Tag: thecuttingroomfloor

Stuff on Raimais

Pretty hard to read. Is that supposed to be AAIMAIS?

Raimais is a sci-fi-focused maze game from Taito in 1988. Ryan Oliver, writing over at Hardcore Gaming 101, has written an excellent description of the game, including why you might be interested in it. Not only is it like a kind of Arkanoid-style revision of a pre-existing genre but with powerups, in this case maze games, it reminds me a lot of the early arcade and Atari 2600 game Dodge ‘Em. It’s got multiple routes and lots of secrets, including secret endings. It pulls some Druaga-style dirty tricks on the player: without a secret item, you’re doomed to get a bad ending. Even with it, you have to complete a sequence of Quick Time Events during the ending or your character gets zapped by a laser gun and just dies, no do-overs, no continues.

Furthermore, the hardest-to-reach ending was actually impossible to get! The game’s included on Taito Legends 2 from 2006, but there’s a more-recent Arcade Archives version (Switch, Playstation Store), that gives you the option of making the impossible ending possible.

This Arcade Archives trailer gives a good sense of the play without giving too much away (3 minutes):

Here’s a recap of links at the end of the HG101 article:

I’ve known about Raimais for some time, and in a reversal of the usual turn of events I had already read the gaming.moe and Sudden Desu pages before HG101 covered it. This is an excellent excuse to link to them though.

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.

Romhack Thursday: Speculative Super Mario Bros. Prototype Recreation

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Some months ago there were the “Gigaleaks,” huge troves of internal Nintendo files and documents that revealed a lot about abandoned projects and the development history of popular games.

There was so much information in them that people are still discovering new details. One thing that was surprisingly overlooked was source code for the version of Super Mario Bros. included in the SNES remake within Super Mario All-Stars. The source contained quite a lot of interesting commented-out lines and other data, that seemed to indicate that it may have been a hacked-up version of the source to the original Super Mario Bros.

A lot (but not all!) of this has been covered on the Prerelease page for Super Mario Bros. on The Cutting Room Floor. You can go read about it there. There resides information on scrapped enemies and objects, weird modes and behaviors of existing objects, and lots of other curiosities.

For the 38th anniversary of the release of Super Mario Bros., Nimaginendo Games made a romhack that seeks to recreate many of these abandoned elements, and shows it off in a Youtube video. The hack can be downloaded from a link in the video’s description, but only for a little while! I should emphasize that it’s not a real prototype, but a speculative recreation based on information from the leaked source. It even has an older version of SMB’s title screen.

Extra! Did you know that an early working English title for Super Mario Bros. was Mario’s Adventure? And Nintendo of America even made a promotional flyer with that name! These images come from Flyer Fever:

Super Mario Bros. Beta/Prototype recreated in 2023 (Youtube, 8 minutes, link to rom in the video’s description)

Alternate Title for Cobra Command

Just learned today from Jeremy Parish’s NES Works, Data East’s Cobra Command had an alternate title planned in case they ran with trouble releasing under that title, possibly due to its name’s similarity to that of the bad guys from the G.I. Joe cartoon show. According to The Cutting Room Floor, that title was, well, not so great: