Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels, Issue 18 (Patreon)

Welcome to another issue of Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels. 

The Only True Reflection

Reflections in Mario games have been handled differently based on the level of the sophistication of the hardware they were developed for. The only example of a reflection in Super Mario 64, the Snowman's Land lobby on the second floor of Peach's Castle, is not a true reflection as it is simply another room with a second Mario model that mirrors the player's movement behind a pane of glass, this being the computationally cheapest way to imitate a reflection. In Super Mario Sunshine, the few reflective surfaces in the game (the calm water in Bianco Hills, the mirrors in Gelato Beach, and the mirror in one of the rooms in Hotel Delfino) display an actual reflection, achieved by rendering the scene again in a lower resolution from a different viewpoint (although some differences from the actual scene are present, such as FLUDD's nozzle being absent in the reflections).

In Super Mario Odyssey, there is a widespread use of so-called environmental reflections. These are present throughout the game, but are most ubiquitous in New Donk City, where the windows of almost all buildings contains this type of reflection. Rendering the scene again for each of the windows like in Super Mario Sunshine would be absolutely unfeasible even at very low resolutions as there are places where Mario can see over a hundred such reflections at once. Instead, a different technique is used, called cubemaps.

A cubemap is a collection of six square textures that represent the reflections on an environment. The six squares form the faces of an imaginary cube that surrounds an object; each face represents the view along the directions of the world axes (up, down, left, right, forward and back). What happens in-game is that instead of truly reflecting the actual environment around them, the windows merely show the corresponding area of the cubemaps assigned to them when Mario looks inside. One side effect of this is that no objects are reflected in the windows; most obviously Mario himself, but also no NPCs, enemies or other objects like taxis. 

Another side effect that may be much harder to notice without looking very closely is that there is no separate cubemap for each window, or even each building, in New Donk City. Instead, the buildings share a small number of cubemaps, which in practice means that no building actually reflects what is really surrounding it. Here are examples:

This door is opposite the Crazy Cap store, which, if it were present in the reflection, would be instantly recognizable due to the brightly lit entrance and yellow-purple color scheme. However, it is nowhere to be seen in the reflection.

This building next to the New Donk City Hall doesn't reflect the City Hall despite logically its reflection needing to be extremely prominent. Instead, it reflects a view of the skybox around the main playable area and none of the buildings Mario can actually access.

The New Donk City Hall itself has a unique cubemap that is simplified even further. Instead of reflecting just the skybox, it reflects even less: only the non-modeled part of the skybox, i.e. the buildings in the very background of the city that are simply textures painted on the sky instead of models in the environment. 

Due to some cubemaps not being centered to the elevation of the windows, an effect also occurs where a window on ground level reflects something below it, as though it was much higher up. In this footage you can see the camera zooming out and revealing space inside the reflection where the ground should be,

I have analyzed all buildings in the city and I found that not a single one of them has a cubemap completely accurate to its actual location; i.e. all reflections of the windows in the city are wrong to some degree. This is the closest one to being accurate:

This building is diagonally to the southwest of the City Hall but is reflecting it as though it was directly in front of it. Despite this, this is the most accurate reflection, as the vast majority of the others either reflect only the skybox or are positioned in completely different spots in the city from the actual building they are used in.

Funnily enough, the one building that is actually straight in front of the City Hall - the building the Odyssey is parked on - does not reflect the City Hall at all:

However, despite there not being any building with the correct reflection, I found an object that does have one: a taxi. All taxis in the level have the same cubemap that stays unchanged as they move through the city, which of course results in the reflection being wildly incorrect the vast majority of the time:

This side of the taxis, for example, always reflects this light building. However, this particular taxi is standing opposite this building instead:

...which, of course, looks nothing like the reflection. It turns out that all the taxis are reflecting the environment surrounding the taxi that Mario can capture to visit the rainy sub-area, parked in the middle of the main street:

The west side of the capturable taxi reflects the light building, which is accurate...

The north side reflects New Donk City Hall, even with the correct slight offset that is due to the taxi being on one side of the road and not completely straight ahead of the entrance...

...and the east side reflects this brown building, also accurately. 

Interestingly, this decision to make this taxi the focal point of the cubemap must have been made very late in development, as the E3 2017 trailer for the game shows a different reflection on it (and all other taxis):

In the end, it is slightly ironic that the only object with a correct cubemap in the city is an object that is intended to move, instead of the many completely stationary structures like the buildings.

DSi Shop Crew

Downloading a game from the DSi Shop on the original DSi (no longer possible after 2016) displayed an animation of the playable characters from Super Mario Bros. 2/Super Mario Advance throwing orbs representing data into a box which filled up as the download progressed. (Footage from this video.)

What is interesting about this animation is that the sprites themselves are not taken from the two sources one may immediately assume they may originate from, namely the Super Mario All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Advance. Instead, the sprites are recolored, and in the case of Peach and Toad, even redrawn versions of those from Super Mario Advance. Here is a sheet showcasing all the sprites used in the shop:

Let us compare the sprites of the characters here and in the two abovementioned games. The sprites on the left are from the DSi Shop, the middle from Super Mario Advance, and the right from Super Mario All-Stars (i.e. the sprites are presented in reverse chronological order).

With Mario, the color of the cap and shirt, as well as the skin, more closely resemble the SMA version, which has had its colors lightened during the port process to balance out the GBA's lack of backlight (at least in the first model, before the introduction of the GBA SP) which would have made the original sprites too dark in comparison. However, the blue of the overalls seems to be a correction of both the SMA and the SMAS colors to the standard blue used in official artwork of Mario. 

With Luigi, the cap and shirt resemble the SMAS version more than the SMA one, and the skin was darkened slightly compared to how Mario's skin was changed little from the SMA tone. The overalls were again changed completely to the dark tone used in modern Luigi artwork. Interestingly, there is a small pixel difference between the SMA sprite and the shop sprite: in Luigi's frame where his legs are far apart, his head is moved backward in SMA by one pixel compared to the shop. This makes it resemble the SMAS sprite, so the chronological chain of events was moving Luigi's head back one pixel from SMAS to SMA, then forward again for the shop. It can also be argued that the sprites were taken and recolored directly from SMAS, however, the coloring that seems to be inspired by SMA makes that unlikely (though not impossible, as the colors could simply be standard Mario artwork colors).

Peach's sprite underwent considerable changes. The torso was recolored to include the brooch on her dress, the dress design was updated, earrings were added, her eyes were colored blue (oddly enough, neither Mario's nor Luigi's were despite their eyes being the exact same shade of blue in official artwork), and her hair and crown was edited completely. Note that despite everything else about the shop sprite being made to resemble artwork as closely as possible, the shape of the crown was changed to be broader and flatter (although this may be just the hair interfering with it), making it look less like Peach's actual crown.

Toad's sprite underwent the most drastic change, with all parts of it being scaled down by a small factor to more accurately reflect Toad's size relative to Mario, Luigi and Peach. Although clearly this sprite has demanded the most effort out of the four to bring up to date with the character's official design, one change was not made: Toad's lower body still resembles baggy pants as it did in the other games, instead of being a perfectly geometrical half-sphere with floating feet that it is currently. 

It is somewhat of a pity that these more accurate versions of sprites that went mostly unchanged since the original Super Mario Bros. 2 save for different coloration went unused outside this minor non-interactive animation in the DSi Shop. If Super Mario Bros. 2 is remade again for another console in the future, it would be a pleasant callback to use these sprites, although with the lack of new sprite-based games and the tendency to remake sprite-based games with more complex art styles or in 3D, the chances of this happening are very slim.

The L Colors Continue

In the second issue of Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels, I wrote a segment called "Luigi's Country-Dependent, Color-Changing Hat", which concerned itself with the fact that the normally green L emblem on Luigi's cap changed color to red in some publications such as the German Club Nintendo comics, and to blue in others. Since then, I thought about compiling other instances of the L emblem being displayed in different colors. Here are cases of the L being black, yellow and white, in addition to the previously discussed red and blue.

Despite the Super Mario Bros. Super Show and Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 cartoons having the correct colors of emblems on Mario's and Luigi's caps...

(Super Mario Bros. Super Show: "Do You, Princess Toadstool, Take This Koopa...")

(Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3: "Misadventures in Babysitting")

...the Super Mario World cartoon series, produced by the same team after the other two, for an unknown reason changes the L emblem on Luigi's cap to black:

(Super Mario World, "Fire Sale")

Note that Mario's emblem still remains red, as seen in the same episode:

Luigi's emblem is black in almost all episodes of the Super Mario World cartoon until the final one, "Mama Luigi", where likely due to a larger focus on him the L emblem is drawn accurately throughout:

A white variation of the emblem is seen in a very specific circumstance: the results screen of Mario Golf for the Game Boy Color.

When I first saw this, I thought that maybe the white spot is the area around the emblem, while the letter itself is outlined with black; however, the white area is too L-shaped for it not to be the emblem. What makes this instance interesting is that no other image of Luigi from the game has a white emblem:

In addition, Luigi seems to change between a gold hat and his normal cap (or a slight variation of it) seemingly at random between different segments of the game. The cap shown in the results screen does not match any of the other caps precisely.

The yellow L emblem is not seen on Luigi and thus is not as pertinent as the other examples, however, I find that I should still include it for the sake of curiosity. In 1991, a cross-promotion between Nintendo and Kirin Lemon, a Japanese soda brand, took place. A commercial for the "Mario edition" of the drink (which can be seen here) showed a person in a Mario costume riding Yoshi. The emblem on the person's cap, though it resembles Mario's, is not a red M, however.

It is an extremely faint yellow L, standing presumably for "Lemon". The L is so light that in other scenes, it is almost too hard to make out at all, although this is also due to the video's compression:

Still, this is the only known instance of a yellow L emblem appearing on any type of cap that is intended to represent those belonging to the Mario Bros. With the major colors now out of the way, I will continue my search for orange, pink, brown and other non-primary-colored L emblems.

Pre-Release Arrow, Reconstructed

In Super Mario Maker, each level begins with a prominent arrow sign pointing to the right, the purpose of which is not entirely clear as there is only direction Mario can go to make the screen scroll, which is the right, and only one direction in which the flagpole can be located, which is also the right. In addition, many levels that start off with a door that is located to the left of Mario's starting position do not benefit from the arrow sign, which results in course makers often covering it up with decorative stage elements. If Super Mario Maker 2 includes stages that can scroll vertically, hopefully the arrow sign will also be adjusted to point upwards in those cases.

During the 2014 Game Awards, a trailer for Super Mario Maker (then still called simply "Mario Maker") was shown that revealed the Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World themes - prior to this, only the Super Mario Bros. and New Super Mario Bros. U themes were known. In that trailer, very briefly, the starting arrow sign for the Super Mario Bros. 3 theme can be seen:

The arrow looks rather different from the one in the finished game:

While the finished arrow has a design resembling the planks of the airship courses of the game, the pre-release arrow resembles the blocks that Mario can bump against and which sometimes release power-ups, with its pattern that somewhat evokes the stripes of a raccoon's tail, in reference to the Raccoon Mario power-up.

The finished version's files do not contain the sprite for the arrow sign from the Game Awards trailer, so I have decided to reproduce it as accurately as possible using the video as reference:

The original-size version is in the bottom right, while a zoomed-in version is on the left. I have counted all pixel distances by zooming in on the video and overlaying it with a grid, and this sprite should be entirely accurate unless I have made an error which I did not discover while double-checking. 

I am releasing this sprite into the public domain and you may use it however you wish.

Russian Yoshi Species/Individual Divide

As you may know based on previous articles in which I have talked about Mario content in those languages, I am a native speaker of German and Russian. While there is plenty of German-exclusive Mario content where my knowledge was practical to provide translations - most prominently the German Club Nintendo comics - there is relatively little original Russian content that warrants being presented to an English-speaking audience.  In Issue 4 of this column, I have talked about a play on words in Super Mario Odyssey where "You got a Moon!" was translated as "New Moon!" in Russian, but outside of minor details like these, there is usually no content where speaking Russian would provide new insights into the Mario body of work.

However, this does not stop me from regularly attempting to find content in Russian that could be of interest. I was recently looking at the Russian translation of Yoshi's Crafted World and found something that, due to the linguistic properties of Russian, may add detail to the distinction between Yoshi, the character, and the Yoshi species.

In English, both kinds of Yoshi are spelled the same; with a capital Y. This is common for fictional creature names; while creatures from mythology may be spelled with lowercase letters only, such as "elves" or "dragons", species invented specifically for a work will usually be spelled with capital letters, such as e.g. Zoras from the Legend of Zelda series, Thestrals from the Harry Potter series, Wookiees from the Star Wars series etc. Consider how odd it would look to encounter these being spelled without a capital letter, like "zoras". 

In Russian, however, the rules are more strict. If something is a species, it must be spelled with a lowercase letter to denote that it is not a proper name referring to any specific individual. Of course, there are many exceptions, especially in recent decades as more and more authors take examples from English literature and want to mimic those conventions; but the rule is still there and is often respected by various works of fiction.

I have encountered this segment at Nintendo of Russia's Kids Club section:

Translation: "Sometimes, out of Yoshi eggs, little Yoshis hatch. And other heroes, for example, Mario, must raise and feed the baby until it grows up and becomes a big Yoshi that can be ridden around on." The content of the paragraph is entirely standard, but the fact that "Йоши" - "Yoshi" - was always spelled with a capital letter struck me as odd. I began thinking about how I must have seen it being spelled with lowercase letters before for me to have this reaction to the spelling. As it turns out, I have:

This is a screenshot of the Russian version of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. The Brock (yellow block person) that Mario is talking to is referring to a Yoshi that is out of the view of the camera to the bottom left, and is saying "Something is wrong with this [yoshi]". The word for Yoshi is spelled with all lowercase letters here - "йоши", in accordance to the rules outlined above, as this Yoshi is not "the" Yoshi, i.e. the famous green Yoshi that is playable in many Mario games, but rather a random NPC out of many Yoshis in the game.

The newly released Yoshi's Crafted World also consistently uses the lowercase spelling. Here, you can see the "Choose a [yoshi]" option being highlighted. It seems that the team in charge of localizing the games differentiates between the species and the character. Note that in games where Yoshi is present "as a character", i.e. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the game capitalizes his name, even though technically, up to 8 of him can be on screen at once due to the fact that many players can choose the same, canonically singular, character.

Then why did the Kids' Club section use the capitalized version to refer to the species? After more research, I have come to the conclusion that it is only the in-game text that respects the rule. Promotional content is localized by a different team and simply capitalizes Yoshi's name every time regardless of context.

For example, this 2015 promotional video by Nintendo of Russia says "Choose your [Yoshi] in this classic video game for the Nintendo 64", capitalizing the name, even though the context here is exactly identical to the Yoshi's Crafted World situation above, where the name is not capitalized.

The conclusion here is the following: the teams in charge of localizing the games - and only the games - into Russian have access to some sort of information that decides if the Yoshi in question is "the" Yoshi character or merely a random member of the Yoshi species. Unfortunately, not many games in the Mario series so far have an official Russian translation, meaning that I could not find any cases where it was not clear from the context whether the Yoshi in that game is the singular Yoshi or a random Yoshi - however, this does not mean that this information cannot become useful in the future.

As time progresses, more games will receive a Russian localization, and inevitably, one of them will contain a corner case like New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Is the Yoshi ridden in that game "the" Yoshi who, due to a four-player mode, can be on screen in several iterations, or are those random members of the Yoshi species? There is no clear answer, as for example in Super Mario World, the green Yoshi Mario could ride was in fact the singular Yoshi, but the other three types of colored Yoshis were random Yoshis. I will keep an eye out on all Yoshi spellings in upcoming games and will write a segment - or an entire article if the news is important enough - if the Russian translation provides answers to questions like these that the other versions cannot answer.

The Little Yoshi That Couldn't

Speaking of Yoshis, there is an interesting limitation involving the Yoshi partner in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door that can be seen only during an extremely brief segment of the game that, during a regular playthrough, lasts less than 5 seconds.

After opening the titular Thousand-Year Door by collecting all seven Crystal Stars, the door remains open until Mario steps through it. Note that it only remains open until it is walked through once - after entering it and exiting it again, it will close behind Mario just like a regular door. Normally, the player simply takes a few steps from the pedestal to the door, steps through it, and starts Chapter 8 within several seconds. 

However, something peculiar happens if Mario, instead of walking through the open doorway normally, attempts to ride through on Yoshi.

Yoshi is stopped at the doorway and prevented from continuing inside. As long as Mario is riding Yoshi, he cannot enter through the door, and dismounting him instantly allows him to enter.

This is likely due to the fact that since the scene where the doorway is open is so brief, it was not fully tested and thus reuses part of the code that is present when the door is no longer locked, but closes after Mario. In this case, the "!" that signifies that Mario is able to walk through when the player presses A does not appear if Mario is riding Yoshi, either:

This is also the case with most regular doors in the game. As minor as this is, it is curious how this moment - a moment of great story importance within the game, especially for a first-time player - can fall flat and become almost comical if the player simply chooses to use a certain partner ability during it.

The Picross Game Boy Borders

Mario's Picross has a rare degree of complexity in its integration of Super Game Boy features. While there are many Mario games for the Game Boy that include special borders when played on the Super Game Boy, some even dynamically changing the borders based on what part of the game the player is in, Mario's Picross contains six selectable borders that each require a special input to view, in addition with the decorative border that is present only on the title screen:

As you can see, the border continues Mario's cropped-out face visible on the title screen. If you simply press Start here, the border changes to a green one when the game begins:

For many players, this was the only border they would see. Experimenting with pressing a certain direction on the D-Pad simultaneously with pressing Start would reveal one of a set of four more borders:

Left for yellow, Right for red, Up for black and Down for white. And while all of these themes are a great addition to the game, they are not the main event and do not have as much effort put into them as the final, hidden theme that has a more complex way of activating it. If you input Up, Right, Down, Left on the title screen and keep holding Left, a sound will play. While holding Left, press Start (letting go of Left activates one of the other themes) to view the Transparent Game Boy theme:

This theme is remarkable for the reproduction of the circuits one may see inside an actual transparent Game Boy in pixel art. Here is a photo of one such console, for comparison:

Consider how all the detail around the screen in the Mario's Picross version of the Game Boy corresponds to a visible element on the circuits of the actual console. While I am not an expert on the technical names for the features depicted, please note how the circular features on the top are offset vertically from one another, or now the lines on the left and right of the bottom line up correctly in their orientation (although due to pixel resolution, the artwork depicts much fewer parallel lines than are present on the console).

The chip visible on the bottom middle reads "10" in the game, while the number ends with "31" in the photo. By analyzing several photos of transparent Game Boys, I have determined that they each have different numbers on that element, meaning that those are either serial numbers or something else that necessitates many different variations. If any of my readers knows more about this part and whether the "10" code in the artwork could have special significance, please contact me and I will write about it in a future column!

Super Mario World Background Palettes, Animated

There are a wide variety of background graphics in Super Mario World, although that variety is not strictly due to many different drawings being used but rather due to various palettes being used with a relatively small amount of truly different graphics. I have always wanted to be able to quickly see the different available palettes at a glance, so I have put them together in animated GIFs. For each background that is not animated, the GIF cycles through all palettes of it that is actually used in the game - not including palettes that debug and data mining programs show as being available, but not actually used. For animated backgrounds, the background animates for 2 or 3 cycles before shifting to the next palette.

First, the backgrounds that use different palettes, but are not animated:

Note how in the fortress background, the "icy" variation seems to have extra detail in the form of icicle-like formations, but this is actually present in all palettes and merely brought into visual prominence by increasing the contrast in those specific areas.

Next, the backgrounds that use different palettes and are also animated:

In the castle background, you may notice that the animation consists of circles expanding and contracting around the candles on the wall. In-game, this is harder to see due to the fire sprites on the candles partially covering up the circles.

Finally, some backgrounds have only one palette:

Finally, there are some "backgrounds" like the Morton Koopa battle or Switch Palace background that are not actually large graphics like the ones shows here, but rather singular tiles placed by the game; in the case of the Switch Palaces, a single 16x16 square repeated both horizontally and vertically.

While there many be little point to this outside of showcasing the different palettes, I believe it can be interesting to look at how the shifting of the palettes can create different moods in the levels with minimal effort, and that having it presented in this form has certain advantages to viewing the palettes side-by-side.

Coconut Crackers / It's Mr. Pants

Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers was a puzzle game shown at E3 2001 and intended to be released by Rare for the Game Boy Advance in November of that year. Due to the acquisition of Rare by Microsoft in 2002, many of their ongoing projects were halted, canceled, or reworked into other games due to them no longer having the same rights to Nintendo-related IPs as before.  In case of Coconut Crackers, the game was first put on hold, and then released in 2004 without the Donkey Kong IP as "It's Mr. Pants", starring a crayon-drawn character that appeared in Banjo-Tooie and the Rare official website.

Before I continue with the comparison between the Donkey Kong and finished version of the game, I would like to briefly discuss the amusing implication that It's Mr. Pants is, technically, the last in a long chain of spin-offs starting with the original Donkey Kong arcade and is, as such, however remotely, related to Donkey Kong. If we define game X to be a "spin-off" of game Y if game X stars a character in a main role that first appeared in game Y as a minor or supporting character, then the following becomes apparent:

1. Donkey Kong Country is a spin-off of the Donkey Kong arcade, since it features Donkey Kong, who first appeared as a villain in the Donkey Kong arcade.
2. Diddy Kong Racing is a spin-off of Donkey Kong Country since it features Diddy Kong, who first appeared in Donkey Kong Country as the second playable character.
3. Banjo-Kazooie is a spin-off of Diddy Kong Racing since it features Banjo, who first appeared as one of the racers in Diddy Kong Racing.
4. It's Mr. Pants is a spin-off of the Banjo-Kazooie franchise since it features Mr. Pants, who appeared on the TV in Boggy's igloo in Banjo-Tooie, the direct sequel to Banjo-Kazooie. 

While of course this is not meant to be taken seriously, based on this line of reasoning, It's Mr. Pants is a quadruple spin-off of Donkey Kong, which makes it just as Mario-related as WarioWare: Mega Microgames, which is also a quadruple spin-off of Donkey Kong (via Donkey Kong -> Super Mario Bros. -> Super Mario Land -> Wario Land -> WarioWare).

Here are all the images ever released for Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers:

If you followed Nintendo game news in 2001-2002, you likely have seen all of them, as magazines would repeatedly print these due to a lack of new screenshots of artwork before it became clear that the game would not be released.

There is also one surviving video from that version, which can be seen here. It shows the title screen animation of Donkey Kong swinging from vine to vine, some gameplay, and the barrels that let the player choose the difficulty, with the Easy difficulty being called Jungle, the Medium being called Snow, the Hard being called Lava, and another difficulty that is not selected but would presumably be Very Hard and feature one of the other environments like Underwater or Hive.

Now it is time for the actual comparison. The title screen that was shown in the screenshots used the same 3D animation that It's Mr. Pants ends up using, of Donkey Kong juggling a red line, a blue L, and a yellow shape that is a T in the Donkey Kong version and another L in the It's Mr. Pants version. 

There is only one screenshot of the main menu, where a mode called "Endurance" is selected. It's Mr. Pants has no mode called that, so the closest are the "Wipeout" or "Marathon" modes, which both give the player a time limit, although Wipeout has garbage blocks while Marathon starts off on a clean board. We do not know what the other modes in the original are called, but in It's Mr. Pants, the modes are, from left to right, Puzzle (the main mode where preset puzzles are solves), Wipeout, Marathon, Muddle (which tasks the player to build certain shapes from a single color in order, again on a blank board), and Options. It is likely that all of the modes in the original are equivalent to some of the modes in the finished version.

The actual gameplay in It's Mr. Pants is identical to the Coconut Crackers gameplay, but the perspective is a simple orthogonal one instead of the more hardware-intensive tilted perspective of the original. Here is what the developers had to say on this change:

Finally, despite never being released, Coconut Crackers was actually referenced in an early trailer for the 2012 movie Foodfight!, infamous for being considered to be one of the worst animated movies of all time. At 10 seconds of this video, you can see the artwork of Donkey Kong looking around from the game, in the top right corner:

Whether a Donkey Kong game that ended up not released was precisely the one to be referenced in that movie is, in some ironic sense, appropriate is up to your interpretation.

Donkey Kong Country Series Inter-Game Background Reuse

The Donkey Kong Country games on the SNES are known most of all for their at the time extremely impressive SGI pre-rendered graphics. Not only the characters and all their animations, but the entirety of the backgrounds were rendered on Silicon Graphics workstations using a technique called NURBS, or non-uniform rational B-splines. Instead of polygons, the surfaces of curved objects are truly curved and not merely made out of very small slivers of straight surfaces as is ubiquitous in 3D rendering in games now. NURBS, while able to simulate curves to any arbitrary level of precision and thus superior to polygons, are too computationally expensive to be used in real-time applications even now, 25 years later, and it is unknown when we can reach a point where NURBS in gameplay can become feasible.

Of course, due to all of the games' graphics needing to be rendered separately, which could, depending on the complexity, take up a large amount of time, the teams tried to reuse backgrounds wherever it would be the least noticeable. (This is specifically discounting palette changes and focussing on background layers being used together with different background layers in a way that makes them hard to recognize as being reused.) Here are examples of this happening in the trilogy:

The fog layer on the right is reused in all three games in the trilogy. In the original DKC, it is used in Misty Mine, in DKC2, it is encountered in Web Woods, and in DKC3, in the pipeline levels (shown here is Low-G Labyrinth). You can see the same sideways 8-shaped hole in the fog in all three images, although not perfectly aligned since the fog layer not only moves, but also distorts in all three games to different extents.

An interesting instance of partial reuse is seen in DKC between the Candy's Save Point and Cranky's Cabin backgrounds. While the left side of the screen is not pixel-perfect between the two, the path and plants in the background are similar enough to be able to state confidently that at least the assets used to render the background were reused, although perhaps shuffled around slightly prior to rendering.

The far background layer from the forest levels, shown here is Vulture Culture in Donkey Kong Country (left column) was reused as the far background layer in the jungle levels in Donkey Kong Country 3 (shown here is Konveyor Rope Clash, right column). Interestingly, the trees are played off as being evergreens in the forest levels of DKC due to being specifically a biome more elevated and resembling temperate forests than the Jungle, but are presented as presumably deciduous, or at least needle-less, jungle trees in DKC3 (although in that game, the background is much harder to see). 

Finally, here is an odd scenario where one of the games' GBA remakes reuses a background layer between two different biomes that the original SNES version did not reuse:

In the SNES version of DKC3, the waterfall levels and the cave levels do not reuse graphics. However, this background layer from the waterfall levels in the GBA version which can only be seen closely by turning off the layer containing the actual waterfall (right), is used in the cavern levels:

On the left we can see the Buzzer Barrage level as it normally appears. In the middle, we turn off the foreground layer, and on the right, the middle background layer, leaving only the farthest layer, which, if you compare it to the waterfall level above, is a recolored version of it. This is peculiar because it is entirely unnecessary - the original game simply didn't have two background layers in the cave levels at all, so the team responsible for the port made the background more complex just to put in reused graphics from another background.

This concludes today's issue of Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels.

If you are currently thinking that there is little chance that I can fill out the Stamp Card in the few days remaining of April, I agree that it is quite daunting, however, I urge you to wait until the end of the month to see whether I can meet the challenge I have set for myself, especially since I have already written the podcast scripts for the two podcasts and only need to record them. For more details on the stamp card, please see the bottommost portion of Issue 17.

Thank you very much for reading.