The international versions of WarioWare: Move It changed two of the forms (Joy-Con holding variations) from the original Japanese:

Top left: the form known internationally as “Knight”…
Top right: …was originally known as “ナルホド” (“I see!”) in Japanese, depicting a moment of epiphany.

Bottom left: the form known internationally as “Fashionista”…
Bottom right: …was originally known as “Ninja” in Japanese. This also explains why it is introduced at the beginning of Kat and Ana’s stage, as it was intended to fit those characters specifically by being ninja-themed.

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Unused Spike variant that would spawn Bullet Bills from its mouth instead of spiked balls, found in development files for Yoshi’s Island.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: NintendoMetro

Mario Kart DS contains an unused track called “luigi_course” in its files, which is an early version of Waluigi Pinball, seemingly meant to be Luigi-themed at that point in development.

A feature of this iteration of the track that has been removed completely is an alternate path to the finish line from the main pinball area. By driving over an obstacle, the racers would enter a long tunnel with several turns that goes underneath the main track, and joins up with the regular route at the exit from the pinball table.

As this detour is much longer than driving straight through the table, it is possible that the original vision for the table was to be much more dangerous and chaotic, so that racers would have an incentive to avoid the flippers and balls completely even at the cost of a much longer driving distance.

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In Super Mario 64, landing from a jump next to Koopa the Quick and then jumping again immediately on the next frame enters an extremely glitchy state known as the “time stop” state, whereby most objects will be frozen in time until Mario touches the ground again. This state is even more glitched in the Japanese version of the game.

Together with Mario’s Wing Cap, this can be used to cause several stars to appear all at once when the time stop ends, as seen in the footage. After performing the glitch and stopping time, Mario collects 100 coins, 8 red coins, touches the race finish flag pole, and ends by Ground Pounding a ! Block with another star in it. Then, Koopa the Quick’s dialogue appears, signifying the end of the time stop.

This results in the “Footrace with Koopa the Quick”, “Shoot to the Island in the Sky”, “Find the 8 Red Coins” and the 100 coin star being awarded all at once since Mario met all their requirements while time was stopped.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: geek_007

Both Paper Mario: Color Splash and Paper Mario: The Origami King contain sets of three paintings each that reference the respective previous game in the series.

Top: three paintings are hanging in a hallway of the Dark Bloo Inn in Paper Mario: Color Splash. From left to right, they reference the following locations from Paper Mario: Sticker Star: the Yoshi Sphinx, Snow Rise, and Hither Thither Hill.

Bottom: three paintings are hanging in the lobby of Overlook Tower in Paper Mario: The Origami King. The bottom two are referencing the Violet Passage and the Emerald Circus from Paper Mario: Color Splash, while the top one depicts the Overlook Tower itself.

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In the WarioWare: Move It microgame “The Big Moment”, the aim is to propose to a woman with a ring, which is put into one of three ring boxes and needs to be opened with the correct timing.

Interestingly, the woman does not merely have “success” and “failure” expressions, but also unique humorous expressions for different types of failures, which are seen extracted from the files here.

Top row (regular expressions): waiting to be proposed; being proposed with a ring; being proposed with an empty box.

Bottom row (bonus expressions): being proposed with a jack-in-the-box; being proposed with a donut; being proposed with a bell pepper.

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Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s engine resembles the Super Mario Maker engine in that it is able to combine a surprising amount of elements together that would never interact during regular gameplay.

One such interaction, which is also present in the Super Mario Maker games, is pipes being able to spawn any object repeatedly, even if that object would never emerge out of a pipe normally.

In the footage, pipes have been modified to spawn an endless amount of decorative Toads (seen in the game’s intro, where they wave to the player and keep walking to the right), which can be done by adjusting a single variable. The Toads then fall down a bottomless pit and despawn. No previous game in the series has ever been able to create an endless amount of NPCs in this manner without heavy rewriting of the code.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Getlucky12341

Officially licensed 2025 merchandise for the Yoshi’s Adventure ride, available at Super Nintendo World in Japan.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: blacktangent

For every type of major collectible seen in 3D Mario games, there has been a different implementation of in-engine coloration in different games.

While regular Power Stars are yellow due to using a yellow texture, Grand Stars in Super Mario Galaxy are black internally, and are colored yellow at runtime. This is implemented this way to allow the “drained” effect seen on the first Grand Star to fade dynamically into its regular coloration.

In Super Mario Odyssey, Power Moons do not actually use differently colored textures, and are white internally while being colored into their various variants at runtime.

In Super Mario Sunshine, Shine Sprites have a white-black gradient texture that is applied at an extremely low intensity to an in-engine yellow color to create a slight gradient that appears like light reflecting off its surface.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: 1, 2, 3

In the Floaty Fun Water Park level of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, the bloom post-processing effect interacts in a unique way with the shiny surface of the blue pipe.

From a very specific camera angle, the shine on the pipe is multiplied beyond its regular limits (likely due to a positive feedback loop somewhere in the render pipeline) to create an extremely pronounced five-pointed shine, as seen in the footage.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: ericspieslice