Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels, Issue 13, Week 1/2019 (Patreon)

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

I apologize deeply for the break between issues. I was overwhelmed with stress and took the advice of my patrons to not overwork myself and concentrate on running my websites first while I figured out a way to release the Patreon articles without all the problems I encountered before. I can now announce that I will be returning to posting articles weekly, with the following changes:

• Each article will be released on the weekend rather than on Wednesday. The frequency will still remain at one article each week, with each article containing 10 topics.
  
• Instead of catching up on missing Lost Levels articles by releasing more than one Lost Levels article a week, I will instead release single-topic in-depth articles, in addition to the weekly Lost Levels articles. These articles may be guides such as the Yoshi's Story guide, or lengthy analyses of some aspect of the Mario franchise. This will also allow me to give requests from Supperstars tier subscribers the adequate amount of attention instead of including them in an article where they would have to share space with 9 other topics.

As I have stated previously, all of you are entitled to refunds. If you believe that this is not acceptable, contact me and I will issue you a refund of your contributions immediately and without question.

Before I start, let me briefly restate that all images without an attribution have been recorded/created by me; and that all feedback of any kind is greatly appreciated.

Now, let us enter the mouth of a giant sword and fall into an otherdimensional factory of obscure Mario content.
This is Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels. 

The City is Different at Night

The first time the player sees New Donk City in Super Mario Odyssey's story line (provided the player did not discover the Metro Kingdom painting in Tostarena and got a preview of the area in a peaceful state), the city is under siege by Bowser's troops during a rainy night. Barricades block most of the roads, debris litters the streets, enemies are everywhere and the city hall is being sapped of its electricity by the giant Mechawiggler.

However, these are just the big, obvious changes. There are several smaller ones that require leaving the path the game lays out for you to discover, which I will talk about today.

The Mayor Pauline Commemorative Park, normally containing a number of trees and benches, is completely empty. There is also no way to reach it without using tricks to allow extended jumping, so presumably the area was made as uninteresting as possible to dissuade players from attempting to cross over the gap before defeating the Mechawiggler. In fact, I believe this to be the motivation for the next two changes as well.

The pool are on the northwestern rooftop, which can only be reached by jumping off one of the higher levels of the New Donk City Hall in the night version of the level, is also completely empty save for the pool itself. Since this is the only water-covered area in the game that is present during rainy weather, and due to it being out of the way and not important to the story, the programmers did not add special graphical effects of raindrops hitting water. As such, there is a minor error that displays the raindrops hitting the bottom of the water as well as the top; visible most easily in the Coin filter of Snapshot Mode.

There is one platform separate from the main area to the west; it is usually accessed through a building that leads Mario to an alleyway with hundreds of New Donkers walking in a crowd. The far end of that alley contains a pipe going to that platform; here it is on the level's map:

However, in the nighttime version of the level, it is seemingly not there at all. Looking out to the west of the main area shows nothing but darkness below. The building is in fact still there - but it is shifted downward and covered in shadows so that only some of Snapshot Mode's filters can see it:

The first idea that would come to a curious player's mind upon seeing this would be to try to jump to the platform - after all, if it has been moved downward, it should be easier to jump to. However, if the jump is attempted, you will find out that the building was moved so far down as to be below the death barrier - meaning that Mario will perform his "falling into a bottomless pit" animation and die even if he is directly above the building and should fall onto solid ground. This, together with draping the building in shadow, suggests to me that the developers wanted to make it disappear entirely - but for some reason, literally removing it from the area model was too complex of an endeavor compared to moving it downward.

This may be well-known to those who like to interact with the entirety of the environment as captured enemies, but I would still like to mention it: the neon signs fizzle out when hit by a bullet from a Sherm.

Can you see the difference between the two above pictures? It's the barricade in the upper right corner - it is entirely absent in the bottom image. Now, it is not possible to destroy barricades in this version of the city, so what is happening here is not a manipulation of the environment, but rather the developers giving the barricades a radius outside of which they are not displayed. This is ubiquitous not just in this game, but in 3D games in general for small objects - but the larger an object is, the larger that radius must be to avoid the object visibly "popping in" when approached. In most cases in Mario games, objects as large as the barricades are considered part of the level's base geometry and are simply always displayed no matter how far away Mario is.

This spot on the roof of the building directly north of Squawks Park is interesting in that there are specific environmental sounds that play when Mario is on this roof that do not play anywhere else. During the daytime, it is construction sounds, resembling jackhammers. In this version of the level, it is especially loud sirens. 

It is rather disheartening to me that it is not possible to go back to this version of the city once Mechawiggler has been defeated on the same save file (the version during the Koopa Freerunning race, while having the night ambience, uses the normal level geometry). Luckily, the game supports 5 save file slots, so one of them can be reserved for a file that contains the nighttime versions of New Donk City, Tostarena and Lake Lamode, as well as the cloudy version of Steam Gardens. If you enjoy these versions of those locations, I can only recommend you also create a dedicated save file to visit them.

Themes 28 Years in the Making

The Koopalings first appeared in Super Mario Bros. 3, released in 1988 in Japan. This is the earliest piece of official artwork for them, which you may recognize from the game's manual:

(Now, the North American version of the manual was in black and white; but the Japanese one was in color. This image uses the arrangement and text of the NA manual image with the colored artwork.)

Note the wands the Koopalings are using. The wands are, as seen in both the manual and in the game, not their own: they are stolen from the kings of the seven different lands the Mario Bros. travel through. Interestingly, the colors of the gems in the wands seem to not be related either to the respective Koopaling or to the theme of the kingdom they stole it from: Wendy has a purple gem despite nothing in Water Land being conspicuously purple and having no purple in her color palette, and so on. 

What is also interesting is that although there are 7 kingdoms, and 7 Koopalings, the colors used for the gems are not the rainbow. They are instead red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and black. While the rainbow having 7 distinct colors is often a point of debate, with many believing 6 colors would be a better subdivision, adding black is a peculiar choice, especially since Roy and Sky Land do not seem to particularly lend themselves to being represented by black - Sky Land would in fact be much better suited for a white gem.

All of this was not truly relevant for a very long time, especially since it was confined to artwork. In-game, the gems were different colors due to the NES's limited palette:

In 2009, the Koopalings once again were depicted using wands in New Super Mario Bros. Wii (which, given how the wands were stolen and then returned, makes little sense from an in-universe perspective unless the Koopalings stole them back, but I understand that the wands were an integral part of the depiction so that was likely the reasoning behind bringing them back). The colors were retained from the SMB3 artwork:

From this point onward, the Koopalings have had their wands, with these colors, in most depictions... which brings us to the 2016 game Paper Mario: Color Splash.

The entire plot of Paper Mario: Color Splash revolves around paint; specifically, the fact that there are 6 colors of paint: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, and that if mixed together, they create black paint. Now where have we seen these seven colors together before? 

I do not know whether the Koopalings were chosen as main antagonists of almost all chapters of the game (save for the final one, where it is Bowser) because there were seven of them and they lend themselves well to be bosses in a game divided into seven or eight parts, and then the idea with the colors mixing to create black paint was created to match it with their wands; or whether the idea with the seven colors was created first and then the Koopalings chosen as bosses because their wands fit the colors perfectly. Regardless of what the cause and effect relationship here is, what is remarkable is that no changes needed to be made to 1988 artwork to perfectly fit it to the plot of a 2016 game.

However, if we think about this further, then we realize that there are parts of the game that definitely were designed this way purely because of the distribution of the colors in the 1988 artwork; meaning that the game owes the concepts of some of its locations to artwork made 28 years prior. Let me explain.

Here is the world map of Prism Island, where the entirety of the game takes place:

The island is divided into six regions, each corresponding to one of the colors (minus black, which is represented in Bowser's castle on the upper edge of the map). Now, consider that the environments for each color are strongly influenced by what type of environment would usually have that color in real life. Meaning, the red section contains a volcano, the blue  section contains an underwater area, the yellow section contains a desert, and the green  section is entirely set within a forest. (The orange and purple sections are less well-defined, given how no real-life environments are inextricably linked to those two colors in the public consciousness).

Since the Koopalings needed to be bosses of areas that fit together with their own wand colors, the game includes such choices as giving Ludwig a ship to fight Mario on - something Ludwig has never before had in the Mario series, never being the boss of a watery area or expressing any interest in water. Still, due to the color of his wand and the necessity to make the blue are water-related, he is fought on a ship.

What to me is the most interesting, however, is the fact that there is one Koopaling who has his own theme: Lemmy Koopa. While the other Koopalings can be plausibly put in almost any situation, Lemmy constantly balances on a ball, making him a perfect fit for a circus-type environment and looking out of place anywhere else.

Lemmy also has a wand with a green gem. So, if we take the fact that Lemmy should be in a circus by design, that his green gem would make him the boss of the green section, and that the green section is entirely set in a forest because that is the most fitting environment for a section based on that color...

...we have the Emerald Circus, a circus in the middle of a forest. This is not at all a common type of location for a circus, so it was specifically chosen for the above reasons. And now let us recall that those reasons are tied together because of one piece of official art from 1988. The reason there is a circus in a forest in a 2016 game is that the artist randomly decided to color Lemmy Koopa's wand green almost three decades prior. 

It is astounding how such little decisions can lead to content being created based on them down the line - and this is just one we can fully trace. Who knows what could be uncovered if we had access to the entire decision process for Nintendo games? Of course, given how much Nintendo disliked being transparent in their development, we will likely never know.

Addendum: I have been contacted by twitter.com user "ThatThereDman" during the writing of this article with information about how the Koopalings also use their wands in their forward aerial attacks and down taunts in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: 

Who knows where the wands will turn up next?

Rare Rare Mario Artwork

There is rare Mario artwork - as in, it is uncommon. But there is also Rare Mario artwork - as in, Mario artwork created by the Rare development studio, also known as Rareware, creators of the Donkey Kong Country series, Banjo-Kazooie and many more, later acquired by Microsoft. Rare has not created much of it, which is why we can collect every single piece of it in one article.

This one is perhaps the most well-known, as it was used in many print publications before the release of Donkey Kong Country 2. As Donkey Kong Country 2 and Donkey Kong Land 2 are the only released Rare games with a Mario appearance, almost all of this artwork will be related to them.

This one, however, is much less widespread. In fact, there does not seem to be any version of it that is not overlaid with different artwork; a clean version of this Mario seems to be lost to time. The character next to him is TJ Combo from Killer Instinct, another Rare franchise.

These two are completely undocumented online - I found them myself when looking through scanned magazines. This, of course, means that more artwork could be hiding in a single issue of some obscure magazine waiting to be uncovered, and perhaps we will still find forgotten Rare Mario art 10 years from now. Also note that the second one was presented without any Rare logo, but given that it is exactly the same model and that Nintendo never used that model in their products, we can assume it was also made by Rare.

The model was made into sprites, used in Donkey Kong Country 2 and Donkey Kong Land 2 during the screen that shows how many DK Coins the characters collected. The GBA remake of DKC2 used the same sprite as the original, only slightly color-shifted.

(Source)

Finally, here are Mario-related sprites from an unexpected place: an early prototype build of Diddy Kong Pilot, the game that was eventually retooled into Banjo-Pilot. This also seems to be the only depiction of Mario made by Rare that is not using the DKC2 model. As very little is known about this version of the game, it is highly likely that more sprites of Mario (and other Mario characters) made for that game exist somewhere in Rare's archives. 

The Changing Seasons of Rain Shower

Rain Shower is a Game & Watch game present among the different games in Game & Watch Gallery 4. Some of the games in that collection display changes if the game is played for long enough - for example, in Chef, the background changes from indoors to outdoors and back every few hundred points.

As I was researching the game, I noticed that there have not yet been rips of the background of Rain Shower, which goes through four different seasons. I have decided to rip the graphics myself, and present my findings here.

This is the "summer" background that the game starts with. Let us look at what layers it is composed from.

This is the far background layer. Unfortunately, it is missing parts in its corners as those would be overlaid by the trees, making it unsuitable to be ripped by itself. 

This is the foreground layer, with the canopies of the three trees. Where are the trunks, however?

The trunks are on their own layer... with canopies that look like autumn, even though it is summer in the scene. This layer is in fact present behind the summer canopies - scroll up and look very closely at the outline of the leaves in the first image - you will notice some red leaves not being covered. 

The reason this happens is that the transition between seasons, which happens every 100 points, slowly turns the current season's canopies transparent from the bottom up, revealing the layers underneath. Then, once the transition is complete, the layers change - the new season's canopies become the top layer, and the season next in line is loaded underneath, to prepare for the next transition.

This is the autumn background.

At 200 points, we see the winter background. 

Finally, spring arrives at 300 points, cycling back to Summer at 400 points.

A note about the gameplay: every so often, 3-Up Moons (or a similar power-up) appear. If five of them are collected by any of the characters, Mario gains invincibility, identical to getting a Super Star, and knocks out Bowser as depicted. This is notable for being the only time in the Mario series that a moon-based power-up is used for invincibility rather than for lives (as the 3-Up Moon) or as a quest item (as the Power Moons from Super Mario Odyssey).

Connected Worlds

Donkey Kong Country Returns has Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong travel all around their homeland of Donkey Kong Island before they reach the volcano at the top and fight the evil Tiki Tak Tribe. In their adventure, the Kongs visit eight areas of the island: the Jungle, Beach, Ruins, Cave, Forest, Cliff, Factory and Volcano. (There is also a ninth area after beating the final boss, although that one is in a secluded location.)

Remarkably, the first level of each area after the Jungle is always set in an environment resembling the previous area, providing continuity to the locations. In some cases, the reference is obvious, in some, more subtle. Here are all the locations referencing previous areas.

This is the beginning of level 2-1, Poppin' Planks. It depicts the edge of the Jungle, receding into the Beach. Here is a view the game can not offer, using a tool in an emulator to move the camera past the foreground to get a better view of the Jungle:

The beginning of Level 3-1, Wonky Waterway, is almost entirely Beach-themed, with only a tiny glimpse of the aqueduct beginning on the right edge of the screen showing that the Ruins are ahead:

As the Ruins end, the first level of the Cave, 4-1: Rickety Rails, starts off outside the Cave in the last portion of the aqueduct, creating a bookend with the above image:

The most remarkable way the change of locations has been implemented is, in my opinion, the transition from the Cave to the Forest. This is how Level 5-1, Vine Valley (a reference to the world of the same name in Donkey Kong Country) starts:

It appears to be another Cave level. Only jumping up the springy mushrooms reveals that this is in fact the base of a hollowed-out tree:

Here is another portion of the background that cannot be seen in-game - while very dark, you can see the mouth of the cave opening up around the tree if we zoom out.

Finally, this scene is also unique for allowing us to see the ground of the Forest. Almost all Forest levels take place on a height that is just high up enough to not see the ground and just low enough to not see the canopy, with tree trunks taking up the entire background as they are presumably the easiest part of a forest to model.

The transition from the Forest to the Cliff is one that is the most hidden. At first it appears as though the beginning of Level 6-1: Sticky Situation is entirely Cliff-themed, with no Forest references in sight:

(Note that the sparse vegetation here is present throughout all Cliff levels and is not itself a Forest reference.)

In fact, we need to walk further into the level to see it:

There are trees in the far background. However, the foreground in this level takes up almost the entire screen and it is very hard to get a good look at the trees. Fortunately, we can again use the camera tool:

The camera tool also shows that the forest background portion is exclusive to the first part of the level, making it a deliberate Forest reference.

The beginning of Level 7-1: Foggy Fumes has a few Cliff rock formations directly next to a replica of the 25m level of the Donkey Kong arcade, which marks the beginning of the Factory.

(Camera zoomed out to show the entirety of Cliff assets.)

Finally, the transition between Factory and Volcano in Level 8-1: Furious Fire is in the form of a closed Factory gate behind Donkey Kong as he starts the level.

If we zoom out, we can see there is slightly more to the Factory wall than can normally be seen:

These nods to the previous locations may be minor (outside perhaps of the Cave-Forest transition), but they go a long way in making the world of the game feel cohesive and less like a series of obstacle courses, at least in my opinion.

A Hotel Mario Oddity

If you have been active on the Internet for longer than five years and have followed trends on YouTube, it is likely that you have seen the intro to the Philips CD-i game Hotel Mario at least once. (Video will be used for next screenshots.)

The intro begins with Mario and Luigi walking through a gate labeled "Mushroom Kingdom". Then, after a brief scene showing Bowser laughing at them, they are shown further along the road:

They arrive at another gate that is also labeled "Mushroom Kingdom", except this one has a board over it reading "Klub Koopa Resort". 

Now, if you have seen this intro once, or a hundred times, or perhaps even more, I must ask you to try to look at it with fresh eyes. Why would there be two doors labeled "Mushroom Kingdom" within such short distance of each other? Let us look closely at those backgrounds.

When Mario and Luigi are shown along the road to the second door, note what colors the mushrooms around the door are. There is a green one and a pink one on the left of the door, and a small light red one and a larger orange one on the right. Now, go back to the very first image. Notice something peculiar? The exact same mushrooms in the exact same colors surround the first door as well. Now, the following is just speculation on my part, but it seems almost like whoever drew them thought they were the same door.

The intro seems to be taking place in real-time; that is, there is no indication that there is a time skip between the very first scene and the scene where Mario and Luigi approach the second door. Mario and Luigi walk through the first door, Bowser laughs, and Mario begins talking while Bowser is still laughing, meaning that the Mario Bros. could have walked only a few feet away from the first door at best. But then, why does the landscape visible through the first door not match up with the next scene? It also has a road turning left, while the road Mario and Luigi are on turns right next. 

This is all very circumstantial evidence, but I believe that the very first scene with Mario and Luigi walking through the door was not originally intended to be at that point in the intro. I believe that there was originally only one door and that the first scene was intended to be used at the end of the intro, showing Mario and Luigi walking into enemy territory. However, at some point it was decided that it would be better to show Mario and Luigi walking for a longer time before reading Bowser's letter. The animators took the background they had of the door being walked through, edited it to remove the "Klub Koopa Resort" sign and put it at the beginning of the scene.

This would, in my opinion, explain all the discrepancies in the intro as well as why there would be two completely identical doors. But of course, without access to information about the making of the scene, I can only theorize. Still, I hope that my hypothesis made sense to you and that even if you disagree with my conclusions, you can see why the mushrooms on the sides of the doors being identical is rather suspicious.

Wanda's Secret Russian Name

In the year 1993, a game called Mario & Wario was released in Japan for the Super Famicom. It used the mouse peripheral for the console - an add-on that was only used for Mario Paint in all other territories, and even though rumors existed that it was intended to be localized in North America, it all fell through. Mario & Wario was never released anywhere outside of Japan, and on no other console except the Super Famicom. 

The game's plot is that Wario is using buckets to blind Mario, Yoshi and Peach, rendering them unable to see what is in front of them due to the buckets being stuck to their heads. Luckily, Luigi has the convenient, but unexplained power to remove buckets from people's heads, and a friendly fairy named Wanda, a character exclusive to this game, is ready to guide the bucketed characters towards Luigi over obstacle-filled screens in gameplay highly reminiscent of the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series.

After a very long absence from any video game, Wanda appears in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a Spirit, together with over a thousand other, partly very obscure, video game characters. This is what her Spirit looks like:

After checking every other language the game is available in that uses the Latin alphabet, I can confirm that her name is Wanda in all of them - which is itself a straight transliteration of the Japanese " ワンダ ", pronounced "Wanda".

This is completely logical - none of those countries have ever had the game released in their territories or languages, so why should they use anything but the simplest way of representing Wanda's name in their alphabet? This is true for most obscure characters whose games only released in Japan, as well.

However, the Russian version holds a surprise for Wanda.

(Before I start talking about this, I must note for those readers who may not know that I am fluent in Russian. Of course, you are free to doubt my expertise in this language as I cannot verify it here; if you do, please feel free to skip to the next section of this article.)

Instead of being transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet as would be expected - and as is the case with hundreds of other Spirits originating in games that were never released in Russia - Wanda's name was localized into something else. Her name is "Жизель", the Russian spelling of the French name "Giselle". Now, why would the translators give her a different name?

 "Жизель" is a pun on "жезл", meaning "baton" or "wand". The name was localized in order to preserve the pun on the word "wand" in the name "Wanda". Of course, the mere fact that a name was localized to preserve wordplay is not notable. What makes this interesting are the circumstances.

Russian translations are usually not allowed to localize any names of major Mario characters. In fact, the rules are so strict that they result in names that are downright hard to pronounce in Russian simply because the name was transliterated without change from English. Toad's name is "Тоад", which is literally every single letter in "Toad" transliterated one-by-one without regard to the fact that "oa" is not pronounced "oh" in Russian, but "oh-ah" instead. Thus, "Тоад" is pronounced "toh-uhd", which I hopefully am not alone in the opinion on sounds suboptimal.

With this level of control over translations, why was Wanda's name allowed to be localized? More importantly, given that she is a character from a game Nintendo never showed interest in re-releasing, why did anyone even consider localizing the name to begin with? Perhaps you think I am overexaggerating the importance of this. However, please keep in mind that there were over a thousand names to be translated and most of them were simply transliterated as discussed earlier. I cannot say that I think this means that Wanda has any future, but part of me wants to believe that there was some internal note to the translators that explained which names were "relevant for future endeavors". 

We can only wait and see.

Tiny Rogueport

At the beginning of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario receives a letter from Princess Peach. The letter is read by Luigi, and the scene in which it happens looks like this:

The background is a scene of Rogueport, the main location of the adventure, from afar. However, it is also covered up almost entirely by a translucent graphic of Peach's letter, making it hard to see. Of course, if you have played the game, you know that after this, you get a better look at the town without the letter in the way when Mario approaches it by boat:

However, the Rogueport seen here and the one seen in the letter scene are not the same. Go back and look closely at the far left wall of the town in both images. Can you see the Excess Express train in the letter scene that is absent in the approach scene?

As it turns out, there are quite a few things missing when Mario sees Rogueport that are present in the letter scene.

The first one is the Excess Express. It's fully modeled with all wagons even though four of them are hidden by the town and cannot possibly be seen.

The Cheep Blimp is also in the letter scene. It has little details like the four tassels under the cabin that cannot be seen from the distance it is shown at.

The one detail that is really difficult to see is the S.S. Flavion in the harbor. It is covered entirely by the letter and is nowhere to be found when Mario gets to Rogueport. 

Here is a curious texture error:

The wooden crates at the far right edge of town are only supposed to be seen from the front, like the rest of the scene. Looking at them from above reveals...

...tiny buildings. Each crate is textures with houses from West Rogueport.

While these texture errors are common in amateur 3D projects, usually professional releases simply do not display polygons at all if no textures are assigned to them in order to prevent errors like this from happening.

Infinite Boos 

In the battle against King Boo in the fifth episode of Sirena Beach in Super Mario Sunshine, you are supposed to spray his slot machine to cause him to enter his second phase. Since this is so easy to do, not all players know that if you don't do it, King Boo will keep spawning Boos from his mouth. How many Boos can he spawn? Let's find out.

Minutes pass. The Boos keep coming.

There are now roughtly 25 Boos and they show no signs of stopping.

The room is filled with about 40 Boos and the game is starting to experience glitches. Most commonly, a Boo would start wildly changing directions for a few frames.

When the room is filled with over 50 Boos, the newest Boo spawned by King Boo always despawns whenever he spawns a new Boo. Pay attention to the Boos closest to the front of King Boo in this footage.

I do not know if despawning the most recent Boo is a built-in failsafe or simply the game engine's reaction to having to load this many enemies at once, but I find it baffling that apparently, no one foresaw this problem during development and added some code to King Boo that would simply make him stop opening his mouth and spawning Boos at some point. It is possible that due to the second phase being so easy to trigger, no playtesters bothered to interact with the first phase long enough.

Flagpole Zones

Has this ever happened to you?

You are playing Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels (known in Japan as Super Mario Bros. 2) or Super Mario All-Stars and you wonder why a difference of a few pixels results in getting wildly different numbers of points on the flagpole?

For this purpose, I made this chart showing what zones exist on the flagpole and how many points they award. (Note that these are identical among all games listed above.)

(Points are awarded based on Mario's lowest pixel. If his lowest pixel is in the 800 point zone, he will be given 800 points even if he is mostly in the 2000 point zone.)

The zones are based off 8x8 pixel internal logic tiles, rather than the visible 16x16 pixel tiles of the level. The bottom 2 tiles award 100 points, the text 5 award 400 points, then 3 tiles of 800 points, the biggest zone of 6 tiles for 2000 points, and the final 2 tiles (as well as the circle on top of the flagpole and the airspace above it) award 5000 points.

While I do not know the exact reason, I assume the high difference between 800 and 2000 is based on the fact that Mario cannot reach the 2000 point mark from ground level with a running jump. Thus, only using the staircase before the flagpole can get him enough height to get up to 2000 points.

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

Thank you for your patience. I believe I have finally reached a point where I can accurately judge what amount of content I can create without being overwhelmed, and that I can keep up what I have promised in the beginning of this article - and if not, I hope that you will take advantage of your ability to request a refund if you are not satisfied.

Thank you very much for reading.