have to be both within the cone and in a place where the snowball will collide with the body. There are many places you can stand that would direct the snowball to hit the body, but aren’t in the cone! The cone is also invisible, and the range off places you can stand to complete it is quite narrow.

Watch the video for the full details, it’s really short! Kaze does a good job of explaining it.

Twinbeard Finishes Every Goal of Super Mario World

I had a car accident last night, and while it could have been much worse in retrospect, I’m still pretty shaken. So for today, let’s just relax and watch Twinbeard, who had been playing through every level and finding every goal, finally reach the end of Super Mario World. (18 minutes) Whew.