Top: in Super Mario Sunshine, the Chain Chomplets appear in the “Chain Chomplets Unchained” mission of Pianta Village, where they are on fire and will hop along the village’s path while leaving a trail of fiery goo. They have to first be temporarily cooled off by spraying them with water, and then be launched into the central spring via tugging on their tails to be permanently cooled off.

Bottom: the internal programming for them is surprisingly complex, with this image representing the Chomplet Pathing Map. While on fire, they follow the black paths; when cooled off, the Chomplet will always go toward the dot matching the color of the area it is in, unless Mario is between it and that dot, in which case the Chomplet will go to the adjacent dot that is furthest away from the direction Mario is in.

While this information is much too specific to be of any actual use to anyone outside of people trying to create tool-assisted speedruns of the game (especially since the mission is easy enough to complete without needing to understand the mechanics), this is a great showcase of the fact that even the most minor and unremarkable parts of video games have tremendous programming effort behind them to function in the expected manner.

Source: nokidoki

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In Super Mario 64 DS, if Yoshi puts a Koopa shell in his mouth in Snowman’s Land, then bumps into the Chill Bully boss so that he is knocked in the lava, he will be riding the shell in a glitched way that allows him to stay alive with 0 HP as long as he does not stop riding the shell, or being in other states that override death (clinging to trees, walking through a door, etc.)

In this state, touching the tree next to the Chill Bully arena will make Yoshi cling on to it seemingly normally (except for the fact that he is actually dead), but actually steadily increase his speed variable in the background due to the wind acting on him (known in the Super Mario 64 glitch/speedrunning community as “building hyperspeed”).

After building hyperspeed for over a minute, Yoshi can slide down the tree to activate this speed. Since standing on the ground is not a state that overrides death, Yoshi will die instantly… but due to his hyperspeed, will keep sliding along the ground. This results in the “sliding dead Yoshi” seen in the footage, who will only actually activate the script to exit the stage after he has slid all the way out of bounds into the death barrier.

Source: p_yoshi

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In Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, performing a long jump onto an enemy or NPC (seen here with Bowser Jr.) and turning around in mid-air will make the player character’s face disappear.

This is a glitch that has already existed in the original Wii U version of the game, but is much more easily observed in this version due to the addition of Snapshot Mode.

Source: LooygiBros

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New Super Mario Bros. U is 13 gigabytes when downloaded for the Wii U (including the DLC). However, New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe for the Nintendo Switch is only 2.5 gigabytes despite featuring exactly the same content.

This is in fact not a consequence of compression, but a simple decision to cut off non-gameplay content from the original version. The Wii U game contains a whopping 10.5 gigabytes of bonus videos, which are either included on the disc or downloaded to the console when purchasing it digitally.

However, the Nintendo Switch version removes all of those videos and instead simply streams them from Nintendo’s servers instead when they are accessed. Below is a recording on the video menu being accessed on the Switch, showing the connection icon and the gradual loading of the page. On the Wii U, these would have displayed instantly due to being included in the files.

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In Super Mario Galaxy 2, pressing B before entering a pipe while riding Yoshi will cause him to look upward with his mouth open while entering the pipe.

Source: cometobservatory

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The Wii U and Nintendo Switch versions of Lego City Undercover feature a variety of Mario objects that the player can discovered and built. The footage depicts a Super Star being built (note that the Super Mario Bros. Invincibility music also plays during this).

Source: ShiromiGames

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In the Bobbing Barrel Brawl level of Donkey Kong Country 3, there is a relatively hard-to-see different floor graphic underneath the Koin enemy. The player is supposed to first defeat the Koin in the standard manner by using a steel keg, and then throw a TNT barrel at the floor that was under it to reveal a blue 3-Up balloon.

However, if the player does not defeat the Koin (or the red Zinger above it) and instead throws the TNT barrel at the Koin directly, the balloon will still emerge from the hidden spot, but will have a glitched color palette giving it a yellow-white color scheme with red eyes.

Below is a comparison between the correct and glitched appearances of the balloon.

Source: Saestrol

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“Super Donkey” was the name of an unreleased project that was developed between 1991 and 1992 for the SNES, and aspects of which were repurposed for the development of Yoshi’s Island later.

The main character in most of Super Donkey’s playable builds, found in Nintendo’s internal archives, is a pilot character who resembles either the main character from the 1981 Sky Skipper arcade, or Stanley the Bugman from the 1983 Donkey Kong 3 arcade, drawn in a Rayman-like “floating limbs” style.

However, there is also this earlier build that features Mario himself in the same style, indicating the game has started out as being Mario-themed. The footage shows some of Mario’s basic actions, such as walking, jumping, climbing, and flying at will. Note that the character continued being able to fly at will in later builds, which may have been one of the reasons he was changed since that is not an ability one would traditionally associate with Mario’s moveset.

Source: LJSTAR_

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In Super Mario 64 DS, Koopa the Quick is programmed to slow down whenever he runs up a slippery slope (seen in his Bob-omb Battlefield race when he runs up the white slope after falling off the seesaw bridge). The slow-down appears to be predetermined in-game (due to his path always being the same), but is in fact based on the incline of the slope.

If he is put in a different course and given a different path, it becomes apparent what happens when the slope is both slippery and steeper than the one slope he was ever supposed to run up. He slows down to the point that he starts running backwards, descends back down the slope, and continues fruitlessly to climb back up forever, as seen in the footage.

Source: mariomadproductions

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Original Mario Kart 64 illustration of Yoshi being pelted with bombs, used for the cover of an issue of the Australian N64 Gamer magazine.

Source: White vader

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