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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Early files found in a demo for Mario Kart: Double Dash show icons depicting Donkey Kong’s partner being Donkey Kong Jr. instead of Diddy Kong.
Interestingly, Diddy Kong is himself referred to as “dk_jr” internally in several places, suggesting that instead of scrapping the character and creating a new one from scratch, the developers simply took the existing Donkey Kong Jr. and replaced his model with Diddy Kong at some point in development.
As such, this means that Donkey Kong Jr. has been replaced twice in the series. In Super Mario Kart, he was playable. In Mario Kart 64, he was replaced with Donkey Kong, and finally, in Mario Kart: Double Dash, he was planned but was once again replaced, this time by Diddy Kong. He would not return to the series until Mario Kart Tour many years later.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
In Mario & Luigi: Brothership, some loading zones can be very easily skipped by using the UFO Spin from higher ground.
In the cave on Skorcheen Island, a pipe can be used to bypass a nearby loading zone leading out of the cave in this manner. If this is done, Mario can jump out of bounds at the end of the passage, completely dissolving into the fog as seen at the end of the footage.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: CM30
One of the events that can happen when Bowser Time is activated in Mario Party 7 on all boards except for Bowser’s Enchanted Inferno is Bowser taking a souvenir picture of the players using a cutout board.
Interestingly, extracting the graphics for the boards from the game’s files shows that some of them actually have faces drawn where the cutouts go, so that the faces cannot actually ever be seen in-game.
Compare e.g. the way the picture from Grand Canal looks in the in-game screenshot, where the faces are not visible (top), to how the extracted file actually contains the faces in the image (middle row, left).
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In Donkey Kong 64, there is an invisible 101st purple banana in Gloomy Galleon, out of bounds.
Top: to collect it, Tiny Kong needs to enter her part of the central shipwreck, then go into first person near a specific wall, which will make Tiny Kong clip through it (a glitch that works with all walls facing a specific coordinate direction in the game). From there, Tiny can swim upward and reach the top of the water, which is normally above the ceiling of the area.
Bottom: from there, she can use the Pony Tail Twirl to reach the other side of the hallway, where the water will end outright and she will stand on ground out of bounds. Somewhere in the darkness is a single invisible banana that can be picked up (note the counter in the top left increasing when she touches it).
Since every collectible, including this type of clearly unintentionally placed banana, is correctly tracked by the game’s save file, someone who wishes to truly collect everything that the game tracks would also need to collect this banana.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: ScykohPlays
Set of five officially licensed 1995 Donkey Kong Country plushes from Japan, comprising Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Candy Kong, Enguarde and Squawks, each with their own hammock and banana.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: VGPlushDaily
Extremely bizarre and frightening unused enemy found in the files of Wario World. It appears to be a unique combination of several concepts:
-its body and face resemble a traditional Japanese doll, and particularly its face is very similar to the Garlic Dispenser character from the finished game, implying the two may be related
-its torso opens up to reveal a giant maw of teeth
-it is skating on a single large ice skate. Its entire body shape vaguely resembles the Skating Goombas from Super Mario 3D World, and due to the maw, the skate also doubles as an allusion to a goatee.
While the game contains many macabre enemy designs, this may have been cut for being too outlandish even for this game.
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Top: in Super Mario 64 DS, Luigi is able to pass through the mirror on the second floor of Peach’s Castle using his Vanish Luigi ability. If he stops directly behind the mirror, zooming in the camera will cause Lakitu’s reflection in the mirror to move in such a way that the camera will clip into it and show the inside of the cloud, which contains two strangely-textured spikes.
Bottom: the spikes are actually the bottom of Lakitu’s model, which tapers to a point as a way to save polygons (tapering to a point is able to save 1 polygon over cutting off the model, as a triangle uses 1 polygon while a rectangle uses 2). The strange textures are actually just areas of the model that did not have textures specifically assigned to them, and which simply continue taking pixels from the texture sheet from the edge of the assigned area.
Note that while the large cone is Lakitu’s torso, the small cone is actually his hands, which surprisingly are also modeled to taper to a point while inside the cloud.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: SM64DS, NA/DS
In the Wooded Kingdom in Super Mario Odyssey, a rock can become glitched by picking it up with correct timing from a falling platform. Whenever that rock is thrown the next time after this, it will remain suspended in mid-air.
Since NPCs enter a brief hurt animation when a rock is thrown at them, throwing the glitched rock next to an NPC will lock it into the hurt animation indefinitely, as seen with this unfortunate Shiverian in the footage.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Terido_s