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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Bizarre promotional 1997 pin of Mario’s face with the tagline “Ask me How to Dig a Million Bucks”, used by store employees to evidently promote some Nintendo 64-related advertisement campaign, although no details on the campaign appear to be documented.
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In Donkey Kong Bananza, the Spin Jump is an unlockable skill that can be purchased for 2 Skill Points. There is a strange quirk in the physics calculations for the Spin Jump whereby it gains speed every time it bounces off a wall.
While normally, the player is not expected to bounce off a wall more than once or twice per jump, if Donkey Kong is positioned between two walls in the manner shown in the footage, he will gain immense velocity from the ricocheting effect.
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In Paper Mario: The Origami King, Jean-Pierre Colored Pencils the 12th (better known in-game as “Colored Pencils”) covers the inside of the Overlook Tower in various colored pencil drawings that are removed when he is defeated.
Here are the surprisingly detailed textures for the drawings, extracted from the game’s files. Please zoom in to view the details.
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A bizarre oversight in Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels results in some objects being manipulatable after Mario’s death.
Left: normally, whenever Mario dies, all objects on screen freeze for his death animation, and do not move again until the stage is restarted.
Right: however, if the player pauses and unpauses the game at least 4 times during the death animation, the objects will suddenly continue moving until the stage resets, as seen with the Koopa shell resuming its movement and killing the Koopa Paratroopa. The points and extra lives gained this way surprisingly still count even though Mario is dead, as shown with the black screen indicating that he now has 4 lives as a result of the glitch instead of 3 as on the left.
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Earliest known sketch of Donkey Kong Jr.’s proposed design for Donkey Kong Country, which was reworked into Diddy Kong after the decision was made to turn him into a new character, shared by Donkey Kong Country designer Gregg Mayles.
Unfortunately, this blurry version is the only quality the artwork has been made public in.
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Top: the indestructible material in Donkey Kong Bananza that appears in challenge courses and around specific objects that are supposed to not be affected by Donkey Kong’s ability to destroy most terrain is called Neptunite. It comes in two varieties: regular Neptunite with music symbol designs seen here on the floor, and Slippery Neptunite seen here on the walls.
Middle and bottom: interestingly, despite “Neptunite” giving the impression of a fictional material, it is the name of a real-life material. It is a silicate mineral containing many elements, including potassium, sodium, lithium, iron, manganese and titanium. Whether as a coincidence or a deliberate reference, the colors of neptunite in-game are very similar to real-world neptunite, ranging from grayish black to a black with a slight blue tint.
It is possible that another influence for the name was the fact that “Neptune” contains the word “tune”, referencing the musical symbols engraved into the material, though this is merely speculative.
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In Yoshi’s Island, the Fuzzy enemies cause the screen to distort when touched, giving the appearance of Yoshi being under the influence of a psychedelic substance. However, unlike how it may appear at first, this effect is not merely a visual distortion of the image, but rather a physical distortion of space itself.
Top: normally Fuzzies appear only in specific portions of levels where Yoshi interacts only with a curated set of objects. However, by performing a precise jump into the loading zone for the Fuzzies in Level 1-7, they can be made to spawn in the first part of the level.
Bottom: activating the effect here shows that the distortion was not intended to be used with slopes, causing Yoshi to phase through some of them and even be able to clip into the ground. This is because instead of merely the image of the ground being distorted, the waves are applied to the ground and its collision itself, causing issues during unintended applications.
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In Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, a glitch that may occur in some cutscenes after a camera angle change is character being in its low-polygon form for one frame before its high-polygon model loads in.
While this is extremely difficult to notice during gameplay outside of a momentary “flicker” of the model, going frame by frame through the footage reveals what is actually happening.
The above distortion can be seen in the Donkey Kong Adventure DLC.
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