Tag: mario

Video: The History of the A-Button Challenge

It’s now been some years since pannenkoek2012’s “A-button challenge” videos hit the scene, introducing the internet to hyper-obscure Super Mario 64 glitch concepts like the HOLP and Parallel Universes. For the record, those videos can be seen here and here, and if you haven’t seen them before, you are in for a ride. Videos like the Walls, Floors, and Ceilings series (37 minutes, 32 minutes and 37 minutes) are not only interesting in their own right (to people of a certain mindset) but are a good introduction to concepts for writing your own 3D platforming engine.

These videos are all ultimately in service to the A Button Challenge, a long-running quest to try to complete Super Mario 64 with a few presses of the A button as possible. What may seem like a completely spurious pastime, it turns out, has been an obsession with some players since not long after the game first came out!

The origins and history of the A Button Challenge are explained by a surprisingly long and deep series by YouTube user Bismuth, totaling over four hours of video and, as I write this, isn’t even complete. I’m not sure how many people would be interested in watching so much on such a niche endeavor, but pannenkoek’s videos have been popular enough that I figure they must be out there, and some of them may even read this blog, so here goes!

Sundry Sunday: Take Me Home, Mario

Well, it’s Sunday again. The world around us is burning down in flames. As I write this [warning: U.S. politics rant], the overturning of Roe v Wade is fresh in memory, with the obstructionism of two particularly terrible Democrats, as well as every single Republican in the Senate, and the traditionally hard road to climb for the incumbent party during midterms, making it seems like nothing will be done about it for a while in the future. It’s pretty bleak, and it was all done by thoughtless, horrible people thinking they’re in the right. This is going to ruin tens of thousands of lives.

Well for a moment at least, let’s try to console ourselves with a silly remix of a small part of Take Me Home Country Road with Mario in it.

Sundry Sunday: Mario Frustration

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! We’re turning the blog floor into a giant MUD PIT.

It’s your reward for sticking with us (the blog, and the world) for another week. And the monster truck of content we have for you? The video Big Foot? A blast from early in the last decade, Mario Frustration, a humorous voice-over of a play through of one of those absurdly difficult Mario romhacks, back before Ninendo co-opted that whole genre with the Super Mario Maker series.

This video went viral a while back, but it’s actually a voice over of an earlier video. I have a URL for it (it’s http://www.quixoticals.com/2007/04/most-frustrating-super-mario-mod-ever.html) but I’m not linking to it. Firefox doesn’t like that site, probably related to outdated encryption, and I remember it looking a bit dodgy the last time I was there. YouTube is probably a better showcase for it.

There is some “adult” language in there, in the Modern Internet Style, and some salt, but overall it’s not nearly as ireful as the Angry Video Game Nerd could be in the day.

Hempuli Translates Finnish Super Mario Manual Back Into English

Hempuli is the creator of the brillian Baba Is You, as well as other games. He’s known to tweet from time to time, and lately he translated some of the text from the quirky Finnish translation of Super Mario Bros. back into English, making an effort to retain some of its distinctive weirdness. Here is that thread, unrolled for your convenience. Here’s a couple of highlights:

Hurry Mario and save Princess Chanterelle of Mushroomoom land!
“Willowherbs” is the translator’s attempt to do something with the “field horsehair plants” in the English manual that have mystified players for decades now.
Daddy-longlegs?

SGDQ 2022: The Mario Sunshine Run That Went Wrong

Fanbyte posted a short piece about a run of Super Mario Sunshine at SGDQ 2022 that went wrong. The world-record holder, about 45 minutes in, made three consecutive mistakes on one of it’s “secret” levels, which are unforgiving tests of 3D platforming skill, all done without FLUDD, making them substantially more difficult.

Speedrunners playing Super Mario Sunshine, seeking to avoid the incessant prompts to save progress, in total adding about about 336 times 3 seconds to the time, usually play without a memory card inserted. But this removes an important safety net: without saving, if the player runs out of lives, the whole game could be lost, and that’s what happened to SB_Runs. Super Mario Sunshine is not a game that gives you a lot of extra lives if you aren’t going away for them, and the coin-star portion of the game, which can earn some extra lives, is usually saved until later.

I watched this live as it happened, and let me tell you, the pathos was thick in the air. Here is the run, cued up to just before the fatal moment:

SB_Runs rallied well, gamely starting over. There wasn’t enough time scheduled to finish, but he did manage to build back up to nearly 100 of the game’s 120 Shines before time ran out, and the crowd, both in the room at at home, cheered him on, offering to match every Shine he could earn with a donation to Doctors Without Borders.

But it’s an important reminder. It’s easy to watch speedruns, especially in a marathon setting, and assume that they’re all as casual as the runners make them look. Every so often though, the mask falls off, and the immense difficulty of what they’re doing shows through.

The New Yorker: Mario at 40

In addition to the ZX Spectrum, Nintendo mascot Mario, née Jumpman, also turns 40 this year.

I’ve actually seen people claim that Mario is the perfect mascot, like he were destined towards super-stardom. He was nothing of the sort! Only a vaguely ethnic stereotype at first, although purposely a bit ugly in his original incarnation, he’s a working-class kind of guy. It seems prescient now, but it was the 80s at the time of his creation. Who picks a carpenter (his original occupation) to be their hero? Shigeru Miyamoto does. That’s really the secret of Mario’s success: he was created by one of the most successful game designers of all time, as part of his first project.

The New Yorker, which, it’s a fact, publishes humor other than cartoons, has a pretty funny bit of short fiction in tribute to Nintendo’s plumber and his advancing age by Simon Rich, even if it posits a version of Mario who’s a bit seemy, and worries that he’s-a gonna be cancelled. But it ends on a happy note, with Mario finally getting that back surgery he’s been needing for so long. Wait, what? Also he gets scammed by Wario.

The New Yorker is one of those publications that throws up a paywall at times, probably related to how many articles you’ve seen this month, so be warned.

And I know what you’re-a thinking: “How does Super Mario go broke? You collected entire rooms of coins! What happened?” And the answer is-a simple: I trusted a close personal friend to manage-a my money. And I can’t say too much about what happened, because the lawsuit is-a ongoing, but essentially, all those years I thought that I was riding Yoshi, it was the other way around.

Link Roundup 4/27/22

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Gavin Lane of Nintendo Life: Playnote gets a Flipnote Studio-style art app.

Jay Peters of The Verge, also on Playnote. Its makers wonder if its seasonal distribution model will be appreciated by purchasers of its becranked yellow joybox.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life: UbiSoft to shut down server support for a number of older titles.

Florence Ion (cool name!) of Gizmodo: Google Play is getting data safety settings.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life, again: Lego to release a huge new Super Mario set.

Thomas Whitehead of Nintendo Life (lot of items from them today): Game Freak to offer employees option of four-day workweek. Awesome!

Wes Finlon of PC Gamer: Moneyfarm Square-Enix unveils a new $11,600 statue of Terra from Final Fantasy VI riding Magitech armor that caused series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to basically go WTF. Remember, back when he designed the first game in the series, Square was facing issues whether their little game development operation could survive.

“Master Blaster,” if that is their name, at Sora News 24, on Sega trying to bring eSports into Japanese high schools with a Puyo Puyo Boot Camp. “Listen up maggots, you’re going to spend the next hour setting up combos and fighting Draco Centauros until you get it right and I don’t want no backtalk or I’ll bust you down to facing Nohoho again!”

Rhys Wood of TechRadar: An Elden Ring demake for Game Boy is in the works.

Luke Plunkett of Kotaku: Super Mario movie delayed, Miyamoto promises it’ll be worth the wait. Aww, it’s just like that apocryphal quote often attributed to him. This reporter is overjoyed, the last one ended on that cliffhanger, Daisy was back from Dinohattan and needed Mario and Luigi’s help again, no doubt because of some scheme hatched by Koopa. I wonder how they’ll manage to bring Dennis Hopper back from the dead to reprise his role?

Alana Hauges, also from Nintendo Life: Sega plans to delist classic games from some platforms (but not Switch) in anticipation of the release of Sonic Origins.

And Ryan Dinsdale of IGN tells us Sony is creating a game preservation team, of which this reporter can only say, IT’S ABOUT FREAKING TIME.

Link Roundup 4/24/22

Patrick Klepek for Vice, about Melon Han-Tani releasing the player movement code for his game Sephone.

Sam Machkovech for for Ars Technica, reviewing geometry puzzle game Tandis.

Alana Hauges of NintendoLife on the forthcoming Zero Tolerance Collection, which includes an unreleased sequel to the original Mega Drive/Genesis game.

Alana Hauges also informs us of preorders for a vinyl release of Ace Attorney music.

Keema Waterfield for Wired writing about playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with her five-year-old daughter.

Arto

Ryan McCaffrey on IGN tells us about an upcoming RPG, Arto, with a very interesting look to it.

Stephen Totilo, Axios, on the return of Ken and Rebecca Williams, founders of Sierra On-Line from years ago, and their attempt at a comeback.