A Super Mario variety blog.
Screenshots, photos, sprites, gifs, scans and more from all around the world of Super Mario Bros.
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Top: in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Mario and Luigi’s stage entrance animations involve them jumping out of Warp Pipes. It is difficult to notice during regular gameplay unless comparing them directly, but Mario’s pipe is a darker green than Luigi’s.
Bottom: however, internally, the textures for the two pipes are actually swapped in their brightness relative to the objects as they are seen in-game. On the left is Mario’s pipe texture, which is light green but is made darker at runtime with a shader. On the right is Luigi’s pipe texture, which is dark green but made much lighter with a shader.
It is unknown why the developers chose such a bizarre way of implementing the pipe colors.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
The Game & Watch Gallery 2 version of Helmet includes a unique Easter egg whereby a different character is unlocked for playing badly enough.
If the player gets a Game Over with a score of less than 100, and selects Retry on the Game Over screen, Mario will be replaced with Wario. Note that there is no other way to play as Wario, so a player that is too good at the game might never discover this.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: info
Top: in the preview image for the Bowser Jr.’s playroom field in Mario Super Sluggers, a cloud can be seen to the top right of the Bowser Jr. decoration.
Middle: however, in-game, there are no clouds at all on the walls of this field. At first this may appear to be simply a case of an outdated preview image: as often happens in development, screenshots are taken of areas in a certain stage, but then the area is changed while the screenshot is never updated, creating the discrepancy.
Bottom: the truth, however, is much more bizarre. The clouds are actually there in-game, but can only be seen if the camera is moved outside the field itself. Note how only the clouds on the near side (seen from outside) are visible, and not the far side (seen normally, from inside).
This is due to the clouds being mistakenly coded to be inside-out (in technical terms, their culling is set to “backface”, which is the opposite of how most regular objects are rendered). This strange oversight results in clouds that can not be seen during regular gameplay and require clipping out of bounds to discover.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: PenguinTheGeno
During the final battle against Bowser in Super Mario 64, a rare glitch may occur if Bowser is thrown offstage in a specific location where he already made part of the arena fall off.
After jumping back up from the abyss and making another part of the arena fall, Bowser will miss his follow-up jump to the safe part of the arena. Since Bowser’s code only checks if he should jump back up after being thrown offstage by Mario instead of a case where he somehow falls through a fault of his own, he will simply never come back up.
This particular match against Bowser will become unwinnable due to Bowser being missing, and Mario must die to continue regular gameplay.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
Top: official art for Yoshi’s Island shows the various Yoshis with differently-colored shoes, similar to their later portrayals in the series.
Middle: however, in-game, all the Yoshis’ shoes are barely distinguishable (yet still marginally different) shades of red.
Bottom: strangely, the Yoshis all have differently-colored shoes in the game’s intro only, which then go away when actually playing as them. As these shoe colors resemble the official art, it is clear that this is how the Yoshis were intended to look, but it is unknown what exact technical reasons were behind the developers not being able to implement that during gameplay.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: YI (NA, SNES)
Extremely rare Mario Party 4 artwork of the “GOOOOOOOAL!!” minigame, found in a 2002 issue of the French official Nintendo magazine.
This is the only high-resolution version of this artwork that is currently known to exist, and not even this version is fully visible due to Wario being partially covered by a screenshot.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: MON (France), Issue 7, 2002
