In Super Mario Sunshine, the smoke from Corona Mountain briefly stops whenever a Shine Sprite spawns, and then picks back up again.

This can best be seen in the cutscene of the Shine Sprite that appears after cleaning the black goop off the Shine Gate. Note how the smoke dissipates during the cutscene, and immediately starts back up when control is returned to the player.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: SMS (NA, GC)

Officially licensed 1994 plush keychain of Enguarde the Swordfish from Donkey Kong Country, from Japan.

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It is very common in 3D games to use in-engine coloring to apply color to objects that is not present in the texture graphics themselves. This most commonly appears in two ways: either as the texture being “multipurpose” and grey so that it can be tinted any color at runtime, or a “default” texture being whatever the natural color for the object would be and it sometimes being tinted for special cases.

An extremely unusual and inexplicable example of this comes from Super Mario Galaxy 2, where the lava of this planetoid in the Bowser Jr.’s Fiery Flotilla galaxy has a green texture (left) before it is recolored in-engine to the expected orange color (right). Note that this is inarguably intentional given how the texture’s internal filename is “LavaSunGreen”.

There are no cases of lava actually being green in the game; as such it is entirely unknown why the color is implemented in this way instead of just making it orange to begin with. It may be possible that the lava was originally intended to be green here, with the developers realizing that the players may be confused and changing the color to something more standard during development.

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In Super Mario 64, talking to Koopa the Quick stops Mario in his tracks to make him listen to the dialogue for a few seconds, so it is logical to conclude that it would remove all of Mario’s momentum at the moment of approaching Koopa the Quick.

However, that is not the case; if Mario has a high speed when initiating the dialogue, the speed can be preserved by jumping on the first frame after control is returned to the player.

The footage shows an extreme example of this, whereby the player accumulates vast amounts of speed as Wing Mario using the Backwards Long Jump exploit, stops to listen to Koopa the Quick, and then simply picks the momentum back up to finish the race in 5 seconds.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: bobmario511

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon contains an unused cutscene of Luigi unlocking the front door of the Treacherous Mansion where he completely misses the keyhole with his key due to not being aligned with the door correctly. Note the keyhole coming into view behind Luigi’s head as he steps back.

While this is of course simply a consequence of the cutscene being unfinished and unused, it also seems somewhat appropriate for the haunted setting of the game for a door to be illusory and needing to be unlocked by putting the key somewhere that is not the keyhole.

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It is well-known that Il Piantissimo from Super Mario Sunshine is secretly a reference to the Running Man from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which can be seen in-game by standing next to him and angling the camera to look up into his mask.

However, comparing the two directly reveals some differences as well. In addition to having a goatee and ponytail, Il Piantissimo also has darker skin and a different facial structure from the Running Man, including a much more defined chin.

Whether these differences are merely stylistic and this is in fact the same character in two different universes, or whether Il Piantissimo is unrelated to the Running Man and merely looks like him as an homage, has never been stated by the developers.

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In Super Mario World, the Sunken Ghost Ship features an area where Boos keep appearing and disappearing in different spots in the screen.

Interestingly, the game does not have the capacity to create hitboxes for every single Boo that appears during this. Instead, whenever the Boos become visible, hitboxes are assigned only to the Boos that were on screen at that exact moment, and not to any of the others.

As such, if the player is aware of it, this limitation can be exploited. The player needs to merely memorize where the edge of the screen was at the moment the Boos fade in, and can then safely swim through any Boos that were further right from that point.

Another trick is to use the L button to scroll the screen to the left, which puts most of the “active” Boos to the left of Mario and allows him to mostly swim though the hitboxless Boos that scroll into view from the right.

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

In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, it is relatively rare for Mario to become Dizzy since the only way it can be inflicted upon him is through stage hazards or an enemy using the Dizzy Dial item. No regular enemy attacks can inflict it.

As such, an easily missable detail of the Dizzy status effect is that in addition to the obvious reduction in the accuracy of Mario’s own attack, it also makes attack items capable of missing, when they usually are guaranteed to always hit all enemies.

The footage shows Mario being Dizzy and using a Fire Flower, which manages to miss three of the Goombas and only hit one of them.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: PM:TTYD (NA, GC)

Development files for Yoshi’s Island contain a SNES program (that supported the SNES mouse for input) that the game’s developers used to edit the rotating Super FX world map on the game’s title screen.

The screenshots in the left column show the editor’s window and the ones in the right column show the islands created this way when viewed in the game’s actual engine (the glitched background is an artifact of the editor not being designed for the final version of the game).

It is remarkable that the developers made a dedicated program for creating the maps that would run on the same hardware as the game itself instead of doing it on a PC as is common for the vast majority of game development. It is possible that these kind of tools were ultimately an inspiration for the Super Mario Maker series many years later.

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In Donkey Kong 64, there is a minor code oversight in the Army Dillo boss battle whereby Army Dillo’s aim is off at the beginning of the fight.

He will only be able to actually aim at Donkey Kong after either he or Donkey Kong move from their starting positions. As such, the optimal way to start the battle is to simply not move at all until his first attack is over, as seen in the footage. Army Dillo will miss all four of his shots, allowing the first hit to him to be done “for free” without any danger in this manner.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: DK64 (NA, N64)