Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels, Issue 16 (Patreon)

The marathon to catch up with the issues continues. As usual, the source of all images not explicitly marked with an attribution is myself, and all feedback is appreciated. Now, let's jump into Exor's mouth (famously called "Neosquid") and be transported into a factory producing obscure Mario content.

This is Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels.

Get Rich by Robbing Your Brother

Super Mario Odyssey is a game that demands Mario to pay many tens of thousands of coins if the player wishes to buy every piece of merchandise in the Crazy Cap stores (especially after the round of updates lasting through November 2018, which added many new outfits for a total of over 70,000 coins); in addition, buying enough Power Moons to max out the Odyssey for a special reward needs another 11,900 coins. 

All of this has led to many players searching for the most efficient way to earn coins in the game. Currently, the most widely known way to make money quickly, and the one acknowledged as the fastest if done efficiently, is to continuously repeat the vine bonus section in Bowser's Kindom, near the top of the keep. (A popular video on the method can be found here.) A single run of the bonus room can get up to 160 coins if done perfectly; and it takes about 60 seconds for one loop, meaning that playing optimally, you will earn 2.6 coins a second. To earn 10,000 coins at this rate would take an hour and a few minutes. However, there is an even faster and easier method to make money, which unfortunately only works if you start your save file with it in mind; still, it can earn money at about 25% higher speed for far less effort.

The method I am about to describe relies on never starting Luigi's Balloon World proper, meaning never finishing Luigi's tutorial on the mode. If you start a new game on a new profile on your Nintendo Switch, Luigi will offer to show you how to play Luigi's Balloon World before enabling you to access other players' balloons. If you keep repeating the tutorial without ever completing the Hide It part, you can earn money faster than the Bowser's Kingdom method.

Here are step-by-step instructions:

1. Go to the Lost Kingdom. While Luigi offers tutorials in all kingdoms where Balloon World is available, the Lost Kingdom tutorial places the balloon in a spot where it is extremely easy to earn the maximum amount of coins for it by reaching it quickly. In contrast, the balloons in the Luncheon Kingdom and Seaside Kingdom are much further away and are an inefficient place to use this trick.

2. [This is where the loop begins. From here until the end of the loop, with a stable Internet connection, it should take 45 seconds.] Talk to Luigi, skipping through his text as quickly as possible, and agree to his tutorial. There will be a brief connection test before Luigi transports you further up the mountain.

3. Skip through Luigi's text on Find It as quickly as possible and as the game starts, simply long jump off the cliff in the direction of the arrow. You will land on Luigi's balloon, popping it. It may take a few tries, but afterwards, it will be extremely easy to make the jump consistently every time, taking less than 3 seconds between the game starting and ending.

4. Luigi will award you 50 coins for finding the balloon and 95 coins for doing it quickly. Even if you take a bit of time to line up the jump, the bonus will still be 90 coins.

5. Skip through Luigi's dialogue about Hide It as quickly as possible - this is the most aggravating part of the loop due to him taking 13 dialogue boxes until you regain control - and then simply press Plus and select Quit from the menu.

6. This will put you back in front of Luigi near the beginning of the level. Move the Control Stick slightly towards Luigi and press A to initiate his dialogue again, restarting the loop, going back to Step 2.

By continuously taking Luigi's money and never completing the Hide It tutorial, Luigi will never activate proper Balloon World access and the trick can be used indefinitely to get 145 coins every 45 seconds, or 3.2 coins per second on average, meaning that 10,000 coins can now be collected in 52 minutes instead of over an hour. If you believe the advantage is too slight, consider the following: the Bowser's Kingdom method requires you to continuously perform skillful inputs to maneuver Mario using Rocket Flowers, and then to jump over spiked floors and Spinies. This can lead to many coins being missed, and if you make three mistakes in the Spiny part, restarting from a checkpoint, slowing you down further. The effective rate of collecting coins is actually slower than the optimal one in practice, especially if you choose to do this while multitasking (which many players are likely to do due to the tedious and repetitive nature of this activity).

In contrast, the Luigi method is basically just the mashing of the A button and one skillful input every 45 seconds (the long jump), which is not even particularly punishing if you fail as long as you choose to err on the side of a shorter jump (a longer jump can in fact land you in poison, wasting the loop). 

In the end, if you are playing on a file that has not yet connected to Balloon World, this is definitely the most optimal way to earn coins available; however, I understand this is simply not an option for most players. Still, you may want to remember this for any playthroughs in the future.

Fog in Super Mario 64

Early 3D games were infamous for using excessive amounts of fog to mask a short draw distance. Super Mario 64 also uses fog in some of its areas, but almost always purely for aesthetic reasons rather than to hide the level geometry not being loaded. Emulating the game allows us to compare how the parts of the game where fog is used would look like without it, which can result in a heightened appreciation of the tasteful use of this effect at a time where most games used it as a crutch instead.

The game contains two variants of the same effect: fog, which covers the stage in a greyish-blue haze, and darkness, which is identical to fog in functionality except being pure black. As fog affects only objects and not skyboxes, darkness is used only in areas where the skybox is black as well, as otherwise the black objects would look like silhouettes against the skybox, which while possibly appealing in some circumstances, was not the aesthetic goal of the designers.

Bob-omb Battlefield is the first use of fog in the game. The effect is strikingly realistic and not unlike what is employed in modern games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Unfortunately, there are issues with the fog: it only affects level geometry, meaning enemies, interactive objects like boxes and trees, collectibles like coins and stars, and Mario himself are not affected, remaining colorful even from far away as everything around them is covered in fog. Due to their size, trees are particularly detrimental to the realism of the fog (note the tree on the floating island). 

Here are comparisons of the level with and without fog. Note how the effect seems to have been made with the perspective from the beginning of the level in mind - there are no trees on the mountain to ruin it - but looking back down from the mountain is much less impressive. Still, even there, the fog helps to distinguish how far the ground is - the floating island blends into the ground far below it if the fog is deactivated.

Jolly Roger Bay is in my opinion the most atmospheric use of fog in the game, especially before the ship is raised, as the level is darker and has a blanket of mist (parallel to the ground and distinct from fog) to go with the effect.

It is clear that the level was made with the fog in mind. The cliffs around the main area blend into the skybox due to the fog color being chosen specificially for this effect. The descent into the water is also much more cinematic when Unagi the Eel slowly emerges from the murky depths as opposed to the fog-less version that leaves no surprise.

The Princess's Secret Slide is the first use of the "darkness" type of fog. Although later in the game, darkness is used to mask the slide not being loaded into memory all at once, in this case, it is purely cosmetic.

This is merely speculation on my part, but perhaps the darkness on this slide was added to make the actual hardware-required darkness on the slide in Tall, Tall Mountain less conspicuous.

Strangely, despite being rather large, the Bowser courses do not use fog, but the Bowser battle arenas do. As fog is only visible from a distance, it is almost unnoticeable until the player pauses; during the pause screen, the camera zooms out, making the fog more apparent.

Hazy Maze Cave has the game's most prominent use of darkness; in fact, the course's name in Japanese translates to "Cavern Dissolving into Darkness". This course actually uses the fact that certain objects are not affected by darkess to its advantage by making them lamps; turning what made the trees in Bob-omb Battlefield look out of place into an atmospheric effect.

The fact that the water surface is also not affected by darkness results in Dorrie's lake taking on a surreal, glowing quality; it is hard to say whether this was intentional or a result of hardware restrictions. The rolling rocks in the big hole room, however, specifically are programmed to be affected by fog to appear to roll out from darkness, surprising the player.

While the main area of Lethal Lava Land does not have fog, the inside of the volcano does. Unfortunately, due to the fog most easily being noticeable in the vertical direction, but the camera being normally limited to the shorter horizontal direction in this segment unless first-person view is entered, this does not affect the standard experience much.

If however the camera is positioned to look down from far away, the same effect resulting in the glowing lake makes the lava appear to glow, which is more appropriate to the liquid in question.

The same idea of the main area not having fog, but it being present in the side area, is used in Shifting Sand Land. Here, the pyramid has very pronounced darkness visible from the beginning when looking across the ground floor, making the Eyerok tomb in the center stand out more.

No fog appears again until the slide in Tall, Tall Mountain, which as I mentioned earlier, has an instance of it actually hiding the fact that the course is made out of three parts that are not each loaded into memory simultaneously. This is not actually due to the complexity of the track - it does not have many polygons compared to the maps of most courses - but due to its size, as the engine of the game has trouble rendering things too far away.

What is undoubtedly the strongest fog effect in the game is present in Tick Tock Clock. The level looks completely different without it, although it is unclear what the aesthetic reasons of making the fog so thick could have been. The first thought is that it is hiding more loading zones, but disabling it shows that the entirety of the level is in fact loaded at all times:

The above image was taken with Mario on the bottom floor of the level, showing that there would conceptually have not been any problems with the fog being absent.

The darkness at the Endless Staircase helps disguise the fact that the "endless" effect is achieved by smoothly warping Mario down a few steps if the player tries to bring the camera closer to Mario to investigate. However, there is also an interesting implication here:

The game can load an area with fog and one without it at the same time! The Tick Tock Clock room has no fog, but when Mario is close to the door to the infinite staircase room, we can see it is loaded and has the darkness effect present. This is never used for anything visible by the player; which is unfortunate, as I am certain many interesting visual effects could have been achieved by fog being present in one room, but not another adjacent one.

In the end, Super Mario 64 shows that fog can be used even in more primitive 3D environments to great atmospherical effect, something even later Mario platformers often lacked, like Super Mario Sunshine (although it can be argued that the heat haze in that game was its version of an omnipresent environmental effect).

Boo Shrooms

This is a particularly odd visual effect that appears in the Donut Ghost House in Super Mario World. The technical explanation for this eludes me; while documentation of the effect exists, a reasoning for why exactly it happens is not readily available. Just take a look at this footage:

To activate this, a very specific series of events needs to occur. Cape Mario must reach this secret alcove in the first room of the Ghost House, by flying towards the top left at the beginning of the level and walking across the ceiling. Then, Cape Mario must jump and activate one of these blocks containing a 1-Up Mushroom from the side by performing a Cape Spin. (I was hit by a Boo in the footage here, which does not seem to be necessary for this glitch to occur.)

What will ensue is that after this, the 1-Up Mushroom from the block will keep teleporting around the room, with it randomly jumping to one of the Boos' positions from time to time. It appears that any time a new Boo spawns, it has a chance of becoming the 1-Up Mushroom, resulting in it jumping to its position.

I understand that the game has object slots, which when tampered with by loading too many objects into memory can cause other objects to load incorrectly; however, the game is perfectly capable of separating the mushrooms from the Boos when Mario activates the blocks normally. It seems that using the cape to hit them from the side is what causes this mix-up. Now, hitting blocks from the side is shown to have other unintended effects in the game; such as forcing all blocks in the "choose a block" minigame rooms to be winners. If you happen to be able to explain the effect, I would love to hear about it!

Bom Town

The Extra Mode in Mario Party 4, hosted by Thwomp, Whomp and a Ztar (an evil black Power Star), contains some special single-player minigames that are slightly more involved than the game's standard party minigames. One of them is Bob-omb X-ing, where the player must dodge Bob-ombs exploding for as long as possible. The area the minigame occurs in has some interesting details that are out of frame or not easily visible.

This is what the game looks like when playing it. Note the hard-to-read signs and the barely visible buildings in the top left and top right corners.

And this is what the area looks like zoomed out. As you can see, there is quite a bit of scenery that is not displayed normally. The crossing is between a toy shop, a cafe, and two green areas. Let's take a look at the signs.

The ones in the top left say "Bom St." and "Bom Town". When I first saw this, I found it interesting that "Bom St." is very close to the name that Fortune Street, a game featuring Mario on the Wii, was called in Europe and Australia: Boom Street.

In fact, it appears that the signs were made by the Japanese designers and not localized, as "Bom" is how the "boom" sound effect is usually written out using the Latin alphabet in Japan. (This can be seen in Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic, the game that was later turned into Super Mario Bros. 2. In the original, the explosion sprite read "Bom"; for Super Mario Bros. 2, a "b" was added at the end in a smaller font due to the lack of space.) If the signs had been localized, it is entirely possible that the street would have been called "Boom Street", identically to the game.

There is also this sign in the bottom right saying "Toy Shop" that is at an oblique angle to the camera. Along with the shop itself not showing the "Toy Shop" sign in the normal view, it is very hard to tell that the building is a toy shop without using an emulator.

Zooming into the cafe shows a logo of two Bob-ombs around a plate of some kind of food and a name that while blurry, seems to read "Café de BOM". This could be either an allusion to European cafés, whose names often include "de" as that is a word in many Romance languages (French, Italian etc.) or just be Japanese, as "de" is used for names in that language as well (see Panel de Pon, the Japanese name for the game that was localized as Tetris Attack internationally).

Finally, the signs are textured to be mirrored from the other side; since they are intended to be viewed only from the front, this was obviously done with the expectation of never being relevant to the player.

Mario Party games always include details in their minigames that become apparent only many years later when players have the tools to take the games apart and see parts of the environment normally impossible to view. One day in the future, we will be able to see the minigames of modern Mario Party entries like Super Mario Party and discover similar hidden details about them, as well.

Super Mario Dies

Usually, games that include Small Mario and Super Mario make a point of always turn Mario into Small Mario when he dies for any reason, even from timing out in a level, which does not actually incur damage to Mario. However, there is one example of a game having a dedicated death sprite for Super Mario - with the caveat that it is actually impossible to see it without modifying the game, as it is covered up by a foreground layer when it is used.

The game in question is the Super Mario All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 2. The sprite does not exist in the original NES version. Here is a look at how Mario's normal death sprite looks - Small Mario looking at the camera in shock:

However, if Super Mario dies by sinking into quicksand, he will actually assume a special Super Mario death sprite when he is completely out of view. The only way to see it is to disable the foreground layer containing the quicksand:

Here, I disable the layer when Mario is almost done sinking. While he still shrinks during the animation and the sprite does look a lot more like Small Mario than Super Mario, it is nevertheless unique to the specific situation of Super Mario sinking into quicksand:

Compare it to the Small Mario sprite shown above.

Here are the three Super form death sprites for the other characters:

We can only wonder if the artist responsible for drawing these sprites knew that due to the implementation of the quicksand, they would never be seen by players and only be discovered once the game is over two decades old and open to be edited and analyzed.

Sound Fantasy

Sound Fantasy, known originally as Sound Factory, was a SNES game that was slated to be released in 1994, but was ultimately canceled. The game is an early music game prior to the rise of that genre's popularity, and as such, it attempted to contain many different game modes to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Some of the modes are focused on more traditional gameplay, while others are purely about composing music. Many of those who were able to play the game's prerelease version compared it to Mario Paint.

Just like Mario Paint, Sound Fantasy included Mario content. Here is a collection of Mario-related images I was able to find from articles about the game as well as a leaked prerelease version that was published on the Internet a few years ago.

Perhaps the biggest one is this footage of a preset scene (similar to the preset songs in Mario Paint) featuring Mario celebrating his 10th birthday. (Footage taken from here.) The birthday in question can logically only refer to the 10th birthday of Mario Bros., the first game to feature the name "Mario" in the title. The game's development ran from 1993 to 1994; this would have been too late to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Mario as a character, as he was introduced in Donkey Kong in 1981. Mario Bros., however, released in 1983, making this the most likely explanation.

Here is a comparison of this scene from the leaked prototype and what is likely the same scene in a slightly later version that currently remains lost.

One of the samples in the composer mode is this image of a Super Star/Starman from the Mario series.

A view of the preset selector screen that shows a zoomed-out version of the Mario preset from the lost build. We can see the text was changed from referencing Mario's birthday to "Mario Music".

Finally, there is this article that also includes a Wario picture on the bottom. Whether that picture was a preset in the game or made by a player to showcase is unknown.

In the end, despite never being released, some of the game's ideas were reused in SimTunes for PC in 1996. And - however unlikely - if the upcoming Super Mario Maker 2 contains tools to make music (since the Super Mario Maker games take a lot of inspiration from Mario Paint) it could very well use some of Sound Fantasy's concepts, too.

Map Additions

Super Mario Advance 4, being the second remake of Super Mario Bros. 3 after Super Mario All-Stars, added a lot of new content to the game, mainly through the use of the e-Reader to distribute additional levels. However, it also changed existing content in a way that may have been unnecessary.

There is a significant difference in vertical resolution between the NES and the GBA. While the NES was able to fit the entire height of the map screens and include both a decorative border and a status bar, the GBA just barely has enough height for the map screen. Unfortunately, the GBA version also needed a status bar, and since the map screen uses all of its rows, leaving none of them vacant for a status bar to go in, the developers decided to make the map scroll slightly - by one 16x16 tile between being in the top half of the map versus the bottom half - and add a "slack" row of tiles to the bottom that was not present in the original so that the status bar has a place to go without obstructing the roads and levels on the map.

In theory, this is a perfectly serviceable solution, as long as the slack row was kept to be as unobtrusive as possible; meaning that it would need to contain exactly what one would expect the row under the preexisting map screens to contain. The designers in charge of updating the map, however, thought that the map needed to be updated on a larger scale than just the one row. Below are some examples. (NES maps taken from here.)

The Grass Land map was modified in a way more or less consistent with the original. Note the extra rocks on the bottom creating a circle around Level 5.

The same goes for Desert Land. It is, however, with Water Land where the changes start affecting the previous design:

The coastline on the bottom of the map has been changed from a straight line to an assortment of islands. While this does help identify the Japan-shaped islands on the very right of the map, the Toad House-shaped islands in the middle are now less conspicuous due to the bottom island representing the stem blending in with the new islands on the bottom of the map. 

I would argue that the change to the bottom coastline in Giant Land is detracting from the original intended imagery. The Giant Land map in the NES version is supposed to look like a Koopa Troopa (or perhaps a more ordinary kind of turtle), and the straight coastline represented the ground it was walking on. With the change, the Koopa Troopa is now no longer walking on flat ground, but either jumping or floating over uneven ground. The fact that the bottom coast follows the Koopa Troopa's shape also makes it harder to identify. While this is not an edit to the map per se, the fact that the lines connecting to Level 4 are now green instead of clear also makes the entire shape harder to read. Compare how clear the Koopa Troopa's silhouette appears in the NES version and how the extra detail muddles the shape in the GBA version.

Sky Land, Ice Land and Dark Land's maps were modified by simply filling in a copy of the bottommost row, so no major changes can be pointed out.

Pipe Land's map may be the biggest change to the intended imagery. The islands are clearly intended to be shaped like pipes, sticking out from the ground represented by the flat coastline. Changing the coastline as it was done in the GBA version makes the pipes appear to float off the ground, which pipes in the Mario series never do (and official Super Mario Maker tutorials advise players to not make pipes do, either). Even disregarding the imagery, the original map is heavily pattern-based, consisting of three identical clusters of islands. Any change to the map should preserve the pattern to keep the geometrical, industrial theming of the map. However, if you look at the bottom left corner of the GBA map, the new coastline does not follow the islands identically for each cluster, being one tile wider on the left than in the middle. 

I understand that this is all merely pedantic nitpicking on my part, but it is still peculiar why the designers would decide to edit preexisting parts of the maps when they could have either simply filled them in with a copy of the bottommost row of tiles or simply had the status line be opaque, as it is in the original game, completely eliminating the problem of needing the extra tiles to begin with. For most other games, changing coastlines of maps would not be a concern as they rarely have a significance behind them; but for a game like Super Mario Bros. 3 that specifically creates shapes with its maps it is quite baffling.

Stars in Castles

The original Super Mario Bros. had no Starman/Super Star power-ups in its castle stages. However, there are unused palettes for Mario to use within them during invincibility, as well as special interactions with castle-exclusive enemies and obstacles that can only be seen when he is invincible. To do this, we must use Game Genie codes to give Mario Super Star power in castle stages. Please take a look at this footage:

Here, we see the special palette, as well as Invincible Mario's interactions with Bowser's fire and Bowser. Bowser's fire disappears on contact, awarding Mario 200 points. Bowser himself (or, more accurately, Fake Bowser, as only the Bowser in 8-4 is the real Bowser) turns upside down and falls offscreen, also awarding 200 points. Note that this is the only way to have Fake Bowser appear upside down - he falls down right side up if the bridge is dropped, and he turns into the appropriate enemy if he is taken out with fireballs. (Real Bowser does turn upside-down if defeated with fireballs, as well.) Interestingly - as this never comes up during normal gameplay, it was never tested - the palette Mario has when activating the axe is kept throughout the Toad/Peach cutscene. I have timed it to be on the palette that is exclusive to the castle stages and not seen anywhere else - a monochrome color scheme.

Invincible Mario simply does not interact with Firebars. 

In another castle level, I show Mario interacting with Podoboos/Lava Bubbles. They also turn upside-down and fall offscreen, awarding Mario 200 points. As most of these interactions play out in a way consistent with the rest of the game despite never being achievable, it is likely that they were intended to happen at some point during development. 

International Women's Day

As I am publishing this issue on March 8th, International Women's Day, I thought I would make a segment about some of the least appreciated female characters in the Mario franchise - namely, those whose gender is not identified within the games they appear in and is only stated in supplementary material to be female; or in other words, characters you would not know to be female simply by playing the game in question. Here are three examples of such characters.

Marching Milde, the miniboss of World 4 in Yoshi's Island, does not have a stated gender in the game. All dialogue pertaining to her is Kamek's blurb "Yoshi! Oh dear . . . Well, Marching Milde will pound you to bits!!" before the battle. However, the 1995 Nintendo Power guide for the game reveals that Marching Milde is female.

An example from a lesser-known game is Big Boo from Mario Clash on the Virtual Boy. Note that the manual calls her Big Boo and treats her as a single character, while in-game, there are many Boos, none of which are bigger than the regular Boo size.

Above: there can be several Boos appearing in a stage at once.

Still, it is possible to interpret the manual as referring to each Big Boo separately, meaning that if this is true, then Mario Clash is the only Mario game to feature exclusively female Boos.

Finally, Barbos, the boss of Razor Ridge in Donkey Kong Country 3, is also female, which is not mentioned by anything in-game given how there is no text concerning her outside of the name of the level, "Barbos's Barrier". Again, the 1996 Nintendo Power guide is the one providing the information:

This concludes today's issue of Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels. Between writing these issues, I have been working on the missing podcast episodes, as well. When this marathon is over and the articles are caught up, a podcast marathon will begin! As usual, the next issue is coming very soon, so please stay tuned!