Tag: nintendods

Avoiding Walls in Mario Kart DS & Wall Assisted Super Bouncing

The gold standard of game breakdowns continues to be PannenKoek’s extremely detailed and approachable examinations of Super Mario 64, but there’s other people out there are also nerding out excessively over games.

Suuper W‘s makes videos about several different Mario games, but Mario Kart is their primary beat. They recently explained how Mario Kart DS detects when you’ve hit a wall. It’s worth a look if you want to either how the detection works, how it can be abused, or, just possibly, both. (14 minutes)

Also of interest is a video they’ve done about “Wall Assisted Super Bouncing,” a Mario Kart DS technique that can cause you to game big air and leap over barriers under the right conditions. It’s 11 minutes, and even if (as is likely) you’re not in the Mario Kart DS TAS speedrunning scene, it may be interesting for its look at the specifics of MKDS’s engine.

A Walk Through Nintendo’s Internal Employee-Only Museum, Circa 2006

From the recent trove of preserved video from Noclip Game History Archive, here’s a look through Nintendo Of America’s internal employee-only museum/store, circa 2006, on Youtube. There is very little sound in the footage, so you might want to increase the playback speed to double.

For context, it was near the end of the Gamecube’s life, immediately before the release of the Wii, and the early years of the Nintendo DS. Objects glimpsed during the stroll include various consoles, records of Nintendo’s collaboration with the Starlight Children’s Foundation, Pokemon merchandise, Nintendo awards, some arcade units (including a glitched Mario Bros. cabinet), a Virtual Boy, various character statuettes, old playing cards, a capsule timeline of Nintendo history, and various games for sale at the time. It seems that the museum also functions as a retail space for employees.

Exploring Nintendo of America’s Employee-Only Museum (Youtube, 28 minutes)