Tag: nintendo

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.

A Video Claiming Old Zelda Was Better

It’s kind of an old subject now. The Legend of Zelda was originally released in 1985, and right with the next game, Nintendo started toying with the formula.

The third game in the series, A Link to the Past, is widely revered among classic game-players, but there’s been this small coterie, growing over the years, that despite greatly improved graphics and controls, a much greater variety in enemies, like 13 dungeons in all and a host of cool secrets, in some ways it’s not up to the original. And the darn thing is, I agree with them.

The Legend of Zelda is kind of the victim of being left behind by design trends, in some ways. Link to the Past is an inflection point; while TLoZ is infuriatingly vague in some ways, and very challenging, some players latched onto those aspects and relished the challenge. Its second-sequel is almost luxurious in how it tells the player how to progress. There are establishments around the fantasy world of Hyrule whose whole purpose is to tell you what to do next. That’s great for making a generally-playable game, but if you want to figure the game out yourself, like solving a great puzzle, it’s lacking.

Its secrets are much less secret. It feels like the world wants you to discover its hidden caves, imagine that. Of the differences between the two, most players preferred the new direction, as did developers, not the least being the makers of the Zelda games themselves.

Of the fans who recognize the first game’s gnomish inscrutability and obscure secrets as a strength, probably the best-known advocate has been Tevis Thompson, who made the case in his 13-year-old essay Saving Zelda. He followed up some of the ideas in the graphic novel Second Quest (which is great), but it more goes in its own directions.

That was where the discussion stood, until the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. After over a dozen games that leaned in to the Link to the Past template, it seemed to represent a rejection of that whole line, of the very trends they themselves had started and build upon. Instead of the mechanistic puzzlebox world, where exploration is carefully gated and players can’t get themselves into situations they’re not ready for, they threw open the doors. Here, have a world not only much bigger than any previous Zelda, but one of the biggest worlds in gaming period. Go anywhere, right from the start! While the secrets are still not that secret, the vast land obscures their locations pretty well, so it adds up to about the same effect.

Breath of the Wild was the first Zelda game that largely felt like Game #1, and there are signs this was intentional. The Japanese release made direct references to the 1985 original, using the font from the cover of the original game for its own title screen and to announce locations, have a look:

Comparison image from (ugh) r/zelda

When the game first game out, there was bewilderment, but players were very appreciative, but, did this mean all Zeldas were going to be vast open-world exploration games now? Tears of the Kingdom seems to indicate, maybe! Then Echoes of Wisdom last year showed that, while that game itself had many changes to the formula (such as actually starring the title character), they had not abandoned the classic formula, or look either.

All of this is to introduce the video by ThePlinkster, which like Thompson did in 2012, makes the case that the first game is still, largely, the best, and it even claims it’s better than BotW, which might be a bit of a reach. It’s 18 minutes, and while I don’t really agree with him entirely, he doesn’t make his case badly. Here it is:

Kosmic Figures Out How To Defeat Donkey Kong’s Kill Screen

Kosmic is a speedrunner who usually focuses on Super Mario Bros., but he’s reached the kill screen in Donkey Kong before. With some help, he’s figured out a way to complete that game’s “kill screen,” the point where it’s usually impossible to continue.

At Level 22 of Donkey Kong, there is a bug that causes the game to only give Mario (nèe Jumpman) 400 bonus timer points to complete the level. (The screen displays 4000, but that’s caused by a different glitch.) Playing normally, that’s not enough time to reach higher than the second girder on-screen.

However. If the player has Mario climb the first broken latter, then hold down for four frames then up for one, Mario will climb up off the top of it by one pixel. Continuing to do this, Mario can continue to ascend the screen. When he reaches Pauline’s height, the game will declare the level completed and move on to the next screen.

As it turns out, the bonus count on the Barrels screen is tied to the barrels that Donkey Kong throws, and the timing on those is somewhat random. If DK is slow at emitting those rolling obstacles, rarely, that will give Mario just enough time to reach Pauline at the top, and advance to the next level.

Doing this physically is essentially impossible. The player would have to waggle the joystick extremely quickly (and loudly), yet with the precise timing to consistently raise Mario’s position, to get him up the screen in time, and even if that worked, he’d still have to be lucky enough that Donkey Kong was slow at rolling barrels. But in emulation, with tool assistance, Kosmic managed to get to the top and finish the level. Then using other tricks and glitches, he managed to finish the next three levels (Elevators, Barrels again and Cement Factory) too, before his luck ran out at the next Barrels screen and he was unable to continue.

Here’s his 29 minute video explaining his feat. Or, if you’d like to avoid the general description of what this means, you could start at this point 11 minutes in.

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)

Out Of Bounds Discoveries in Nintendo Games

I had a different post ready to go today, but it’s been delayed by a few days for unavoidable reasons, so let’s do another Nintendo obscurity video, this time for things that can be found “out of bounds.” There’s several interesting cases mentioned and shown off here in this video from Nintendo Unity. It’s 11 minutes long.

Some of cases shown:

  • In Punch-Out!! on the Wii, off-camera, Piston Hondo is reading a Sailor Moon manga in a between-round cutscene.
  • On the original Pikmin’s title menu, the name of the menu programmer is off-camera to the left.
  • There’s a cartoon drawing of a Goomba as a texture beneath Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine. This has been given the name “Kug,” and there’s more information on it on Supper Mario Broth and The Cutting Room Floor.
    • Noki Bay in Sunshine has a model of a book locked in an unreachable area. There’s more info on it on The Cutting Room Floor.
    • This one’s relatively well known: the trophy of Princess Daisy in Super Smash Bros. Melee has a texturing error that gives her a third eye, hidden beneath her hair on the back of her head. The trophy for Meta Ridley also has a hidden heart texture inside of it.
    • In Earthbound, if you can clip outside of the terrain in the upper-right corner of Onett, you can reach the ultimate upper-right corner of the whole map. (All of the areas in Earthbound are connected on a single huge map!) Interacting with the corner there can access a debug menu left in the game.
    • There’s a secret control room beneath the island in Donkey Kong 64.
    • Another well known glitch, the video mentions the glitch that lets Samus get inside the level terrain in Metroid by rolling into a ball and coming out of it repeatedly while a closed door surrounds her. This is the means by which people can get to the glitchy “secret worlds” mentioned in an early issue of the Nintendo Fun Club News.
    • At the end, the video reminds of the “Minus World” glitch in NES Super Mario Bros.

What Nintendo Games Do When You Delete Save Files

I know, lots of posts on this blog end up being about Nintendo in one way or other, but their corporate stance of toymakers, regardless of its truth, means they often do interesting things, and one category of those things is having special animations when you delete save files. But deleting save files is destructive, obviously, so many people never see them. Here’s a video compilation of some of them. Of particular note is the deletion process of Animal Crossing games (yes, them again!), and of all of those there’s the one for the original Gamecube version, which pretty much implies you’re killing your village’s inhabitants. A pretty heavy trip to lay on a kid! Here’s that video, from Nintendo Unity (9 minutes):

Sundry Sunday: Zelda’s Point of View

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

Last week I put off Sundry Sunday to let you know AGDQ was about to begin! So this week I’ve brought multiple videos, all with the theme of looking at a Legend of Zelda game from the point of view of the usual-rescuee, Z-girl herself. No, not the one in the green suit! What are you saying?

In Wind Waker, Zelda gets to take a fairly active role in the story, until you (and she!) find out that she’s actually Zelda, and then gets stuck in hidden secret sunken Hyrule Castle for the second half of the game, boo! What did she do down there? K_Grovyle gives us a look (2 1/2 minutes):

Of course the newest Zelda game as of this writing actually has Zelda as the protagonist for the first time, allowing her the kind of malicious gaming shenanigans usually reserved to Link (and to confirm, the one in the green suit is Link, not Zelda, honest). jjjj4rd presents an animation of her usual hobbies while wandering the fields and wilderness (3 minutes):

And some more (3 minutes)!

What’s that you say? Zelda is actually the main character of all the other games? Zelda’s a boy you’re telling me? Why that’s not true, how could you even think that, I thought it was obvious, I–

(Video, from TheMasterOfDooM, length: 4 minutes)

Oh. Okay then, I stand corrected. Zelda’s the boy. Carry on.

How Speedrunners Pay Off Their Animal Crosssing New Horizon Debt Quickly

Argh! This video from Press A! on Youtube promises big by promising to explain how speedrunners blast through the over 5 1/2 million Bells needed to fully upgrade their (pre-2.0) house in Animal Crossing New Horizons, but then in typical game Youtuber fashion they explain nearly everything else about the game, the debt, and all the other things speedrunners must do along the way! Here is the 12-minute video, but I’ll give you the gist below:

First: the glitch only works on version 1.2.1 or earlier, so nowadays it requires hacks to downgrade your Switch to do them. And the trick also means having at least two users on the same Switch, both with residents on the island.

The trick involves duplicating items, then selling the duplicates. The items are duplicated by putting an item that can have other objects put on top of it, like tables or the cardboard boxes in the Recycle Bin, down near the border of the town square area.

First, an expensive item is put on the table or box. The Switch promo item given to the first player upon starting the game is typically used by runners. Both players are brought in, then the second player spins the box while the first player picks the item up off of the box. If done on the same frame, Player One will pick up the item, but Player Two’s rotating of the box will mean it also remains on the box. Now there’s two copies of the item. This process can be repeated immediately, filling up Player One’s inventory with the item. They then sell the items for profit, and continue.

I miss the days when you could just find this out from a text file on GameFAQs, but then tricks like that are a lot harder to discover randomly these days without something like Youtube’s discovery algorithm to uncover them, although it too is random and scattershot, or else following a ton of Discords to seek out all of the little gaming communities where all this data is hoarded.

So that is how they do it, but since it’s specifically on an old version of the game that you can’t even play anymore it’s of limited use to normal players. New Horizons changed so much in that first year that this information is largely of use as a curiosity unless you’re involved in the frankly bizarre speedrunning community.

My own trick for paying off your house means breeding expensive roses, ideally blue but black will do, then growing tons of them in the fields of your island and selling them. If you have the DIY recipes to make wreathes or crown from them, then it doubles their sale price. It won’t pay off your house of in under two hours, but if you can get your starter roses from elsewhere, you can pay it off much faster that way, maybe in a couple of months. I’ve explained the details of that process before, and in multiple places, but hey at least I didn’t just post it in a Discord where non-obsessives will never see it.

There, that’s my annoyed internet oldbie rant for today. Come back tomorrow where I’ll shake my fist at something else, probably AI slop. Ta!

The Letter-Writing System in Gamecube Animal Crossing

I’m opening this post with a special message to any anthropomorphic animal video game characters who happen to be reading this. As we will see, they rate this special prologue quite highly, and so it will make us very popular to any Dottys or Apollos in our audience, being exactly the sort of thing they want to hear. In the secret, inner language of their minds, I’m sure it confirms all their biases and makes them feel good about themselves:

I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series has a lot of weird systems in them. Some games wear the grass down according to character walking patterns; all the games have the “Stalk Market,” a risky way to make a lot of money; most of the games have a lost-and-found; and so on.

A system that was in the first game, and I’m not sure was ever adapted for later games (but then it might have been) was letter-writing, not just to other players in the same village, but to the villagers. They’d save the letters you wrote them and show them off to other players if they moved to another town, and even write you back. Of course, parsing and intelligently responding to any text, no matter the language, was beyond computers of the time (and despite what AI enthusiasts will tell you, still isn’t), so the game has to fake it in some way. But, how?

Well, what is the purpose of writing letters to characters in the game? It gives villagers something interesting to show people when they move to their villages, and, it’s a roleplaying exercise for the writer, a way to pretend the animal denizens of your town are real people and not simulated game mechanics present to make the game seem less empty.

Both of these design goals work best if the person writing the letter actually writes real letters, and not random jumbles of characters, so Animal Crossing has a mechanism to reward players for writing what appear to be real letters, and not placeholder gibberish, and its system of ranking text to attempt to reward actual letter-like writing is quite complex. It looks for punctuation that looks generally appropriate, capital letters after sentence-ending punctuation, triples of characters that commonly appear in English, and sequences of characters followed by spaces that approximate the word lengths of English. Of special interest: these are elements that have to be tweaked by language, and so they pose a special challenge to localization.

Hunter R., popular Animal Crossing Youtuber, released a video that explains exactly how GC Animal Crossing scores letters written to villagers. As it turns out, the text that scores the very best looks a lot like that in the preamble to this post, up above. Go figure! Here is his description (10 minutes):

How Villagers “Read” Your Letters In Animal Crossing (Youtube, 10m)

EDIT: My mistake! Originally the villager-friendly message near the beginning of this post was missing a trailing period, which would cost it some points when brought under the exacting animal eye. It has been corrected.

Sundry Sunday: Rhythm Heaven Reanimated

Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven games are still a bit obscure, but have a passionate fanbase. They share design sensibilities with the WarioWare series, which is because both share a character designer, Ko Takeuchi. They both have a distinctive clean-line look, and a similar sense of humor.

About four years ago, some of those fans made one of those reanimation compilations of the series, and the fruits of their labor is unusually keeping in spirit of the original, which itself samples many different art and musical styles. The reanimation feels like it could have been one of the remixes from the games itself.

Speaking of, the reanimation covers all of the remixes, of all of the games in the series, with the result that the full sequence is eighteen minutes long! It’s quite faithful to the originals, despite the vastly different animation styles, and it even scored an appreciative comment from Takeuchi himself! Here it is, but be warned: you’ll watch it for a while, then see one of the videos mention it’s only half over, and you’ll think to yourself, no way:

An aside, a different reanimation project near to my heart, but unrelated to video games, is the highly-memeable 2004 collaboration that animated They Might Be Giants’ Fingertips (6 minutes, original page). Note, in its original Flash incarnation, different elements would be selected on every play, an aspect that is unfortunately lost in these renderings.

Can You Block Yourself With Keys In Zelda 1?

The original Legend of Zelda, unique in the series, not only has keys that can be used in any dungeon, but you can even buy keys, for considerable expense, in shops, for either 80 or 100 rupees.

But, is the purchase of keys ever necessary? Usually Zelda 1 gives you many more keys than you need. Even in the Second Quest, which tightens the screws, you can usually get by if you just make sure to clear every room and bomb some walls.

But consider the worst-case scenario. What if you open just the wrong doors? Is it possible, if you waste keys on rooms that aren’t on the critical path to completing the game, to make it so you have to resort to buying keys in shops?

In an 11-minute video, “TheRetroDude,” as he styles himself, examines this question. tl;dw: not in the First Quest, but it’s technically possible to soft-lock yourself, unless you resort to commercially-provided keys, in the Second Quest, if you’re very injudicious about the doors you open. Here:

Trying to Get Stuck in Zelda 1 (Youtube, 11 minutes)