Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels, Issue 12, Week 48/2018 (Patreon)

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

If you do not check the Patreon or your associated email account daily, you may receive the notifications about Issue 11 and this issue simultaneously, resulting in you possibly being under the impression that Issue 11 was skipped. It was not, you can read it here. The reason for the odd schedule is that I previously was a week behind on The Lost Levels issues, resulting in me taking time off work to catch up; this caused two issues to be released within a span of three days. Now, however, I am caught up with all past issues. Issue 13 will be released shortly, as well. 

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 the Light Prognosticus and read a prophecy about obscure Mario content.
This is Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels. 

Time Dilation

According to the theory of relativity, a clock that is moving relative to an observer will be perceived as ticking slower than a clock that is at rest relative to that observer. In other words, objects that move faster have time pass more slowly for them relative to objects that are at rest (this is of course very simplified, but this is the essence of the concept). The Wikipedia article for time dilation demonstrates the effect with this animation:

As you can see, the red, faster-moving clock is ticking slower than the blue, slower-moving clock. This effect has been empirically proven to occur (albeit in very small quantities) and is the focus of a great number of science fiction works due to the implications of being usable to travel forward through time.

Whether intentional or not, this effect appears in Super Mario Bros. 3 - although given the fact that it also appears in both the Super Mario All-Stars and Super Mario Advance 4 remakes, which have had the game's engine reprogrammed from scratch, suggests that it is more likely than not to be intentional.

How exactly is a complex concept like time dilation implemented in a Mario game? If we consider the clock of the player at home - one that is "at rest" - to be a reference point, then the in-game level timer could be considered a moving clock that is attached to Mario's body. Of course, there is nothing in the vast majority of Mario games that suggests that the timer is attached to Mario, however, some games allow Mario to replenish the timer by collecting physical items such as clocks, which would make slightly more sense if the timer was something Mario carried around. At any rate, the time dilation effect requires us to consider the timer to be attached to Mario to become apparent.

Let us first see how time passes when Mario is at rest.

This footage is a loop of four "seconds" of the in-game timer; although in no Mario game except for Super Mario Maker are these actually exactly one second long, which is why it may be more appropriate to call them "time units". As the game can run at different framerates depending on what hardware it is played at, we will count the length of time units using frames instead of seconds; in addition, this allows us to avoid using cumbersome fractions.

When Mario is standing still, each time unit is on average 41 frames long. Why "on average"? As it turns out, the time units are not the same length even when Mario is standing still and there are no moving objects on screen whatsoever - they alternate between being 40 and 42 frames in length. Imagine if in real life, every even second of the clock was a tiny bit longer than every odd second. This alone already hints at the flexibility of the timer, but the true extent of it only becomes apparent when Mario starts moving.

In this footage, Mario is walking for four time units. "Walking" here is defined by moving when only Right on the D-Pad is pressed, without using B to dash. Here, the time units alternate between 55 and 58 frames in length. This means that the "short" time units become 137.5% longer than the resting speed and the "long" time units 138.1% longer. We are already experiencing significant time dilation and Mario is moving at the lowest constant speed he is able to. This raises a question: is it really Mario's speed that determines the timer, or merely the fact that he is walking? Perhaps it is tied to his animation somehow, or to the fact that the player is performing a constant input, rather that his actual velocity.

Fortunately, we are able to test this by putting Mario in a state where he 1. moves faster than walking, 2. without being animated and 3. without player input. That state is freefall.

Level 5-2 contains a vast stretch of empty vertical space where we can let Mario fall for 4 time units without interference. Here, the timer moves at 112 frames per time unit, slower than walking, which confirms that it is in fact tied to Mario's speed. Interestingly, the timer seems to not alternate between short and long time units in this case; every time unit is 112 frames long. This is 280% slower than resting; Mario is experiencing time at a rate almost 3 times slower than usual and this is not even the highest speed he can move at.

Super Mario Bros. 3 introduces the P-Meter, a gauge on the bottom of the screen that fills when Mario is running without interruption. When it is filled, Mario achieves "P-speed", the maximum possible dashing speed and consistently the maximum speed at which Mario can run in all his 2D platforming adventures. When Mario is running at P-speed, the timer is ticking so slowly that I was unable to record him running for four time units since he would have literally ran out of space in the level. In just two time units, Mario covers so much distance that he is past the level's halfway point, and if he could hypothetically start the level while already moving right at P-speed, he would only need four time units to finish it. 

The amount of frames taken up by time units during P-speed alternates between 160 and 165. The short time units are exactly 1/4 as long as those measured when Mario is at rest. This is an impressive amount of time dilation; if Mario were to run at P-speed for what seems like a day to the observer, only 6 hours would pass from Mario's point of view. 

Even though there is only a very slim chance that this timing peculiarity is something that Nintendo's Mario development teams keep in mind, if it was taken to be an integral part of the franchise, it could explain how Mario stays apparently the same age during all of his adventures: he simply runs so fast that time passes only at a fraction of the normal rate for him. Of course, this is merely an amusing implication to think about.

Infinite Tips

Super Mario Galaxy 2 contains little monitors on stands throughout some of its levels. These are known as the Tip Network. The Tip Network provides Mario with movies of gameplay intended to show off some particular mechanic; when they are interacted with, they ask if Mario wants to see a tip, then interrupt the gameplay to show the movie. ("Movie" in this case refers to in-engine gameplay where Mario is controlled by the computer, not a prerendered video file.) There are a few interesting tidbits about the Tip Network.

First off, not every player may know that the Tip Network has its own musical theme that plays during the movies, as some players ignore hint systems of this kind, assuming (perhaps rightfully) that the techniques showcased therein are best discovered on their own. 

If first-person view is entered near a Tip Network, you can see that the monitor is showing whatever the in-game camera is showing, meaning that it will show copies of itself within itself. During normal gameplay, it is not possible to see just how many copies can be stacked this way, but emulator tools allow us to zoom in onto the screen.

The maximum amount of copies that can be clearly seen within the monitor is 6; it is unclear if more cannot be seen due to the game stopping the recursion at some point or due to each successive image becoming more hazy they simply cannot be discerned. 

Reader "Leia" has informed me of the following trick that can be achieved using the Tip Network: it is possible to collect up to 999 coins and Star Bits during a single visit to a level simply by repeatedly collecting the existing coins/Star Bits, then watching a movie on the Tip Network. This will cause the items in the level to respawn, allowing Mario to collect them again.

Here is an example:

In this screenshot, I have collected the coins that normally appear on the cloud in the top left corner of the screen - note that I have 5 coins and there are no coins on that cloud. I talk to the Tip Network and upon exiting...

...the coins have respawned, but I still have a count of 5 coins. (In addition, Mario loses his power-up; something that can make Tip Networks undesirable to use.) This can be repeated indefinitely; here is a screenshot of a player collecting 999 coins using this method:

Of course, collecting large amounts of coins in Super Mario Galaxy 2 has little point beyond being saved as a high score, while collecing Star Bits can be done faster simply by letting Mario die to respawn them instead of watching a movie; still, it is a usable alternative to that method. Thanks again to reader "Leia" for the tip!

Facts About Raphael

Level 5-8 of Yoshi's Island, Raphael the Raven's Castle, has a few things that make it unique. Let's take a look.

The background used in later parts of the level has 3 moons on it. Strangely, it does not seem to consist of 4 repeated parts that one moon was removed from, as would appear at first glance - instead it seems that 3 moons were inserted deliberately into certain points in the background. This is how it looks in-game:

Yoshi starts off on the right side of the castle, with the moon being visible through a window; and then moves to the left side, where the moon is visible again. At a cursory glance, this appears to be the same moon, however if the walls are removed by disabling a graphical layer, we see the truth:

The moon scrolls offscreen to be replaced with another moon. Likely, the designers first had a starry background without moons and then strategically dispensed them to be visible during key moments.

The battle against Raphael himself is unique, as it uses Mode 7 to rotate the entire battlefield to simulate walking around a small planet with its own gravity, as Super Mario Galaxy would 12 years after. It is not possible to see the full background of that battle, so here it is ripped from the game's files:

At the end of the battle, Raphael flies off into the background with a "twinkling star" effect, whereupon a constellation of him with a big star in the middle appears in that spot:

There is evidence that the star in the middle of that constellation had greater importance at some point during development, as the Raphael sprites used in the game actually all have the same star on them as well:

The reason it isn't visible is because it is normally colored black just like the rest of Raphael's body, with it being colored yellow by the sprite ripper in the above image for clarity. 

Operatic Battery

Paper Mario: Color Splash contains items called "Things", which are realistic objects from our world, rendered in as much detail as possible to contrast with the entirely paper-based environment of the game. Each Thing can be turned into a "Thing Card", a powerful move to be used during battle.

One of these Thing Cards is the Battery card, which summons a battery (most likely a D-size, although not being to scale makes it hard to tell the difference between a C and a D battery due to their similar shapes), which appears from above over the backdrop of an ancient Greek temple and zaps the enemies before disappearing. You can see the sequence at the 5:43 mark in this video.

Of interest is the music that plays during this sequence. It is a short snippet of some kind of operatic music, perhaps an aria, with a man singing something in German. Before we go into what exactly it is, let us see what the game itself has to say about it. Here is an excerpt from the game's digital manual talking about the Battery:

The manual claims that is what the song means. Of course, anyone not knowing any German - which would constitute the majority of players reading that manual in English - would have no choice but to take the manual's word for it. Here is what the German version of the manual has to say about it:

Now, in case you were not aware of it, I am a native speaker of German myself, and have translated Mario-related media from German into English both by myself and as part of larger translation initiatives. Of course, you are free to not believe that I am qualified to translate this; in which case you may skip to the next section, as the rest of this section is my own translations of the manual and an attempt at translating the actual lyrics of the Battery music.

Here is a translation of the German manual excerpt into English:

"Developer Info: Battery
The lyrics of the musical piece that plays in the background when the Battery is used is in fact in German. Listen closely: "Hear, you fools! The charged-up! Forth!""

So, the German manual, presumably written by someone who is an expert in German, suggests that the lyrics are "Hear, you fools! The charged-up! Forth!", which does not match with what the English manual claims. It can be argued that "Listen up, you fools!" is an acceptable alternative to "Hear, you fools!", however, there is no mention of anything even close to "Listen to the Battery!" In fact, here is a thought experiment. The German word for "Battery" is "Batterie", something you can easily look up using any online dictionary. That word is pronounced very similarly to the English word "battery". Can you hear anything like that in the lyrics? There isn't anything like that to be heard simply by listening to the syllables. 

Thus, even disregarding my own expertise, you can assume that the English translation is not entirely accurate; either being wrong or being a reinterpretation rather than a translation. Now, let's look at the German manual's stated lyrics. They seem to match up rather well with the lyrics you can hear; even if you cannot read German, you will recognize most of the syllables in it when listening. However, I posit that the German manual is slightly wrong as well. 

Of course, I am not an authority on what the actual lyrics are. It is possible that the German localization team got the lyrics directly from Intelligent Systems, the game's developer, and my theory is completely false. Still, I would like to point out a few oddities about the lyrics as written that make me believe that they are not entirely correct.

First off, I would like to say what I believe to be the correct lyrics: "Höret, ihr Narren, das aufgelad'ne Wort!" Note that it is almost exactly the same as the German manual's lyrics except for different punctuation, capitalization, and the change of the last word from "Fort" to "Wort". My version translates to "Hear, you fools, the charged-up word!" "Charged-up" in this context refers to a fully charged battery. So, now let's go through the reasons I believe those little changes would result in the correct lyrics:

1. Listen closely to the video. When the singer says the last word, does it sound like it starts with a "F" sound or a "V" sound? To me, it is clearly a "V" sound, which is how the beginning of the word "Wort" is pronounced.
2. "Hear, you fools! The charged-up! Forth!" is a string of almost nonsensical sentence fragments. It can be argued that a lot of lyrics are like that, but with the simple change of one letter, we can make it into...
3. "Hear, you fools, the charged-up word!", which while admittedly is also not an entirely logical sentence, makes at least some kind of sense: the fools (presumably the enemies) are told to hear a word; then the battery zaps them as the singer says "Rah!", which would constitute an electrically-charged word, in a metaphorical sense. While this is all up to interpretation, I believe it is much more logical than sentence fragments like "The charged-up!", which makes just as little sense in German as it does in English.

Unfortunately, the Internet is full of people who may or may not know German, each of them offering their own interpretation of the lyrics whenever the Battery is mentioned. I do not have any qualifications that would elevate my opinion above "just another person on the Internet" on this matter, so I hope that I could at least make a good argument for my case.

Bubblainian Voice Oddity

In Super Mario Odyssey, one of the Power Moon missions well known for its sometimes frustrating amount of difficulty is the beach volleyball minigame in the Seaside Kingdom. When the kingdom is freed from the tyranny of the local boss enemy, Mollusque-Lanceur (whose full name according to the game's official Prima guide is "Brigadier Mollusque-Lanceur III, Dauphin of Bubblaine"), the beach volleyball minigame becomes available.

In that minigame, Mario must hit the ball back to a Bubblainian who sits on a sandy pedestal, "hitting back" is done automatically when either Mario or Cappy touch the ball, meaning angling the ball is not an issue, merely reaching it before it touches the sand. One Power Moon is awarded for 15 back-and-forths with the coach, while the other (often considered to be one of the hardest Power Moons in the game) is awarded for 100 of them.

But today's topic is not about the minigame itself - it is about the coach. Let's take a close look at him.

He has a unique model, not sharing certain characteristics with other Bubblainians: he is the only one with a blonde mustache, the only one with blonde eyelashes, and the only male Bubblainian to wear a silver necklace (all other male Bubblainians wear golden necklaces, while all female Bubblainians wear silver ones).

There is a very peculiar characteristic about him that elevated his uniqueness even further. Listen to his voice, audible at the very beginning of this video and several more times throughout. If you have played the game extensively, you may notice it. He does not sound like other male Bubblainians - in fact, he uses the voice clips of female Bubblainians. A good way of telling them apart is to remember that male Bubblainians have a deep voice while female Bubblainians sound very similar to Inklings from the Splatoon series. And it is unmistakable that the coach sounds like the latter instead of the former.

Now, you may be wondering why I am referring to the coach as "he" after showing that he sounds like a female Bubblainian - it seems that now, the gender is not entirely clear. However, there is this:

After completing all of the game's main quest storylines (which the game itself refers to as "restoring world peace"), each kingdom is populated by tourists from other kingdoms. One of them is this female New Donker who refers to the coach as "he", meaning that the game itself considers him male. 

I believe that perhaps at some point during development, the volleyball coach was supposed to be a female Bubblainian, but that got changed and the voice files were not updated; however, it is also entirely possible that this is a purposeful decision and Nintendo wanted to include a male character that sounds like a female character. (Also, it can be argued that the New Donker is not reliable with her use of the pronoun, but that is theorizing beyond information offered by the game.)

What makes this interesting in terms of real-world connections is that in our world, snails (which are what Bubblainians are based on) are hermaphrodites (more on snail anatomy here), meaning they possess both male and female reproductive organs and can not be exclusively called male or female. While not likely, it is possible that the coach is Nintendo's way of referencing this by giving him both male and female traits.

Weaponized Coins

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 contains an optional world, Sherbet Land. 

It is notable for exactly how optional it is: it is not connected to the game's storyline, it is not necessary to be entered at any point, and with enough money-collecting, it is even possible to get the game's best ending without ever entering it - but that is not all. For a world so centered on being optional, it has a very fitting boss: Hinyari the penguin.

Hinyari is unique among the game's bosses for being able to be fought more than once (to be precise, he can be fought indefinitely many times), and for not awarding anything except for 3-Up Hearts - but he is also special among not just this game's bosses, but video game bosses in general, for being entirely skippable. In Hinyari's boss arena, a door is situated that will grant Wario the completion of the level if entered. The only reason to even engage the boss at all is to gain the 3-Up Hearts.

Here is a typical battle against Hinyari:

Note that the boss has no attacks that go upward, meaning that it is trivial to jump onto the platform, wait for him to pass, then exit through the door (in case you thought that the scenario still presented a challenge in how to bypass him, in a manner similar to Bowser battles in Super Mario Bros.)

Let's look at how the boss is defeated. He only takes a hit when Wario jumps on his head; however, after the first and second hits, he will don a spiked hat that prevents this. The seemingly only way to remove the spiked hat is to Shoulder Bash* the boss from behind. This raises the question: how can Tiny Wario fight him if he cannot perform a Shoulder Bash?

It turns out that Tiny Wario can use the power of money instead:

Pressing Up and B in this game when Wario has collected over 10 coins makes Wario produce a coin with a plus sign on it, worth 10 coins. This is used to open up doors and activate checkpoints, as well as other minor uses; however, in this battle, it can be used offensively to allow Tiny Wario to have a chance against the boss.

*While "Shoulder Barge" is a commonly used name for the move Wario performs while pressing "B" in this game and other Wario Land games, the official name for it is "Dash Attack"; I do not use it due to it sounding very ambiguous.

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

The podcasts are almost finished and will arrive very soon; however, if you haven't read it yet, please keep in mind the refund offer and podcast delivery guarantee outlined at the end of Issue 11.

Thank you very much for reading.