Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels, Issue 11, Week 47/2018 (Patreon)

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

More on the schedule of remaining Patreon content for the month 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 make a wish upon the Star Spirits for more obscure Mario content.
This is Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels.  

Triple Ms. Mowz

In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, a unique glitch can be performed with Ms. Mowz during the battle against Grodus in Chapter 8. Before I go into an explanation of the glitch, please take a look at this footage of it in action:

Due to the resulting file size, I decided to omit a crucial element of the battle necessary to perform the glitch: prior to the turn depicted in the footage, Grodus activated a status effect for himself, announced with the line "All direct attacks will be countered". Attempting to perform Ms. Mowz's attack without that status effect being present on Grodus will not result in any unusual behavior.

Now, let us go step-by-step through the footage. First, Grodus must activate the abovementioned status effect. This can happen relatively late into the fight; in my experience, it may be on the 8th to 14th turn; meaning that many players who have developed strategies to beat Grodus as quickly as possible may never have seen him activate that ability. Then, on Mario's turn, Ms. Mowz must be made to attack Grodus with the Love Slap move. (Note that Grodus must have no full protection, meaning that no more than 3 Grodus Xs must be present.)

If the Action Command for the Love Slap is executed perfectly (i.e. the bar is filled up to the end and flashing green), Ms. Mowz will, instead of executing the attack normally, show a different Action Command, asking the player to press A repeatedly instead (although the text still shows the prompt for the previous Action Command). The inputs for that particular Action Command are irrelevant; not pressing A or pressing it has no effect on the subsequent events.

Then, the main visual part of the glitch happens: Ms. Mowz splits into four, then one of them reacts normally to Grodus's status effect, taking 1 damage and running back to Mario. One Ms. Mowz remains in front of Grodus and one behind him, locked into animations, with the fourth one seemingly disappearing. The copies of Ms. Mowz remain on the battlefield, non-interactive, until the end of the battle or until Ms. Mowz is swapped out for another partner, and performing the glitch again results in more copies of Ms. Mowz spawning in the exact same positions, resulting in no visual change. (It could be theorized that spawning too many copies could crash the game due to too many sprites on screen, however, Grodus's status effect wears off relatively quickly and to attempt a crash this way would require the battle to go on for potentially hundreds of turns; requiring great amounts of preparation. If you wish for me to attempt this, please leave a comment and I will research the feasibility of this.)

Anyone familiar with Ms. Mowz's later moves may notice that splitting into four is what she does in preparation for her Tease attack; however, note that in the save file I used to record the footage, Ms. Mowz did not know Tease, meaning that the animation plays regardless of whether the character is able to perform the move. What is even more curious is that the Action Command shown before the Tease split is not the Tease Action Command; in fact, none of Ms. Mowz's attacks have that kind of Action Command. 

This information would be the end of it if we only had the original hardware available; luckily, due to the extended functionality of emulators, we can take a closer look at some of the aspects of the glitch. First off, the obvious question: what happens to the fourth Ms. Mowz?

As it turns out, the fourth Ms. Mowz is hiding behind Grodus. Due to Grodus's large size and the fact that he never moves during any of his attacks, he covers up the fourth Ms. Mowz completely for the entire duration of her being displayed.

Now, you may wonder why the Ms. Mowzs seem to be duplicated here - that is to say, duplicated even more than they already are, with each one of the 4 clones being a "stack" of two, similar to how Paper Mario enemies started appearing as stacks in Paper Mario: Sticker Star.

This has to do with the Tease attack. The intro to the Tease attack looks like this from the usual camera angle:

Ms. Mowz splits into four, just like in the glitch. However, moving the camera reveals that there are actually eight of them:

These darker copies are used to create the trail visual effect seen in the glitch footage (and in the normal Tease attack), by being duplicated themselves (again) and then having their opacity adjusted. So now we have Ms. Mowz splitting into four, those four actually being stacks of two, and the back copies being duplicated for the trail effect. At most, each frame displays 9 Ms. Mowzs in a trail, meaning that at the maximum, there are (9*4)+8=44 copies of Ms. Mowz in the scene at once.

Unfortunately, the glitch has no practical use.

Mario Party 4 Credits

The story of Mario Party 4, as conveyed in the manual, is the following:

It's a very bare-bones story amounting essentially to "Party hosts have arrived to host a party for your birthday", with the in-game opening cinematic showing merely that the playable characters were gathered near Peach's Castle doing nothing in particular when the abovementioned Party Cube arrives from seemingly nowhere.

Stories like this are expected of Mario Party games, but what makes Mario Party 4 special is that in the end credits, prerendered images show the party hosts before the events of the game, providing a small amount of backstory. Here is what the images look like if you are playing the game on a console:

Surprisingly, there does currently not seem to be a rip of the graphics in the ending uploaded to any game asset repository sites like spriters-resource.com; which is why I decided to extract the graphics myself. Here are the images taken directly from the game's files, grouped in pairs, in order, with commentary:

The credits always show a zoomed-in portion of a prerendered scene first before switching to the full image. I am including both since even though the second version shows more of the scene, the first one displays its contents in a higher resolution.

Here, we can see the five host characters first seeing the Party Cube. They are not wearing their iconic outfits yet, appearing instead as five generic enemies. The way Boo is carrying Goomba implies that they are friends and not merely a group of strangers stumbling upon the Party Cube simultaneously by coincidence. It appears to emerge from some kind of pipe; the nature of its appearance and the pipe remain unclear.

Immediately after seeing the Party Cube, Boo begins drawing a picture of the hosts onto it. Here is the texture used for the drawing in-game:

The fact that Boo begins drawing the picture before the hosts receive their outfits also explains why they are drawn as generic enemies on the Party Cube despite never appearing as such outside of the credits.

After the picture is drawn - note the absence of the Star in the middle since the characters have not yet encountered the Star - the Party Cube suddenly grows to the size it is during the events of the game.

The next pictures show Boo caring about Goomba's safety, as he catches Goomba after the latter falls down from the newly enlarged Party Cube. Curiously, even though the credits show some kind of special friendship between those two, in the actual game, the hosts do not interact with each other one-on-one at all.

Here is where the events become inconsistent. We see the hosts putting in their invitations into an envelope - the one that is opened and makes up the main menu of the game - but the invitations already depict the hosts with their party outfits, as well as the Star in two of the invitations. It can be argued that the hosts drew themselves with the outfits because they already had the outfits and merely did not have time to put them on, but the Star being present means they were already counting on the Star helping them out with the party; again, before the Star actually appears and Boo adds a drawing of it onto the Party Cube.

The only possible explanation that would cover all of this is rather convoluted: the hosts knew they would ask the Star in advance, put pictures of the Star onto the invitations, but did not draw the Star onto the Party Cube because they wanted it to be present during the drawing process. I understand that this type of theorizing is extremely likely to not match up with the intent of the developers as the simplest explanation for this is that there was an oversight in the order of the actions; if the invitation-making were to be done as the last step in the preparations, there would be no inconsistency. However, it can be interesting to look at instances of what seems like an obviously unintentional oversight and imagine the consequences of it as though it were intended.

In the following pictures, the hosts ask a Lakitu (presumably another one of their friends) to deliver the letter containing the invitations. Note that the end of the Lakitu's fishing line does not seem to contain a hook, and instead be attached to the letter in some other, unseen way.

In this picture, the hosts are already wearing their party outfits, with the exception of Boo, who is handed his hat by Toad. This could imply that the outfits are owned by Toad and he is lending them to his friends for the duration of the party.

The next three sets of images seem to be the hosts preparing to host the party. The first one is likely practicing a dance, while the second seems to be some sort of disagreement, with Goomba attempting to confront Shy Guy but being held back by Koopa. Finally, the last image has Goomba standing off to the side, seemingly unhappy with the others, as they continue their discussion.

Here, the Star appears. Due to the lack of motion, dialogue and the general lack of expressiveness of some of the characters, it is hard to tell if the hosts were expecting it to arrive or if they are surprised by it. It is also not clear how the Star is communicating with the hosts, as it does not talk in-game.

Here, the Star's picture is added by Boo onto the Party Cube. If the invitation scene were moved to be after this scene, no inconsistencies would occur. However, this cannot be done simply by showing the existing pictures in a different order, as the scene in question was rendered with the hosts' normal models and not with their party outfits.

The final pictures of the set show the hosts getting on top of the Party Cube, where they then appear in the game's intro and title screen. What is not explained is how the Party Cube then wraps itself up as a present with the hosts still inside, and how Mario only receives the invitation at the exact same time the Party Cube itself arrives, making sending Lakitu off with it early entirely pointless. Of course, it is possible that the ending and intro were made at different points during development, and continuity not being the highest priority for this type of game to begin with.

After all pictures are shown, there is an additional brief animation (note that this is merely a low-quality screen recording instead of a rip; as the animation is stored as a video file that would not be possible to embed inside a Patreon post):

Here, the hosts, again without their party outfits, are chasing the Party Cube as it magically cleans itself of the drawings and flies into the sky, exploding into fireworks. In the end, this entire sequence raises more questions than it answers: how did the hosts know about the Party Cube's power to begin with? How is the Party Cube entered if it has no openings and we never see any characters entering it? (If you believe there may be an opening on the top side, which is normally never seen, viewing the model of the Party Cube on the title screen reveals that there is not.) 

Still, it is a charming addition to the game's credits and provides interesting imagery of common Mario species members interacting with each other.

Paper Mario Pre-release Map Analysis

As you may know, Paper Mario was known under the beta title "Super Mario RPG2" for years before its release; while the exact date of the change is unknown, the game was first mentioned under the title in 1997, 3 years before its Japanese release, with the last mention of the name being in 1999. One of the screenshots available from a version of the game still titled Super Mario RPG2 shows the game's title screen.

(Note that I am referring to the title as "Super Mario RPG2" without a space between "RPG" and "2" instead of "Super Mario RPG 2" due to the title being formatted without a space in both the Latin alphabet and Japanese version; still, many journalistic outlets chose to interpret the title to contain the space as spaces are conventionally placed before numerals, which is why you would encounter more materials using the version with the space than without.)

This is the image in question:

Unlike the finished game's title screen, which contains original artwork, this one uses the game's map screen, covered to 2/3rds by clouds, instead. The map screen seems very similar to the one from the finished game, although there are differences. Let us compare them.

This is the map screen from the finished game (enlarged by a factor of 2 due to the original texture only being 320x320 pixels). First off, let us try to overlap the two maps on top of each other as closely as possible to see how much difference there is.

Here, both maps are overlapping each other at 50% opacity. We can see that the coastline, while similar, was changed in the finished version, as well as Lavalava Island being moved much further south. Of course, this type of comparison does not help to see details, which is why we will move on to side-by-side comparisons.

Looking at the available areas left-to-right, let us start with Lavalava Island. Interestingly, all the features of the island present in the finished map seem to already be present in the beta map; however, due to the blurry quality of the image, it is hard to make out any details. Lavalava Island has 5 points of interest: the volcano, the big tree in the west, the lake in the center, Yoshi's Village in the east, and the landing beach with rocks in the south; with the rest covered in a generic mass of trees.

The volcano and the big tree do not have much detail in the finished version; in fact, the tree seems to have additional shading in the beta version (assuming it is in fact the big tree - it is possible that this is merely a discolored section of the jungle that looks like a point of interest due to the extensive blurring). The lake contains two small island in the finished version and seems to either also contain two (larger) islands in the beta version or at least be oddly shaped. It is possible that the thin line bisecting the lake in the beta version represents one of the bridges found in the jungle; this would be a detail left out from the release version.

In the beta version, Yoshi's Island's beach has two islands connected by a bridge, while the finished version has one island connected by two bridges to the rest of the beach. Both are not entirely accurate, as the village actually contains 3 islands, although the beta version is closer. It also seems - but is very hard to tell - that the beta version also contains the tall tree north of the islands, although it does not seem to have a small house on top of it. Still, there is a house on ground level next to the tree. 

The only feature entirely missing from the beta version are the rocks on the southern beach; these seem to be replacing some other geographical feature that may or may not be differently-colored rocks. All in all, this area does not seem too different; which is remarkable due to several pre-release images being from an island region very likely to have later been reworked into Lavalava Island, and they look extremely different from the finished game.

At this point, I would like to mention that the above picture of the beta map is technically not the only existing picture of it - since a roughly 1-second-long segment of footage of it exists as well, during which the clouds covering the map move slightly. Due to the footage being lower-quality than the screenshot, I will not be using it, however, in the case of Toad Town, there are a few frames where the clouds are further to the left than in the screenshot, and as that is a high-detail area, any information is valuable.

We can see that the south of Toad Town looks completely different in the beta version; in fact, it looks so different there are no points to directly compare. The building above the R is likely the train station, but the train tracks are very understated and easily confused for a footpath. 

Luckily, we do have footage of the train station from that version of the game, seen in the same trailer the above frame is from, and the station seems to match up to what we can (barely) see in the map:

Interestingly, the lack of a Lil' Oink farm also matches up with the map; although it is not possible to know whether Lil' Oinks were a late addition or the farm was simply moved to the station area from somewhere else.

As the next destinations have relatively few points of interest, let us analyze them together. It is unfortunately impossible to see if Boo's Mansion is present in Forever Forest in the beta version, as not even the footage has the clouds move far enough to see the top of the forest. It is also possible that the vague purple spot in the east of the forest could be the roof of the mansion, covered partially both by the trees and by Mt. Rugged, but that is pure speculation. 

The railroad from Toad Town to Mt. Rugged seems almost entirely green, while Mt. Rugged itself has less vegetation in the beta version. Now, the following is not based on any evidence, but it seems to me that the Mt. Rugged train station could have been part of the map, but removed from the trailer/screenshot for some reason. Note how the southern part of Mt. Rugged on the beta map is conspicuously empty in addition to looking blurred, as though something has been edited out. Of course, to take this as proof would be preposterous given how blurry the rest of the image already is. Still, it is odd that one train station is present - and the train even shown in the same trailer - while the other train station is replaced with a stretch of empty land.

Finally, the river to the west of the forest is narrower and less winding in the beta version, as well as missing Fice T.'s guard house. Strangely, there seem to be more islands to the south of the railroad than in the release version, although that area is mostly covered by the copyright text.

Dry Dry Desert seems much more barren in the beta version. There is a single dark spot in the eastern part, although what it is is impossible to tell. There are no cacti in the southeast, no oasis, and whatever the feature is that occupies the position of Dry Dry Outpost, it does not resemble the finished version of that town. My best guess here is that it was supposed to be a collection of tents, i.e. a nomad stop, instead of a walled town, as that would explain the gathering of small spots. 

The coast of the desert area is also completely different; not only was the coastline redrawn, but the vegetation has been removed as well. It raises the question of whether in that version of the game, the southern part of the desert had more vegetation, as it seems rather prominent here. In addition, there is an object in the sea at the right edge of the screen, which may be a rock, but due to the small horizontal line running through it, appears to be a sailboat. The finished game contains no such boats (and in fact there are no boats of any kind in the Toad Town harbor), suggesting that perhaps at some point the harbor was used by boats, which were then removed.

It does not seem that Mario himself would have used the boat; the trailer the map is from also shows the famous whale ride scene, confirming that Mario would have used the whale to reach Lavalava Island even as far back as that version. This may mean that the boats were cosmetic or perhaps simply not important to the plot.

In the end, all we can hope for to find out more is that version of the game being leaked in the distant future.

Strong Currents

Invisible walls in 3D video games are what could be described as "a necessary evil". It is not feasible to rely merely on physical barriers to prevent players from going out of bounds - no matter how high a wall or how wide a pit is, if someone discovers glitches that would let them jump higher or further than normal, they would immediately attempt to cross those boundaries. Often, it does not even need to be a glitch in the first place, merely an unintended application of the game's physics engine. 

For these cases, invisible walls exist to prevent players from moving in a direction whatsoever (of course, tricks to bypass those exist, as well, but it is generally not possible to pass an invisible wall merely by moving at a normal speed). Super Mario 64 was the first 3D Mario game, and the first Mario game to use them - unlike the vast majority of current games, Super Mario 64 did not shy away from talking about them in the manual:

Current games attempt their best to not let a player touch an invisible wall under normal circumstances - it usually takes glitches to encounter one. Super Mario 64, as a pioneer of 3D movement in a video game, did not see the need to attempt to mask them at the time.

Of course, the attitude changed in the years following the game's release, and by the time Super Mario Sunshine came out, the developers did not want the player to run into invisible walls. The attempts did not cover all instances, for example, it is rather easy to touch an invisible wall in Bianco Hills simply by moving backward from the level entrance.

And while being unable to cross an invisible boundary could be explained as Mario's unwillingness to abandon the current mission, the fact that even water from his FLUDD cannot cross the boundary is not entirely immersive.

Still, in many of the game's locations, Super Mario Sunshine employs a more sophisticated method of preventing the player from reaching the boundary of the level. 5 of the game's 7 main levels are (at least in one of their major areas) surrounded by water. Instead of letting Mario swim until he reaches an invisible wall, the game instead uses currents to push him away. (Although note that areas with invisible walls over water also exist, such as Delfino Plaza.)

Swimming at normal speed in levels like Ricco Harbor and Gelato Beach quickly makes it clear that Mario will not pass a certain point where the current is as quick to move him backward as he is swimming forward. However, there is one tool we can use to see just how far the current will go: the Turbo Nozzle. This nozzle can be unlocked in many of the levels and allows Mario to run on water indefinitely with high speed. Let us use the Turbo Nozzle to try to bypass the first hurdle of the currents.

After passing the first current that flows at Mario's swimming speed, Mario seemingly encounters an invisible wall. This is however simply another current, one that flows at the Turbo Nozzle running speed. Since running against it is functionally identical to sidling up against an invisible wall, it can easily be confused for one.

However, it can be bypassed by jumping. Then, Mario is thwarted with yet another current - one that is faster than the Turbo Nozzle, actively pushing him backward. Still, the current has one disadvantage over Mario: no matter how fast it is, its force is confined to the water, and it can not affect Mario when he is in the air. Thus, jumping quickly allows Mario to still gain further distance, until after the third current, he hits the actual, true invisible wall of the level.

When the threshold between the second and third currents is approached from the opposite side, this visual effect can be seen. While this is functionally identical to approaching it from the level side, Mario looks much more frantic and the water sprays much more violently.

Using the Turbo Nozzle may have shown us the types of currents, but what about their range? It is very hard to judge distances when so many forces are acting upon Mario - the Turbo Nozzle's drive, his jumping momentum and the currents. It would be useful to be able to just drop Mario at the invisible wall and watch him be carried by the current back to the level.

Luckily, cheats allow us to do just that:

Here, you can clearly see the extent of the currents. The third current takes up the longest distance, the second one much less, and the first only a few feet (as that is all that is necessary to keep Mario from swimming). You may not even notice the first current without looking very carefully at Mario's movement.

In the end, I have to say that while this is an admirable effort, to truly thwart players, the current would have had to be combined with an equally strong wind to make jumping over it impossible.

Eternal Pain

In Super Mario Odyssey, the flower-stealing UFO-like boss Torkdrift is fought in the Wooded Kingdom. To defeat Torkdrift, Mario must capture an Uproot and repeatedly hit the boss's glass flower-collecting chamber until it flips over. 

Did you know that the reason Torkdrift's name contains the word "drift" is because it is a mechanical Spindrift, an enemy from Super Mario 64? Its Japanese name is "Mecha-Fuwafuwa-san", while regular Spindrifts are called "Fuwafuwa-san" (translating roughly as "Mr. Fluffy", or perhaps a pun on "furawa", the phonetic way of spelling the English word "flower" in Japanese). Thus, Mechawiggler is only one of two "Mecha-[regular Mario enemy]" bosses in the game, a fact that is lost on most non-Japanese players due to "Torkdrift" not directly referencing Spindrifts.

Before the battle against Torkdrift starts, the boss is busy sucking up flowers in the "Secret Flower Field". Torkdrift will ignore Mario both in his normal form and in his Uproot form entirely until Uproot Mario touches the underside of the flower-collecting chamber and continues pressing against it for a few seconds, resulting in the boss performing the same animation it would when taking a hit during the actual battle. Then, the battle begins.

In fact, Torkdrift is so engrossed in the sucking up of flowers that Mario can even throw Cappy at the antenna on the spiky part of the boss's body, resulting in it lighting up and giving Mario a Heart:

However, there is another scenario that is possible here. Instead of performing the full amount of pressing necessary to register as a hit, if Uproot Mario touches the chamber for only a short time and then walks away, the following will happen:

Torkdrift will be locked in its "pained" animation until Uproot Mario presses against the chamber enough to trigger the beginning of the battle, jerking around and making panicked sounds. What this means is that if Mario chooses to ignore the boss afterwards, it will be performing the animation indefinitely.

To my knowledge, this is the only time in a Mario game where Mario can make an enemy enter a pain state indefinitely without the use of exploits or glitches - in all other cases, the animation reverts to the normal idle animation after a few moments. In other words, this is the only time Mario can legitimately "torture" an enemy by keeping it in pain forever without defeating it or letting it recover. Of course, Torkdrift being a mechanical entity, this is not as unethical as if it were a living organism, but it still raises the question of why the animation does not have a reset timer as other animations of this kind would normally have.

Only time will tell if Mario will be able to torture his enemies in future games, as well.

Dangerous Demo: Follow-up

In my last Lost Levels article, I talked about a way to play in the demo mode in Super Mario Land 2. A short recap: by inputting certain button combinations on the title screen, it is possible to load up four different levels. Mario can be controlled, but the game freezes after 64 inputs. Still, one of the levels can be beaten even within that limit. Beating that level results in the game's first save file being overwritten with a different level being marked as completed.

Reader "Boogs" then asked me in the comment section about whether it would be possible to beat the game in the state it finds itself after completing the demo mode stage. To be frank, I expected it to be possible, perhaps only exhibiting sound issues as I described in the article. As it turns out, I overlooked an extremely simple fact: after beating the stage in demo mode, demo mode actually continues indefinitely, with the amount of inputs required for the game to freeze simply continuing to count down. As beating the first level under perfect circumstances requires less than 5 inputs, I was under the impression that the limit was lifted after being able to move around the map and enter levels during my research for the last article; but if I had only tried to beat a level, I would have seen that the limit was still in effect.

Here is an example of running out of inputs and the game freezing on the map screen:

(Note that unlike freezing in a level, the background animation freezes as well instead of continuing.)

I have tried everything I could to reset the limit, but not even the trick of getting a 1-Up and then letting Mario die could do it, as that simply reset the game to the title screen. Even if there were a way to reset the input limit between areas, the fact that it is still present in the first place means that no other level except for the Hippo Level could be beaten.

This line of thought, however, resulted in my final discovery about this mode: while beating the Hippo Level the first time in demo mode results in the intro level being marked as completed on the first save file, what would happen if I went to the Hippo Level and beat it again?

As it turns out, beating it a second time does correctly mark it completed on the first save file upon exiting demo mode:

Unfortunately, after doing that, there is really nothing else that can be accomplished, as trying to clear the Hippo Level any additional times before the input limit runs out has no effect. So, in the end, I can say with confidence that the most use that can be gotten out of demo mode is clearing two levels and overwriting the first save file with them. Special thanks to reader "Boogs" for the inquiry!

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

I am aware that I am now a week behind on these articles, as well as on two podcast issues. This is quite frankly utterly shameful and I am more than happy to refund any and all contributions to my readers; simply contact me over Patreon, Tumblr or Twitter and I will issue a refund immediately. I never intended for the content to be this late, and if I had known it would come to this, I would have never started the Patreon campaign in the first place. 

I have taken time off my job for the rest of the month to be able to concentrate on fulfilling as much of the outstanding promises as I can within the 6 remaining days. I plan to put in more than 12 hours of work time each day in the hope of being able to deliver at least an .mp3 version of both podcasts in that time, as the scripts for both are mostly finished. I cannot be certain that a YouTube version of them will be done in time for December 1st, which is why I am issuing the following

Podcast Delivery Guarantee

If you choose to no longer support me in December, but have supported me either in October or in November at the Broth Siblings level or higher, you may contact me over Patreon, Twitter or Tumblr and I will send you the links to the podcast issues as they are released on YouTube. This way, you will not need to feel that you should continue supporting me merely to get access to that content; as you already paid for it and I merely did not deliver it on time. I hope that this can at least somewhat make up for the utterly disgraceful performance on my part regarding the extra content.

I apologize once again, but I understand that at this point, an apology is simply not enough. I must stress that you are entitled to a refund and that dropping support for my Patreon is entirely understandable given the circumstances.

Thank you very much for reading.