Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels, Issue 5, Week 40/2018 (Patreon)

Welcome, Supper Players, Broth Siblings and Supperstars, to the fifth issue of the Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels feature! Thank you so much for your continued support into the second month of the operation of the Patreon! Unfortunately, due to a delay in paying out this month's earnings, I experienced a lapse in my Internet access, leading this column to be delayed by a day. However, I have now secured access for the next two months, which means this should not recur.

Before I start, let me briefly restate some things of note about the  article series. For more detailed explanations, please refer to Issue 1.

• All images without an attribution have been recorded/created by me. If you wish to know what emulators/programs I used, please leave a comment. I will reply promptly.
• All comments and criticism are greatly appreciated, and all suggestions are evaluated and incorporated into future issues. You can shape the form and content of the articles with your feedback, so don't hesitate to tell me anything!

Now, let us open a door after climbing a long stair in our dreams, and have another world spread before us.
This is Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels.

Could Super Mario 64 be the 64th Mario Game?

If you followed Mario news at the time of Super Mario 64's release, you likely heard the facetious remark "What happened to Super Mario 4 through 63?" or, if the person in question knew about the fact that Super Mario World has the subtitle "Super Mario Bros. 4" in Japan, "What happened to Super Mario 5 through 63?"

Interestingly, there have been over 63 Mario-related video games released before Super Mario 64. The Super Mario Wiki, the most comprehensive collection of Mario information in existence, lists 112 games of relevance to Mario as having been released before Super Mario 64. However, the list is "too complete", as one may say, as it lists every single port, some merely licensed by Nintendo, and every single near-identical remake. Certainly, someone counting "all games that Donkey Kong Jr. appeared in" would not count the ColecoVision and the Intellivision ports of Donkey Kong Jr. as separate games. However, merely folding all games with the same exact name into one would also be wrong, as, say, the arcade Mario Bros. and the Game & Watch Mario Bros. have literally nothing in common besides the name.

If we reduce all games in the list to only count each name once, we still have 74 games released before Super Mario 64. But there's another catch. We are still counting "games very few would seriously consider", like the obscure Mario Roulette medal arcade game, which offered no gameplay beyond being a glorified slot machine. To discuss whether slot machines with electronic displays are "video games" is beyond the scope of this article or my expertise, but I think most of us can agree that we do not expect to see them on a list of "Mario games".

But of course, it is technically an arcade game, and to count some arcade games while not counting others is not rigorous. Therefore, how about we constrict ourselves to "Nintendo systems". We define a Nintendo system to be, for the purpose of this specific count, as: Famicom/NES, Super Famicom/SNES, Satellaview, Game Boy, Virtual Boy and Nintendo 64. Since no Mario-related games exist that would be too different between these systems to be plausibly considered "different games" rather than ports, we will not count games with the same names. Let us see the count now.

Super Mario 64 is the 62nd uniquely-named Mario-related game on a Nintendo system.

Quite disappointing, is it not? However, this is just the beginning. The classification "on a Nintendo system" is just the simplest rigorous definition out of countless more complex ones. I am almost certain that some rigorous definition exists that would result in Super Mario 64 being the 64th Mario game - perhaps games that do not feature Mario as a playable character can be excluded while Game & Watch games can be included, or similar. Please excuse me for not including detailed lists in this article, as due to the end result not being satisfactory they would only take up space. Once I have found a classification that results in Super Mario 64 being the 64th Mario game, you can expect a list with release dates and explanations for inclusion or exclusion of each entry.

The Undesirable Bananaport

Donkey Kong 64 contains a helpful way of quickly transporting the player character through levels and the overworlds, the so-called Bananaport Pads. They are pairs of round panels: two with the number 1 on them, two with the number 2, etc. until 5, with one such set of 10 panels found in each of the seven worlds and the DK Isles overworld. 

When the world in question is first entered, the Bananaport Pads are inactive. They must be stepped on to become active, but they only become usable when both pads with the same number in a world are activated. Then, stepping on one of them and pressing the Z button teleports - or "Bananaports" - the player character to the other.

Being such a helpful feature, one would expect the game to not go out of its way to specifically keep one specific Bananaport from being activated, but this is exactly what happens with the "1" Bananaport in Jungle Japes.

Before I begin, let me note that the entrance to every world is a "DK Portal", a semicircular portal with the letters "DK" on it. When a world is entered for the first time, a short cutscene plays of the world's name appearing as the camera flies through some portion of the world towards the Kong that just entered. Here is how it usually plays out, with Donkey Kong entering World 2, Angry Aztec:

(All footage in this section taken from this video.)

Note how close Donkey Kong is to the DK Portal upon entering. While there are objects behind him at the time of entry, they are merely used for restoring consumables, not actual collectibles whose state is saved to the player's save file. Now let us look at the first time entrance to Jungle Japes, the first world.

Donkey Kong is now very far away from the portal - so far that he is past the first Bananaport, which can be seen behind him as the camera zooms in on him. The Bananaport is not activated automatically - it remains inactive unless the player immediately turns back around after the cutscene. But this alone would not yet merit an article about it. What really makes the treatment of this Bananaport peculiar is what happens when you approach the other, matching "1" Bananaport, located slightly further into the level.

Please take a moment to watch the full loop of the footage. Donkey Kong is about to exit the cave and approaches the other "1" Bananaport. Control is taken away from the player when Donkey Kong is only a few steps away from it, and a cutscene involving Diddy Kong in a cage is shown. Then, the camera turns back towards Donkey Kong and he, in full view of the player, warps past the "1" Bananaport without activating it, starting another cutscene where Squawks talks to him.

Not only does the game stop the player mere moments before activating the Bananaport, it also has no qualms about shifting Donkey Kong's position not off-camera, but on-camera in such a way that he passes the Bananaport, requiring the player to turn back to activate it. While it may be a bold claim to state that the game "does not want" the player to touch the Bananaports, the behaviour on display is rather peculiar nevertheless.

How to Win at N-Spade Panels Every Time

The N-Mark Spade Panel, or "N-Spade" as it is commonly known, is a minigame in Super Mario Bros. 3 that consists of matching pairs of cards. It recurs every time the player collects 80,000 points, and presents the same set of cards in the same positions until it is fully solved, whereupon it changes to a different set next time. Matching cards gains the player coins, extra lives and usable items.

You may have noticed while playing, or read in a guide, that there are only 8 different variations of the game; i.e. only 8 ways the cards could be possibly laid out on the board. This greatly enhances the player's chances to win; even without a guide, it is possible to memorize at least part of the boards and be able to match a few pairs on each try.

Here is every board, courtesy of the official Nintendo Power guide for the game:

Even with this chart, however, it is still hard to tell which board layout you have when you are just starting - the layouts are all quite similar, and you are not allowed more than one error per try. So the question becomes, assuming you have this chart, how can you make sure you always know which of the 8 layouts you have while making a maximum of one mistake?

Luckily, there is a way to do this. I will refer to the layouts on the chart by compass directions, such as the top left one is "NW", the middle right one is "E", and so on.

The first thing to do is to flip over the fifth card in the top row. This alone can tell you 3 of the boards: if the card is a Star, it's Layout S, if it is 20 Coins, it's Layout NW, and if it a Flower, it's Layout N.

However, there is still ambiguity when the revealed card is a 1-Up or 10 Coins. In that case, the next card to be revealed is the first card in the middle row. This will count as a mistake in 4 out of 5 cases, but remember - one mistake is allowed, and you will after that be certain of the layout you have, preventing any further mistakes.

With this in mind, if the first card was a 1-Up, then the second card being a Star means it's Layout NE, 10 Coins meaning it's Layout SE, and another 1-Up meaning it's Layout W. If the first card was a 10 Coin card, then the second being a Flower means it's Layout SW, and 20 Coins meaning it's Layout E.

Now, let us compile this information into a picture.

You may print this out and use it while playing if you wish, or attempt to memorize it if you plan to play a lot of Super Mario Bros. 3.

De-Mario-ized

A fascinating part of looking at Mario content is finding content that is not related to Mario per se, but is exclusive to a Mario work. Here is an example:

This render of Gruntilda, a character from the 1998 Rare game Banjo-Kazooie, can not be found in official materials for Banjo-Kazooie. Instead, it is only found in a Mario game: Mario Artist: Paint Studio for the Nintendo 64DD. The discrepancy between what the content is "about" and its connection to Mario is what makes these findings so interesting.

Mario games have a tendency to "Mario-ize" previously non-Mario gameplay - the most prominent example being the Game & Watch Gallery series, which features Mario characters replacing the originally nameless protagonists of various Game & Watch games. The man holding up the manhole cover in Manhole is replaced by Yoshi, the diver from Octopus is replaced with Mario, the man crossing the river in Turtle Bridge is replaced with Toad, and so on.

A unique kind of "technically Mario-related" content is created when a game originally featuring Mario is rereleased with all Mario references removed, or "de-Mario-ized" - and exactly this happens in the European/Australian-exclusive Game Boy Gallery.

What is Game Boy Gallery? Imagine a Game & Watch Gallery game without the Mario gimmick, and that is exactly what that game is. It features five games that can be played - Ball, Flagman, Vermin, Manhole, and Mario's Cement Factory - without Mario.

It is just called "Cement Factory" here. Now, it is easy to think that this may be the "original title" of the game and that "Mario's Cement Factory" was a rerelease to make a game more popular due to the character association - the same thing that happened with Ball, which was rereleased as "Mario the Juggler". However, this is not the case. Mario's Cement Factory has always been a Mario game, from the beginning. And here, Mario is stripped from it. Let us take a look at who we are controlling.

Mario has been replaced by a sentient blob of cement assuming the shape of a human. Suddenly, the name "Cement Factory" makes a lot more sense: it is the cement's own factory. However, I'd just like you to take a moment and think about the fact that an "ex-Mario" game exists where Mario has been replaced with sentient cement.

Another unique aspect of Cement Factory is that in-game, it is actually impossible to properly hear the background music. This is due to the elevators making a constant noise that disables one of the Game Boy's four sound channels, resulting in one of the music's instruments being inaudible. Hackers have extracted the original music data and uploaded it online. If you would like to listen, you can do so here.

N&B

As Nintendo themselves loves to remind us (most recently in WarioWare: Gold), the company was founded in 1889 and manufactured a special type of Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda. Throughout the 88 years between the founding and the first video game product released by Nintendo (the Color TV-Game 15 in 1977), the company had tried manufacturing many other toys and products.

Among them were N&B Blocks, a product highly resembling Lego blocks, but with a variety of round designs not present in basic Lego sets at the time. If you have heard of N&B Blocks before, you may have wondered what the "N&B" stood for. The answer: "Nintendo & Block". That's right, the blocks' full written-out name would have been "Nintendo & Block Blocks".

Here is a range of N&B Block designs:

Super Mario Land 2 contains an area made out of blocks like these, and of course, Nintendo developers could not miss the opportunity to reference their old product by putting the N&B logo on one of them:

Now, you may think "This isn't obscure. I have noticed this myself while playing. The brick is not exactly easy to miss." And yes, I agree that this information is relatively well-known. However, have you ever taken a close look at that brick? A really close look?

The ampersand (& sign) is mirrored. When I first noticed this, I thought this could not possibly have been an oversight, and that this might be a reference to the actual N&B Block logo.

Yet, every known variation of the N&B logo has the ampersand oriented the correct way. The blocks themselves only say "NB" on the pips, without any ampersand. Apparently, whoever was in change of the reference either didn't know how to write an ampersand or made some sort of joke about the Mario version being a knockoff product by having the ampersand reversed.

Japan-Only Miscolorations

While the first Donkey Kong Land attempted to bring the Donkey Kong Country series to Game Boy with a variety of original environments and enemies, the subsequent Donkey Kong Land 2 and 3 played it far safer, being essentially "remixes" of Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3, respectively, and using the same sprites and tilesets (downgraded for the Game Boy, of course).

The title screen for Donkey Kong Land 2 features one of those downgrades: a pixel art version of the image of Diddy and Dixie Kong from the title screen of Donkey Kong Country 2:

This is the title screen when viewed on a Super Game Boy, using per-tile palettes to add color to the image. The information is not perfect; for example, Diddy's left foot is colored red, and there is red shading around the bottom of his torso that seems to imply he is wearing red pants instead of a red shirt, but outside of that, it is passable. Now compare it to the Japanese version of the title screen:

Due to the original Donkey Kong Country 2's subtitle being added to the game in Japan, the image was shifted upwards. This was apparently done without updating the Super Game Boy color information, as now half of Diddy and Dixie's hats are the same color as their faces, and Diddy's arm and part of his tail are red. 

Also, while I'm almost certain everyone reading this knows this already, I constantly experience people on the Internet being surprised by it, so I should mention it nevertheless: the subtitle of Donkey Kong Country 2 is "Diddy's Kong Quest", not "Diddy Kong's Quest". It is a pun on "conquest". 

The title screen even adds a dash that is not present on the box or in the manual to make the pun more apparent - although in my experience even now, 23 years later, not everyone is aware of it, as reactions to this game being brought up on large Internet forums show.

Wario's Pre-"Wario Bike" Bike

The Wario Bike has first appeared in WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$, and has been with Wario in many of his modern appearances, known to most people through the Super Smash Bros. series, where using the bike is one of Wario's special moves.

According to the Japanese official website for WarioWare: Mega Microgame$, Dr. Crygor designed the bike for Wario. The site also features renders of the bike and additional information:

However, today I'd like to talk about a motorbike Wario had six years prior - the first one he has ridden in a game. In Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman, defeating the boss of World 5, Thunder Cloud, rewards Wario with a power-up that appears as the letter M in a square.

You can see it as the last power-up in the line on top of this screenshot. (The other power-ups standing for "Kicks", "Dashin" [sic], "Trouncer" and "Liner", respectively) This item gives Wario a "Moto", which turns out to be a motorbike. By the way, the name "Moto" is not an instance of a character limit shortening the word "motorbike", as it is called the same in the game's manual:

The Moto allows Wario to jump over single blocks. Here is what Wario looks like riding it during gameplay: 

As you can see, there really isn't much to go on in terms of visuals, but one (relatively) high-resolution piece of art exists in the game that depicts Wario riding the Moto:

After defeating the final boss, Wario is seen on the Moto surveying the explosion. Note that the bike's license plate reads "HU", for "Hudson Soft", the game's developer. Now, the Moto is not exclusive to Wario; Bomberman is seen riding it as well, including a special sequence in the credits where Bomberman rides a Moto through a canyon even if the player beat the game as Wario. This means Wario's first bike was shared with the mascot of a different game company.

A final note: the image of Wario on the Moto in the ending has been taken on a Super Game Boy emulator, showcasing the special border the game has when played on that system. Note that Wario has a purple cap in the border, something he has had only rarely, the other notable example being this splash screen from Wario's Woods on the NES:

Can't See the Trees for the Jungle

When you think of a jungle, what do you imagine? Most likely, trees. While according to some definitions of the word "jungle", trees are not necessary, per se - "tropical vegetation" being enough - the popular conception of jungles certainly pictures them as places with a very large amount of trees.

Jungles have also appeared many times in the Mario series, particularly in the Donkey Kong Country sub-series, every time with trees either being part of the gameplay or at least being prominently displayed in the background. Well... almost every time.

This is the Shy Guy's Jungle Jam board from Mario Party 4:

At a glance, and from a distance, it looks rather jungle-like. The color is appropriately green, and nothing looks too much out of the ordinary. However, let us take a closer look.

What looked like trees from a distance are actually merely grass and rocks.

You might think, "These are clearly not rocks, but mountains, and the 'grass' is just as clearly a texture of a tree canopy meant to look like it is seen from far away. The board is a jungle from a bird's-eye view." And this is exactly what I thought in the beginning, as well. However, if that is what it supposed to be happening here, how do you explain this?

A tree is rising above the entire landscape. If the grass is indeed meant to be a canopy from a bird's-eye view, then the tree would have to be truly gigantic - but that is, of course, plausible for the Mario universe. What is not plausible, however, is that the roots of the tree would be growing out of the "canopy" in this manner. Surely, if the tree is supposed to be giant and rising out of the canopy, it would be depicted as a trunk disappearing below the green texture. The fact that the roots are shown can only mean one of two things:

a) The green texture is in fact grass and the tree is normal-sized.
b) The tree is so gigantic even its roots rise above the canopy of normal-sized trees. 

To debunk b), let us see what is further up the tree.

It's a platform with another tree on it, as well as a Shy Guy. Now, that Shy Guy is completely in line with the size of the playable characters, so now we are looking at an increasingly great suspension of disbelief required to support the notion b) since now either:

a) Everything is normal-sized and the green texture is grass
b) The green texture is grass, and the tree, NPCs, and PCs are all gigantic

Now, you may think, "Wait, what if there is a size discrepancy between the background and the playable area? Everything the characters interact with is suspended on floating panels; it could be that the objects on panels are normal-sized and the background is out of scale with that."

This is a good point, but we can debunk it, too. Look what happens when we move the game's camera away from the tree:

The panel and the Shy Guy unload, but the smaller tree remains, and for good reason: it is not actually a smaller tree, but the upper part of the bigger tree. It is only one object. We can even see that the trunk continues through the middle canopy section if we view this in wireframe mode:

This is very difficult to see, so I added a visual aid (the thick light red line). If you look a few pixels left from that line, you will see the unbroken outline of the trunk that goes from the bottom tree part to the top tree part. If this picture only leaves you confused, I apologize. You'll either have to take my word for it, or if you wish, contact me and I can send you a video recording of it - wireframe models are much easier to understand when they move due to the parallax effect.

At any rate, now the argument that some objects are out of scale with others becomes "some parts of objects are out of scale with other parts of the same object", which is near untenable. Also, by combing through the entire board, we can see two other trees:

These are also normal-sized in relation to the Shy Guy. Note that the totem pole is roughly the same order of magnitude compared to the palm trees as the totem poles on the ground are to the big tree. Surely if those were supposed to be gigantic, tower-sized or mountain-sized totem poles, the "normally-scaled" part of the board would depict them as such as well.

In the end, of course, even with all this circumstantial evidence, we cannot know for sure what the designers intended. All I can say is that from the looks of it, Shy Guy's Jungle Jam is a board covered in grass and containing exactly 3 trees.

It's-a Me, Marco

You may have seen this pasta before:

For many years, Marco Pasta was available in different countries in Europe with that logo. Currently, the company has changed it to something less likely to be litigated (unless that drawing of a chef is also from a preexisting IP I am not aware of):

Marco Pasta's original design has brought joy to people all over the Internet for years. And if you like it, you can pay tribute to it yourself - by playing as Marco in Super Mario Odyssey.

The combination of Chef Hat (available in the Luncheon Kingdom) and Mario Suit results in Mario looking exactly like Marco, which is to my knowledge the only time is it possible to make Mario look exactly like a copyright-infringing knock-off of himself. If you are aware of any other cases where this is possible, contact me and I will feature them in a future article!

A Thread to Dread

While the WarioWare series is no stranger to microgames that can be beaten without doing anything - the "Fragile!" microgame from WarioWare: Twisted comes to mind:

...the franchise tries very hard to steer clear from the opposite: microgames that are not beatable under any circumstances. Still, some mistakes slip through, which is why this could happen to you on Level 3 of Mona's microgames in WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$:

Note that I did not stop on purpose upon reaching the wrong elevation: this is simply as low as the game allows the hand holding the thread to go. Holding "down" past that point has no effect. Apparently, the algorithm placing the needle has not been tested enough to ensure it always places it within reach of the hand, making some instances of the microgame on Level 3 unbeatable. This makes Mona's stage - and every other stage in the game that uses this microgame, such as the pig-themed remix levels - impossible to play indefinitely even with perfect reflexes, as sooner or later four instances of this unwinnable microgame would be queued, losing you the challenge.

This has fortunately been fixed in the WarioWare: Gold version of the microgame.

This concludes this week's Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels. Thank you once again for your support.

Please join me next week for Issue 6, featuring such topics as:

• Which Game has the Fastest Mario Speed?
• The Progressive Paperization of the Paper Mario Series
• Mario and Dr. Mario: Same Person or Different Person?

Thank you very much for reading.