Frank Cifaldi presents a look at a mysterious prototype of NES Punch-Out!! that’s turned up. It’s only got four working boxers, with Bald Bull missing key moves, but it also has quite a few working features, including the password system. It’s completely silent though. The game that is, not the video (5 minutes).
The weirdnesses continue…. The cartridge has mock-up art on it that looks like the “black-box” trade dress early NES games had. The chips on the cart are mask ROMs, not EPROMs. In the attract more scroll, arcade names are used for some of the fighters, like Pizza Pasta, Piston Hurricane and Vodka Drunkinski.
Jeremy Parish, formerly of 1UP.com, currently of Retronauts and Video Works on Youtube, made an April Fool’s video, but because he’s Jeremy Parish it took the form of an interesting backgrounder on The Wizard, that big-budget Hollywood movie that’s like a feature-length advertisement for the NES and Super Mario 3. (18 minutes)
The Wizard stars Fred Savage of The Wonder Years, a popular show that you barely hear anything about any more. Like thirtysomething, remember that? I don’t either.
Many of my nights lately have been consumed with trying to play enough Caves of Qud so that I don’t embarrass myself too badly when I finally decide to talk about it. Most of my early explorations were in permadeath Classic Mode, but I have come to realize that playing it that way would mean I would need several years to finish it. I may not actually finish it before I write on it. On Nethack I had the advantage of being obsessed with it for years, had read many spoilers on it and participated on the Nethack Usenet group. These days much discussion of that nature has moved onto Reddit, which I have strong moral qualms about visiting now, not to mention that its app sucks on toast.
It is April 1st, but I already made my silly fake post for the year a month ago. Here it is. Are we good then? Let’s move on.
I’m not happy with the clickbait title The Game Display chose for this video, claiming they found a “golden mushroom” in Super Mario Bros. 3 like it’s some actual thing. What it is is a 1-Up mushroom with a weird palette. But it’s still a video worth linking (11 minutes), and seeing, because to find it you have to learn about an unlikely secret mechanic in Mario 3 involving the map screen and the wandering Hammer Bros. You can watch it, but I’ll give you the gist down below.
Remember those map Hammer Bros. in Mario 3? They walk around after you finish a level or lose a life, adding a bit of extra uncertainty to the map screen, and giving you a stored powerup if you beat them.
But did you ever notice that sometimes the blocks in the battle arena where you fight the Hammer Bros. have powerups in them too, but only sometimes? And it isn’t something to do with the Hammer Bros. themselves, the same fight might have a powerup one time, but no powerup another. What determines whether it’ll be there or not? Is it random?
The diabolical thing is that it turns out the map intersection spaces, the little coin-like locations that Mario/Luigi can stand on but don’t contain levels, Toad Houses or anything that can normally be entered, are actually valid gameplay locations! They’re only loaded as battle arenas when you fight enemies encountered on the map screen on that spot. Although most of those locations look the same on each world, some of them have powerups in a specific block, and some don’t. The qualification for whether you can find it or not is where you fight the Hammer Bros., not which one you fight.
In the sky portion of World 5, there is one specific map screen spot where, if you can lure that area’s lone Hammer Bros. onto it and fight it there, you can find that 1-Up mushroom with the weird palette. It requires a lot of tricky actions to find it, since the Hammer Bros. icon can’t travel up one of the only two ways to that spot, and you also have to avoid clearing a couple of levels using Jugem’s Cloud, because if you clear a level normally, the M or L space that is produced blocks the movement of map screen enemies. You also have to avoid fighting and defeating the Hammer Bros. early of course, and you have to avoid turning the enemy into a Treasure Ship. That might seem like an unlikely thing to have to watch for, but it is a issue encountered in the video. Watch it and you’ll see.
It’s so cryptic and precise that it seems like it must be an intentional secret, the one non-level map screen spot with a 1-Up in it. Given how many infinite life tricks Super Mario Bros. 3 has, I can’t say that it’s particularly useful, but that isn’t the point. It’s a little nod by the developers to the obsessed player, a way of saying, we see what you did there.
The N64 came out after the release of the Sony Playstation, which had already begun its meteoric rise. The Playstation used optical disc media, and had no on-console memory for saving like the Saturn did, so memory cards were a necessity for saving game state. While the N64 didn’t absolutely need them, since the biggest advantage of cartridges as a game storage medium was the ability to include hardware like flash storage in the cartridge (a feature used in Super Mario 64, the first system pack-in), an iconic feature of the N64 was the controller ports, which allowed the use of flash memory cards that could hold save data for multiple games.
As the video demonstrates, memory cards were plugged directly into the controllers, and controller paks allowed for some nice features. My favorite was how Gauntlet Legends allowed players to save characters to their own memory card, so you could maintain state between games played on different cartridges. (This feature would be retained in the Dreamcast version of Gauntlet Legends, which also had controller port memory cards.)
The Nintendo 64 didn’t have a BIOS or other internal boot time code. Like with the SNES, all of its executable code was contained withing the cartridges, or “Game Paks.” (Nintendo certainly loved to call hardware “Paks.” Pak Chooie Umf!) This meant that controller management features couldn’t be included in the console itself as with the Playstation, and any management would have to be done in the cartridge itself.
I don’t know if it was a Nintendo mandate that all games that used memory cards had to include their own menu to manipulate saved data, but in practice that’s what happened. All those games with their own controller data managers! And many games didn’t even expose them in the menus. I suspect that to this day many former and current Nintendo 64 owners don’t know, if they want to check what data is on a card or delete something, they have to insert a card-supporting game and hold Start while turning the system on.
Not all games! Just games that use memory cards! And the weirdest thing, which the video makes a deal out of, is that every game uses its own assets to implement the menu: graphics, backgrounds, fonts and sounds. Dozens of bespoke UI implementations, all to provide the same functionality. Some games add extra features, like exposing a little extra data or letting you switch between controllers. Some games have separate menus available after their normal startup; Rare did this, and sometimes those used completely different menus. But as far as I know, if a game used memory cards, you could hold Start at boot time to manage them.
It’s just another oddity with what, in retrospect, has become one of Nintendo’s oddest consoles. More information on N64 controller pak management menus can be found at consolemods.org. Information on N64 controller paks themselves is at ultra64.ca, which includes Nintendo’s policies on what cartridges should do to facilitate N64 memory cards.
The subject of this post is Elie D’s 13 minute video about one of the mascot characters in Nintendo’s Mario universe thing. Here:
I could launch immediately into a tirade that people shouldn’t invest self-worth into what amounts to, not just a cartoon character, but a corporate-owned cartoon character.
But I don’t really want to? Despite everything we still don’t have as much female representation in gaming than we should have. The Mario character lineup still skews about 90% male. These are characters that people embody within a game, there should be more girls. (Also, why are three of them princesses?)
Overall this is a pretty silly topic for a non-Sunday post, but I have something unexpectedly great for each of the next two upcoming Sundays, so I wanted to squeeze this in while the squeezing was hot.
Did you know there are seven of them? Really! Super Mario World has way more moons than you need to win the game, by a large margin, but it still feels special to find one of these secret collectables.
MarMax Gaming points out all their locations in this video (10 minutes). There’s not a huge numbers of reasons to get them all, Super Mario World practically throws extra lives at you, but you still might want to know how to find them. Well, this is how. Here:
Mario Kart World, of course, has an open world mode, and much of the interest of an open world racing game is dynamic situations produced by the traffic.
There’s been explorations into where the cars and NPCs come go, and we posted a video on that topic a while back. Sometimes they end up meandering in loops. Sometimes they leave the roads and just go tearing about the landscape. Sometimes cars actually find parking spaces, leave themselves there, and NPCs pop out and start wandering.
Well, similar questions can be asked about the game’s trains (15m). Mr A-Game on Youtube followed them around for a while to see where they come from. He claims to have discovered “how the train system of Mario Kart World works,” but I’m not sure. There appear to be tracks that trains can travel down either way, meaning, there must be some system in place to prevent train to train collisions. He does uncover some strong tendencies of trains to take particular routes though.
If I had to guess, I think trains probably aren’t modeled outside far out of sight of active players, that they’re spawned randomly, and that some checks are performed to make sure two trains won’t share the same track. This is a guess, but it would be in line with the impromptu nature of the auto traffic simulation. It’d also mean that the P-Switch missions that rely on trains being in a specific place won’t be disrupted, and that the train can be left behind in the world after the mission without getting in the way of any grand schedule coordinating the trains.
Well, that’s what I think. Maybe I’m wrong. But… maybe I’m right?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
About 3½ years ago, when I started doing this blog and Sundry Sundays, I would post a greater variety of thing here.
One thing I delighted in posting were video game-related ratings from web comedy master Lore Sjöberg, whose name I will always treasure from his work on earlyweb humor magazine The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which is sadly offline now.
About a year ago Lore started making web humor again, for a short while anyway, and one of the things he did was four more installments of The Ratings, one of the most popular features of old Brunching, once so popular that he collected many of them into a book. He even did a few video ratings during the time he 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙽𝚃 for Wired Magazine. I once linked to his ratings of Legend of Zelda weapons, which is still as funny as when he recorded it 17 years ago.
I’m deeply disappointed Niantic didn’t continue with the Hitmonchan/Hitmonlee naming scheme. That could have given us Hitmonsegal, Hitmonyeoh, and Hitmonvandamme.
If you enjoy it, or have ever enjoyed Lore’s work through the years, you can currently find him on Bluesky. Now that there’s not a thriving ecosystem of blogs to link to his work, he’s kind of hard to find now. Help the algorithm realize he’s a treasure, and go have a look!
ALSO, I just found out, AGDQ 2026, the week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins today at Noon Eastern Time! Right off the bat it starts with Super Mario Sunshine and Jet Set Radio, and around 11:30 that night will be running the new Katamari game, Once Upon A Katamari! And from there there’s more great runs to watch, with the typically-hilarious Awful Block this year taking place midnight to sunrise Thursday morning. Here’s the full schedule.
“Zelda Day” is a random thing over at Metafilter. One day long ago, on December 26th, there was a day in which three Legend-Of-Zelda-themed posts were made in one day. Since then I’ve commemorated the event by making another Legend of Zelda post on the same day each following year.
Here is this year’s post, but you don’t have to follow it because I’ve included the links in this post too.
They’re all videos this year. These first links are to videos by Skawo:
I think I mentioned this one before, but again, in Ocarina of Time, if you go back the way you came during the event in Kakariko Village, the world will become a glitchy mess (7 minutes):
Capsyst Animations made three fake commercials for early Zelda games, in the style of the evocative illustrations from the manual. There’s the original Zelda, Zelda II and Link to the Past (all 1 minute long):
YES I KNOW, yet another Nintendo thing. Nintendo Adults are the video game version of Disney Adults, in so many ways. One more way now because there are actual Nintendo theme parks.
I maintain that I am not a Nintendo Adult. But they have had a long history of making inventive and interesting games. I thought they’d been failing a bit at that lately, but then comes Kirby Air Riders, as weird and distinctive game as they’ve ever published. (By the way, did you know that they’ve put up Christmas decorations on the Kirby Air Riders menu screen and paddock area?)
It was a weird time. Around the time as the Famicom was just getting started, Hudson Soft struck a deal with Nintendo to release some of their games for the PC-88 Japanese personal computer platform.
Many of these games had weird differences from Nintendo’s originals. The best known of them is probably Super Mario Bros. Special, a very weird version with paged scrolling, which is to say, no scrolling at all, but just flipping forward one screen at a time. Super Mario Bros. Special isn’t on the subject page of this post, which is old enough that it’s only available on the Wayback Machine, but it is on the website World Of Stewart, and wonder of wonders that page is available on the living internet! Playthroughs of the whole game, in its clunky miscolored XOR-sprite glory, can also be seen on Youtube, here, for instance. (51 minutes)
You can tell the page is old because it has a Digg social media button. (Wait, what’s that? They’re trying to revive Digg?) Please excuse the Wayback Machine banner stuck in the middle of the screenshot, it’s an artifact of Firefox’s screenshot tool.
There was also Punch Ball Mario Bros., which took the basic premise of Mario Bros. and just, well threw it away, just tossed it right in the trash, and replaced it with punching a ball around to attack enemies. Gameplay of that is also on Youtube. (5½ minutes)
Another version of Mario Bros., Mario Bros. Special (which isn’t Super Mario Bros. Special but something else) It’s harder to find Youtube video of that because Google assumes you must be looking for the Super version, but it can be found. (8½ minutes) If you recognize the title screen music from that then you are really a supergeek! (I did recognize it, so yes, that includes me.) And the game, wow… it really doesn’t look fun to play.
Some other games listed include Excitebike (11 minute video), Ice Climber (7½ minute video), the (only slightly Nintendo and with janky music) HAL Hole-In-One Golf (15 minute video), and (the very non-Nintendo) Chack’n Pop (4 minute video). Hole-In-One is a predecessor of Nintendo’s Golf, if you’re looking for that Nintendo connection.
One thing all of these games, except maybe Hole-In-One, have in common is they look like they’re excruciating to play now! They either have way too fast or slow controls, or ear-tearing scratchy music, or both. But they are interesting as curiosities, so here they are. Curious!
Switchaboo on Youtube had a look at video gamethings Nintendo made in the era before people habitually left the spaces out from between words. (14 minutes)
I didn’t know that Nintendo’s first foray into consoles was making a custom controller for the Odyssey (not the Odyssey 2, the Odyssey), and distributed it in Japan. But I do know that Nintendo’s history extends far back before video games, to making Hanafuda and traditional playing cards, and still makes them to this day, along with Mah Jong, Shogi and Go equipment.
