Sundry Sunday: Friends Don’t Let Friends Touch Strange Powerups

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

Pringus McDingus again. Maybe a little explanation of this one would be to the benefit of those who aren’t so extremely online.

Sigil of madness

Super Mario Wonder is one of the games that was announced at the recent Nintendo Direct. The Elephant Berry is a powerup shown in that game. The green symbol in the berry’s eyes is the Deviantart logo. And what Daisy does in this animation is perfectly understandable and maybe even necessary.

Scrapped Playable Peach in Super Mario 64 DS

Wonderful Mario obscurity blog Supper Mario Broth recently posted about evidence found in the cart for a playable Princess Peach in the Mario 64 remake for the Nintendo DS. Incomplete, slightly broken animations for Peach were found in the game’s data.

The original post shows the animations in motion, which includes some glitchy movement in her right arm. Maybe she was meant to hold something in it?

Princess Peach Through The Years

Wonderful blog Thrilling Tales of Video Games did a retrospective last month that went through all the various versions of Princess Peach there’s been. Interestingly, while Peach’s look largely solidified in the promo art for Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (the insanely hard one, a.k.a. “The Lost Levels”), before that there were all kinds of takes on the character, ranging from Miyamoto’s own drawing (used in the box art of Super Mario Bros. in Japan) to a variety of versions all trying to adapt her single sprite image from the ending of SMB.

Peach in this illustration was drawn by Shigeru Miamoto himself. (Image from blog)
And this is the first version of modern Peach. (Image from blog)

The post features a whole bushel of Peaches, many barely seen outside of Japan. Recommended highly!

Thrilling Tales of Video Games: A Parade of Princess Peach Prototypes