Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels, Issue 10, Week 46/2018 (1) (Patreon)

Welcome, Supper Players, Broth Siblings and Supperstars, to the tenth issue of the Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels feature.

If you are wondering what happened to last week's issue, and when to expect the next, please read the explanation at the end of this article.  

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 walk behind a house in the Mushroom Kingdom and let a hidden figure tell us obscure Mario information.
This is Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels.  

Dangerous Demo

Like many games, Super Mario Land 2 contains a demo mode. If the game is left on the title screen without any buttons being pressed, a level will start and the game will play it by itself, moving Mario without the player's input. Demo modes are a holdover from the arcade era, where they were usually called "attract mode" and served to showcase a sample of gameplay to people interested in trying the machine without needing them to insert a coin. Of course, nowadays most people would only be able to see the demo mode after purchasing the game (outside specific scenarios like kiosk demos), making the practice less about providing value and more about keeping to a tradition, an expectation of the demo being present.

While the majority of games - and the vast majority of Mario games - do not allow demo mode to be controlled, Super Mario Land 2 includes an Easter egg that gives players the limited ability to play four of the game's levels. By pressing Select while holding Up at the title screen, a demo of the intro level is loaded; this can be changed by also holding A, B or A and B together to the Hippo level (which is its official name according to the manual), Turtle Zone 1 and Macro Zone 1 respectively.

The ability to play the latter three stages may be slightly useful for those who wish to try out the game without having enough time to beat the intro stage - which is the only necessary prerequisite to access all three - but being able to play the intro stage itself is largely redundant since all that needs to be done to play it within the actual game is pressing Start on the title screen and then selecting a new file, something that in the worst case takes up only a few more seconds than using the code to enter the demo.

The demo itself has a curious limitation - one may expect to be able to finish each of the levels offered here, or perhaps to be cut off after a certain amount of time has passed, but the criterion for the demo no longer being playable is actually the number of button presses. The player is allowed to press buttons or directions on the D-pad 63 times - on the 64th press, the demo freezes, requiring the game to be reset. This also may indicate that this mode is not an Easter Egg, but a leftover from development instead - as letting the game freeze and requiring the console to be restarted is not usually something developers intend to do outside of the ending credits of certain games.

Here is footage of me starting the demo of the intro level, performing 64 inputs, and the game freezing:

As you can see, although all object movement is stopped at the end, background tiles (the sea behind Mario) still continue to be animated. 

The limitation of the player to a certain amount of inputs rather than time raises the question: what would happen if the player were to somehow finish the level without using up all the inputs? Fortunately, the small set of four levels available in demo mode includes the one level in the game that allows itself to be beaten easily with only a handful of button presses - the Hippo level.

In fact, only three button presses can be used to beat the level if played optimally - at the beginning of the level, start holding B and Right, then as Mario passes the Hippo statue, press A and keep holding it as well, resulting in Mario getting into the bubble and flying diagonally upward. As long as you continue holding all three buttons, Mario will quickly fly over the entirety of the level and hit the bonus game bell at the end. So, what happens if this is done inside the demo mode?

Mario will be on the map screen, at the position he would be in right after completing the intro level, with 0 lives. The game is glitched at this point; the music in all areas plays only for a few seconds after each input instead of constantly - which means that if Mario stands still, the music cuts out quickly afterward. If you go into any level at this point and let Mario die - without collecting any extra lives - he will get a Game Over due to having 0 lives.

This will restart the game - with the following being the result:

The first save file will be marked as having 1 level completed. Mario will start off where he got a Game Over after playing the demo, and after walking around on the world map, it becomes clear that the completed level is the intro level. In short: completing the Hippo level in the demo results in the first save file being overwritten with a save that has completed the intro level, and nothing else. This is, in most cases, not desirable as the first save file usually contains a save the player would not want to delete; however, if by chance you do not mind having that save overwritten and wish to skip the intro level, this glitch will allow you to do just that. Note that completing the Hippo level in the manner described above is in fact much easier than even the intro level, and can be done while looking away from the console, which may be relevant in some situations.

The Rich Get Richer

In RPGs and other games that feature shops that both sell and buy items, the golden rule of determining the prices is "no shop is allowed to buy an item that it itself is selling at a higher price than it is selling it at". In other words, if Shop A sells Item B for 10 money units, it cannot offer to buy Item B for 12 money units, as that can be used easily and immediately to gain an infinite amount of money. Instead, for those who are interested to earn money by trading goods, there are usually pairs of shops where one is selling something the other one buys for a higher price; i.e. Shop A sells Item B for 10 money units, and Shop C is buying Item B for 12 money units.

The latter scenario, in the most simplified sense, trades the player's time for money - the player gets money for no additional challenge other than buying and selling items, but the cost of doing so is the time spent walking between the shops in question. This is usually perceived as tedious and so requires high profit margins for the player to prefer it to earning money by battling enemies or playing minigames. The Paper Mario series offers this opportunity and even contains tips from NPCs about what items are most profitable, for example, in Paper Mario it is possible to buy Snowman Dolls for 8 coins in Shiver City and sell them for 12 coins at Dry Dry Outpost.

However, Super Mario RPG includes a scenario where a place sells you items for less than it buys them for - much less, in fact. This is offset by several factors, and can in fact only be used to earn money if Mario's party already has 950 coins - for a profit of 49 coins to the maximum of 999. Thus, this trick can only help to make a large amount of money into a slightly larger amount.

First, make sure you have at least 950 coins, then go to the Marrymore Hotel and stay at the Suite. Once in the room, use the bell to call for the bellhop and ask for a Kerokero Cola.

After this, the bellhop will not leave. The strategy requires you to dismiss him, but he wants a tip. Unfortunately, giving him a tip results in a loss of 10 coins, which does not fit into this money-making scheme, so Mario must not act like the most generous guest during this.

After the bellhop leaves, ring the bell again and repeat the entire sequence until Mario has bought 5 Kerokero Colas. Together with the stay at the suite, the cost for this is 200+(150*5) coins, which is 950. Then, after staying for one night (or even immediately), walk down to the exit and leave the hotel, as the owner will not let Mario buy or sell anything for as long as the room is booked. Upon reentering the hotel, talk to the owner and select the "sell items" menu.

It turns out that the hotel is buying Kerokero Colas for 200 coins each. Selling five of them gives Mario exactly 1000 coins, enough to max out the coin counter at 999. As you can see, the maximum value of the coin counter is the only thing preventing this from being a major "infinite money" glitch - if the coins instead went up to 9999 or higher, selling the Colas for 50 coins of profit each would be a very efficient way to make money. 

As it is now, however, this trick is mostly a curiosity that conjures the amusing scenario of a hotel buying back their own drinks from a guest at a higher price than they were sold for. 

Mimi's Game Dev Talk

Chapter 8 of Super Paper Mario follows Mario and his party through Castle Bleck, where with each sub-chapter, one of the party members is left behind in what always seems like an inescapable deadly situation. Of course, this being a Mario game, everyone turns out fine in the end.

Chapter 8-2 in particular revolves around the shapeshifter Mimi trying to trick the party, and finally battling one-on-one with Princess Peach. In the very beginning of this chapter, Mimi disguises herself as Merlon, who has been the main helpful non-playable character of the story so far, and attempts to use the fact that Merlon has been trustworthy in the eyes of the heroes to persuade them to hit a "!" Block. Actually hitting the block reveals that it is a trap which deposits the characters inside a jail cell.

But what happens if the player does not want to hit the block? Of course, the game does not let the player proceed, but there is an Easter egg in this scene, which is all the dialogue the fake Merlon offers when spoken to instead of hitting the block.

This is what "Merlon" says when first entering the room. Note that even though it is possible to change between Mario, Peach and Luigi as playable characters at this point, swapping between them does not affect the dialogue.

At this point, Mimi attempts to sound like Merlon, mentioning the Light Prognosticus, a book he spends most of the game consulting, and imitating his style of speech; with the only tells being calling the block "totally unsuspicious" and, of course, encountering Merlon somewhere he is not supposed to be in the first place.

At this point, it is possible to not hit the block and instead continue talking to "Merlon". Here are the first four attempts. 

Over the course of the next four attempts, Mimi loses her temper briefly. However, on the ninth attempt, she will have longer dialogue (four text boxes):

Super Paper Mario is known for referencing many aspects of Mario games that surprise players to be referenced at all - calling the land of the dead "World -1", referencing the famous glitch in the original Super Mario Bros., or the various references of games that are not in the common reference pools of other Mario games, like the "Mustard of Doom" Sammer Guy, referencing the Mario & Luigi series antagonist Fawful (that series normally only being referenced by itself and not by other Mario sub-series).

This particular dialogue by "Merlon" is about game development, particularly flags. A flag is an indicator in a game's code, with its most important property being that it is "set" in one place, situation, or point in time, but "checked" in a different place, situation, or point in time. Some event - usually a progression of the game's story - "checks" the flag set by something else, usually actions required to be completed before the story is allowed to continue.

While flag usage is absolutely ubiquitous in video game development - even if they may not be called flags in the specific language or by the specific developers; when people talk about flags, what they usually refer to is "blatant" flag usage. Flag usage is blatant when event A, which normally would have no causal connection to event B, is only allowed to happen after event B is completed, and no earlier - simply to ensure the story always plays out the same way. Here is an example.

The General White search segment in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a classic case of blatant flag usage. General White is a Bob-omb who, for most of the game, spends his time sitting in one spot in a certain town, not moving. However, when the game asks Mario to talk to him, he is nowhere to be found. Mario must visit several locations and talk to the characters in those locations in order to hear from them that General White "just left" from each of those locations, and finally finds him in his house. Now, from a story perspective, this makes no sense - surely if General White simply visits all locations in order and then goes home, Mario could wait for him there? 

This is where flags come in. Mario must talk to each of the characters pointing him towards General White's next destination in order, or else General White will never appear in his home. No matter how little sense this makes, the game railroads you into visiting locations in order and talking to certain characters in order to make an event happen.

Talking to "Merlon" any further just loops this final message.

Infinite Stools

Super Mario All-Stars, as a remake of Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3 and the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (known internationally as The Lost Levels), contains many of the glitches that the original versions of those games contain. Some of them were fixed, others remain in the games. However, on rare occasions, the game introduces new glitches that were not there in the originals.

One of them is the reduplication of Mushroom Blocks. (Mushroom Blocks are those stool-like items that are often provided by the game to defeat enemies; they do not look like what is traditionally called a "block" by Mario games.) The game remembers the positions of Mushroom Blocks the player moved to different locations when the character enters small side areas (Subspace screens and single-screen jar interiors). The error comes in due to the fact that while the game remembers where a player put a Mushroom Block, it does not remember how many Mushroom Blocks there should be in a scene to begin with, and always spawns a Mushroom Block in every spot they spawn when the player first enters a room - even if the same Mushroom Block has been moved and is saved in memory as being somewhere else. In practice, this results in two Mushroom Blocks appearing instead of one.

One area this can be demonstrated is the second room of Level 6-1. After passing through the first large desert area, the player character enters an indoor area filled with a large amount of jars. Three of these jars are covered with Mushroom Blocks. If any of these are moved before the player goes down a single-screen jar (note to not go down jars with multiple screens, as those will reset the large area when exited) and back again, the duplication explained above will happen. Here is footage of it in action:

As you can see, the block always respawns when Toad returns to the main area; I recommend covering the jars containing Cobrats first so they do not interfere with the glitch. After this, the glitch can be repeated as many times as one wishes. Here is an example of more Mushroom Blocks being duplicated:

Lying About Weight

During Chapter 6 of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario meets a lot of unique characters on his detective adventure on the Excess Express. One of them is Heff T., a corpulent Toad who does not have too much of an important role in the chapter outside of the very first case Mario investigates, where the chef's galley pot was stolen. As it turns out, Heff T. stole the pot and hid it in his cabin's closet.

For him to be able to steal the stew, he would have had to leave the cabin. In fact, Heff T. is seen explicitly outside his own cabin twice during the chapter:

Here he is outside the train during the stop at Riverside Station.

And here he is kidnapped by the Smorg collective (rightmost tentacle). Why am I bringing this up, you may wonder?

Later in the game, the player may discover that even though most of the train's passengers change on subsequent trips, Heff T. always stays in his cabin. Talking to him reveals that he is reportedly too large to fit through the door. Now, an argument can be made that he was able to fit through the door during Chapter 6, and only after it was finished, put on enough weight to no longer be able to exit the room. However, outwardly, he does not change at all between these interactions - and we can prove that he would in fact still be able to leave the room simply by changing the viewing angle.

Viewing the cabin from above, we can directly compare the width of the door to that of Heff T.'s sprite, and as expected, he should be able to leave the cabin without any issue, as the door is roughly 1.5 times his own width. 

Now, I understand that this segment contrasts with most of the other things I bring up in these articles; I admit it is mostly baseless nitpicking, as no development team can be expected to expend resources to make sure every single statement by minor NPCs is factually accurate - and Heff T. is one of hundreds of them in the game. Still, I found the situation slightly interesting in that here, a character is pretending to be more overweight than he actually is, which is rather uncommon not just for Mario games, but most of fiction in general. 

Still, if you believe this type of analysis to be frivolous and not up to the same standard as the rest of my content, please know that it will not be a common occurrence.

Broken Stars

We will end the string of Paper Mario-related segments by going back to Super Paper Mario, but this time, to look at backgrounds that - for seemingly no good reason - are broken.

Chapter 4-1 begins by depositing Mario and his party into outer space. After using an empty fishbowl as a helmet that somehow allows them to breathe (curiously, in Super Paper Mario, Mario cannot breathe in space but can breathe underwater, while in Super Mario Galaxy, he cannot breathe underwater while being able to breathe in space), the party meets an alien called Squirps who follows them until the end of the chapter, providing them with a means to shoot projectiles in space.

This is the first room of Chapter 4-1. Please take a closer look at the background, consisting of clusters of overlapping black and dark blue stars. The background loops seamlessly. Particularly, take note of the small pattern to the immediate left of Mario in the image, consisting of three mid-sized dark blue stars overlapping each other in an upside-down triangle formation. If you cannot see it, the next images will make clear what to look out for, and you will be able to go back and compare them.

Chapters 4-1, 4-2 and 4-3 all take place in open space, using what appears to be the same background - however, "appears" is the key word here, as the background in Chapters 4-2 and 4-3 is different for no clear reason.

This is the background seen in Chapter 4-1, in the above picture.

And this is the background used in Chapters 4-2 and 4-3. Can you see the difference? 

In precisely the middle of the texture, there is a visible horizontal seam that causes a segment of the background to repeat. At first it looks merely like parts of stars are cut off, but looking straight up and down from those stars, you will discover the same elements being repeated. 

This can easily be seen during gameplay. Here, Mario is standing in the beginning area of Chapter 4-2 - right where the chapter intro deposits him - below the same three-star pattern I pointed out earlier. Now, you can clearly see the seam running horizontally through the entire frame, duplicating the pattern.

Here are more visual aids to recognize the seam. The first picture is a cropped screenshot, the second one is further cropped only to the duplicated part of the background. The third one is zoomed in further, and the final picture has the contrast increased to be more easily visible. Note that the single small star in the middle seems to not be affected by the seam - raising the question of how the seam was created if this is even possible. As you can see, the two rows are identical in every aspect except they are missing the bottom half of that star being duplicated above it.

This indicates that at some point, someone on the design team edited the picture and removed some of the artifacts of the duplication without fixing most of it. I personally wonder if this was due to the fact that the background is very dark to begin with, appearing almost black on some types of monitors, and whether the designer in question simply was unable to clearly see the background - something that could have been responsible for the seam error in the first place.

If you are viewing this article on a smart device, or in a brightly-lit room, you may be experiencing the same kind of difficulty in seeing these errors. Here is my final attempt to showcase the seam in a way that should be visible on all screens, by maximizing the contrast:

I hope that at least this picture will not leave any of my readers unable to see the error in question.

Shy Almost-All-Guys

There are many species in the Mario universe that have never had a single female representative in the series: Yoshis being the most prominent example. For 28 years of Yoshi appearances, not a single one of them was identified as female - even though they lay eggs, a fact pointed out by Solid Snake in a codec call in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. (Although, there has almost never been an egg that a Yoshi laid on screen that also hatched into a Baby Yoshi on screen - and in the sole case it happened in the Egg minigame in Game & Watch Gallery 3, the Yoshi was not identified by any pronoun - meaning it is, however unlikely, still possible that female Yoshis are responsible for those eggs and the eggs we see male Yoshis lay are not for reproduction.)

One species that is usually assumed to be entirely male is Shy Guys, which is, for the most part, true. Shy Guys have now been around for 31 years and almost every single of them has been, as the name indicates, a guy - except for one.

This is Hulu from Mario Party Advance. Hulu is a member of the Spear Guy variety of Shy Guys, evident by the mask markings and grass skirt. Hulu can be found in the Dancing Stage in the Jungle Area of Shroom City, the game's story mode map. 

Hulu invites the player character to a dancing minigame, which earns a Gaddget, the game's main collectible, when won. Due to the only character speaking during the entire sequence being Hulu, there is obviously no need for the text to use any identifying pronouns, so it is logical to assume that Hulu, like literally every other speaking Shy Guy character in the Mario franchise, is male.

However, the game's credits contradict this. The credits sequence includes a slow crawl of the game's characters with blurbs about how their lives continued after the events of the story. This is Hulu's blurb:

This one sentence suddenly transformed the entire Shy Guy species from "perhaps male-only, like Gorons in the Legend of Zelda series" to "extremely low female representation" as we know that at least one Shy Guy is female - or whatever the correct term for female Shy Guys would be. (This also shows that this species does not display dimorphism between the genders, so potentially any Shy Guy encountered in the games that is not identified as male could be female.) 

Of course, the game being 13 years old and all following Shy Guys still being male could very likely mean Nintendo dropped the idea and the species is in fact intended to be male-only. At this point, only time can tell.

Daisy's Skates

In Mario Power Tennis, each character has a unique cutscene for winning a cup in a tournament. These can sometimes contain interesting details, such as how Shy Guys look without a mask (normally not visible as Shy Guy is turned away from the camera, however, emulator tools allow us to see this):

Today I will concentrate on a much more minor detail. If you have played the game on a TV and won a tournament as Daisy, you may have seen the scene in a quality roughly resembling this:

Daisy rides into view on a pair of inline skates, however, the logo on them is too small to read at the console's usual output resolution. Fortunately, the same emulator tools allow us to zoom in and see:

While the texture of the logo is very low-resolution, it is clear that it is the word "DAISY", but mirrored. The developers likely did not expect anyone to be able to run the game in much higher resolution and make out the texture.

What is interesting is that the texture is applied correctly to the other side of the skates - which is not the side seen when Daisy enters the scene. Perhaps the scene was first optimized for Daisy entering from the right, and then changed to her entering from the left. (An argument can be made that there was probably no consideration for this and the texture was just applied in a standard way that would mirror it automatically, and then not checked due to the small resolution - however, this raises the question of why the developers even bothered to add text if the resolution would make it unreadable.)

Finally, I would like to remark that Daisy's skates are unique due to having 5 wheels. The overwhelming majority of inline skates in real life have 4 wheels, with skates for children having 3. For an asset used in one cutscene of one game, these skates are rather nonstandard.

This concludes this week's Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels.

As you may remember, for two weeks now I have said that I had an issue prepared in advance. This was supposed to make up for the delays in Issues 6 to 8. However, an accident happened during the preparation of that issue that caused me first to swap it for the Piranha Plant special, and then to go an entire week without a new issue altogether. It has to do with the Patreon article editor.

In the editor, a big button on the right needs to be pressed when the article is ready to be published. As it takes many hours for me to write an article, I am not interested in that function until the very end; instead, I want to frequently save what I am working on as a draft.

Pressing an arrow to the right of the button opens a menu where "Save as draft" can be selected. Doing this changes the orange button to read "SAVE AS DRAFT". Clicking it saves the article and also, simultaneously, reverts the button back to "PUBLISH NOW". Exactly this functionality has resulted in my article being lost. As I was going over it to edit details, I accidentally pressed the "SAVE AS DRAFT" button twice, with the second time it activating the publishing function due to automatically reverting after one click. As I did not want my readers to see an article that I thought was not ready to be published yet, I panicked and deleted it. Only after doing so did I realize that I did not save either the text or the images for it on my computer - I rely on online drafts and my hard drive cannot fit all the material, so I have the habit of deleting it when I upload it to a website. I contacted Patreon's tech support, and during the wait, composed and published the Piranha Plant special instead.

Yesterday, I finally heard back from the team that the files could not be restored, and the article being lost. I immediately started writing this article to make up for this, but this does not excuse the fact that there has now been a week without an article. As such, I offer you that I will write another article this week, starting immediately after this one is published. I understand if you are unhappy with this performance, and if you wish a refund, please contact me and I will issue one immediately. I am not attempting to divert blame, merely offering an explanation of what happened. It was still entirely my fault to not make local backups.

On a more positive note, I am now offering you a new way to track my work instead of the transparency reports. I honestly cannot believe it took me over 2 months to come up with this idea, but here it is - the Daily Transparency Report. I am using a time clock program to track the time spent working on the blog, with the timer being paused for any kind of break - so if you read "4 hours", that is 4 hours of pure focused activity without bathroom breaks, lunch breaks et cetera. The daily report will also contain links to all posts made on all blogs during that day, fulfilling a second function as a "hub" of my activity - something that has also been widely requested. The current plan for the next few days is to write another article to make up for the lost week, and to finish and publish the podcast. I hope that the reports will help you track my progress.

Thank you very much for reading.