Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 49 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the 49th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.

I am glad to announce that I seem to have recovered from my illness and that I should be able to resume regular updates of the Patreon from now on.

Galaxy Colosseum

As the years go on and more and more video games across the industry are developed to heavily incorporate - or be entirely built around - online functionality, the scenario of content for a game being lost forever when that online functionality is shut down or no longer supported becomes more common. In the Mario series, the most prominent example of this has been Super Mario Bros. 35, a game that has become entirely unplayable on April 1, 2021, making all of its content essentially lost forever for regular consumers (as only enthusiasts would take the time to research how to set up custom servers, and the code allowing players to do so simply not existing in many cases). Although upsetting when it happens, the community has largely accepted this as an unfortunate byproduct of the more desirable aspects of online functionality, such as being able to play against people from all over the world, or being able to upload player-created content to the game's servers.

It is not always the case that a game's online content becomes unavailable because the servers are shut down; rather, the content may still be in the game's files, but online functionality was necessary merely to access it in place, not to actually download it from a remote location.  One of the earliest examples of this was Mario Kart Wii.

Mario Kart Wii was one of the first major Nintendo titles to make use of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service that was available for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. In addition to allowing online play with up to 12 players per race, another feature that used Nintendo WFC was the Tournaments mode (called "Competitions" in the European version of the game). Tournaments were single-player challenges that were given a ranking based on the player's performance; the rankings were then able to be viewed on the game's online leaderboards for all tournaments, immortalizing the player's achievement - at least until the entire service was shut down in 2014, 6 years after the game's release.

Tournaments were similar to the missions seen previously in Mario Kart DS, in that they featured a variety of different tasks for the player. Some tournaments simply required the player to beat computer players in a race or drive through a course like in the regular Time Trial mode, while others had more unique requirements such as driving through numbered gates or collecting coins. The most unique ones included boss battles, where some manner of large boss character needed to be defeated using items.

In all, there have been 49 unique tournaments from the game's launch in April 2008 until the game's discontinuation in May 2014. The tournaments also repeated, so that there were 145 total tournaments, two being held every month. 

Above is an example of a boss battle against a Big Pokey on the Thwomp Desert battle course in an October 2008 tournament. While the battle course itself is available in the game normally, it does not contain a Big Pokey; the boss is exclusive to the tournament and cannot be fought when the tournament is not active (source video).

The tournaments would be an interesting curiosity but ultimately not a great loss upon discontinuation if they had only included small changes to preexisting tracks and battle courses, however, there is one course that was entirely exclusive to the tournament mode, and which is the topic of this article: the Galaxy Colosseum.

The Galaxy Colosseum (called "Galaxy Arena" in the European version) is a Super Mario Galaxy-themed battle course exclusive to the tournament mode and which is, for the purposes of regular play, lost forever despite being contained inside the data of every copy of Mario Kart Wii. The only way it can be played currently is through the use of cheat devices like the Action Replay to modify the game's code at runtime.

(In this article, I use both screenshots taken myself by loading the course inside a copy of the game using that method, and screenshots taken from noclip.website. In addition, whenever I show footage of gameplay from a recording by other players, a link to the source video is provided.)

The Galaxy Colosseum not only features a unique model for the playable area and a Super Mario Galaxy-inspired skybox, but also original music that is also not heard anywhere else in the game and is lost to regular players just as the course itself. I have previously made a post showcasing the music on the main Supper Mario Broth site, so that you can listen to it in your browser. Despite the track being themed after Super Mario Galaxy, the music is an original composition with both the melody and the instrumentation not referencing anything specific from Super Mario Galaxy.

There were three tournaments that featured Galaxy Colosseum, each centering on a boss battle against Spiky Topmen enemies, which originally appeared in Super Mario Galaxy, but with various differences:
1. In June 2008, four Spiky Topmen needed to be defeated. They would spawn one at a time, and the arena itself was inert. The Item Boxes would provide single Mushroom items, except for one moving Item Box in the middle that would provide triple Mushrooms.
2. In June 2009, there were now six Spiky Topmen, which would spawn in groups of two. Now, all Item Boxes contained triple Mushrooms, and the arena would gradually become smaller as the outer rings would fall away.
3. Finally, in March 2010, the tournament repeated the second one again, except the Spiky Topmen would spawn in groups of 2, then 1, and finally 3. When only one Spiky Topman remains from the final group, it would try to escape from the player rather than attacking.

Interestingly, the arena itself appeared different between the tournaments. Here is what it looked like in the first one (source video):

While here is how it appeared in the third one, with an additional ring (source video):

Finally, in the second one, it had one more additional ring, as can be seen above in the first screenshot of it used in this article. Curiously, the size did not increase linearly with its appearances, but went from smallest to largest, then to medium size, which could suggest that the order of the tournaments was possibly shuffled around at some point.

The Spiky Topmen are enemies that first appeared in the Battlerock Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy, and attack Mario by spinning up and ramming into him. They are unable to harm him directly, but he will be harmed if he either jumps on the spike on top of them, or is rammed by them into an electric barrier, near which they always appear. The way to defeat them is to do the exact same thing to them: make Mario perform his Spin move, which will make them bounce back, so that they hit the electric barrier instead.

In Mario Kart Wii, the player cannot take damage, so the way the Spiky Topmen attempt to harm the player is just by ramming the kart or bike off the side of the arena. As this merely results in Lakitu placing the player back onto the arena, the only consequence is lost time - however, this being a competition for best time, losing time is the most fitting punishment in this scenario. As there are no electric barriers, the Spiky Topmen are defeated by ramming them off the side of the arena using the boost from a Mushroom item.

Here is example gameplay of a player defeating Spiky Topmen (source video):

As you can see, a hit with a Mushroom sends the Topmen spinning away, whereupon they become stunned for a short time, during which the player has the chance to hit them again if another Mushroom is still available. While simplistic, the battle gameplay is engaging and it is very unfortunate that it cannot be experienced with a regular copy of the game now.

Unfortunately, even though it is possible to load the course using an Action Replay code (008A33BB 00000036 for the North American version and 008A8093 00000036 for the European version), doing so loads the course in a state that is different from that used in any of the tournaments. According to Mario Kart Wii expert B_squo, this is due to the fact that although the course itself exists on the disc, the parameters with which it should be loaded (i.e. specific behavior of the enemies and of the course itself) were transmitted from Nintendo's servers during the tournaments; as such, the course loads into a "parameter-less" state where it functions differently.

Most noticeably, the Spiky Topmen are loaded in a "track hazard" mode rather than a "boss" mode. In this mode, they act like other characters that provide only a hazard to the player on various tracks (like Thwomps or Chain Chomps) instead of as bosses that can actually be defeated. In this mode, they are not responsive to any attacks. Ramming into them with Mushrooms does nothing:

Note that I have also used another Action Replay code to give Mario a Star item after the Mushrooms would run out, to demonstrate that the Star also has no effect on the Spiky Topman (I also tried this with all other items and none of them interact with the enemy; although it should be noted that during the tournaments, the only items that would spawn are Mushrooms, and so the enemy was likely never programmed to interact with anything else).

This raises a question that is impossible to answer with the current level of knowledge about the game, but is nevertheless intriguing: is this parameter-less state intentionally programmed? Could it be that at some point during development, there was a plan to have the course become playable in regular Battle Mode (perhaps after the tournaments were over), where the Spiky Topman enemy would behave like this, or is this entirely an emergent consequence of not loading any server-side data that would tell the Spiky Topman to be weak to Mushrooms?

Using a different code developed by YouTube user "MrBean35000vr", it is possible to load the arena in a state where the rings would slowly fall away like in the second tournament (source video; code can be found in the video's description):

However, unfortunately, even using this code, it is not possible to give the Spiky Topmen their weakness to the Mushroom item, so that they continue acting as undefeatable hazards. 

Finally, here are a few interesting details about the design of the course itself:

The skybox is actually taken from Space Junk Galaxy from Super Mario Galaxy, and then given a blue tint:

This is peculiar as the Spiky Topman enemies do not appear in that galaxy in that game; however, using the skybox from their home galaxy, the Battlerock Galaxy, would have likely been more difficult due to it including an extremely large planet. 

Falling off the course in either the second tournament or the version available with the codes shows an Item Box underneath the playable area, placed there likely as an oversight:

(The Item Box is the small purple object halfway between the player in the center of the screen and the "1st" text in the bottom left.)

The outer rings of the arena have groups of spheres travelling through them, which can be seen through the translucent glass in-game; however, the glass is nearly opaque and hides the impressive space-like texture of the spheres, which can only be seen by moving the camera below the ground. Presumably, the spheres represent ball bearings, which are used inside some varieties of spinning tops to stabilize them and keep them spinning longer, and both the arena and the enemies on it being based on spinning tops.

In the center of the arena, there is a slightly convex part of the glass that makes a star insignia shape, which can only be seen from very specific angles and is difficult to notice during regular gameplay. 

Unfortunately, it seems as though this kind of lost content will become only more common over time, and it will likely be much less easy, or outright impossible, to access it even by modifying the code or running an unofficial server. Even with this content, without the helpful recordings of the people having played the tournaments in 2008-2010, I would have been unable to show the intended method of defeating the Spiky Topmen - which only speaks to the importance of documenting our favorite games before their content becomes irretrievable, and trying to preserve it if possible.

I hope that this summary of this lost content, as well as the provided videos and links to codes for those of you who may want to experience the content (or at least the portion of it that can be emulated with the codes) are able to be helpful.

Thank you very much for reading.