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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In Super Mario Bros. 3, there is a visual glitch with two frames of the wand whenever Mario clears an airship level and falls down to one of the kings’ castles. Due to the wand moving extremely quickly in-game, this can only be seen by severely slowing down the footage.
Top: the scene as seen in the game, slowed down.
Bottom: the glitched frames in question, making the wand appear Y-shaped.
While it can potentially be argued that these could be intentional smear frames, this is highly unlikely since the effect only appears on some orientations of the wand, and more importantly, that it only happens in the castles. When the wands drop down after defeating the Koopalings in the airships, the glitch does not occur.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: SMB3 (NA, NES)
To save space, the Super Mario Maker 2 logo is not saved internally as an image containing the full logo, but rather is chopped up and rearranged from an image containing only one instance of each character per font size. As such, the M, A and R in “MAKER” are not present in the image and are arranged at runtime by duplicating the same letters in “MARIO”.
This results in the actual graphic as it appears in the files seemingly calling the game “SUPER MARIOKE 2”.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
In version 1.1.0 and earlier of Super Mario Odyssey (patched in all subsequent versions), having Cappy hit Talkatoo directly after Mario finishes talking to him would result in a variety of glitched behaviors.
One of these is that Mario would start talking to Talkatoo again, but only when the camera actually turns in such a way that he is visible. Mario would be able to wait long enough to fall asleep just by having the camera point in a different direction, and instantly start talking by having Talkatoo come into view.
Normally, a bird lands on Mario’s nose when he falls asleep in areas where birds occur, but flies off the second Mario starts moving again. This glitch was the only way Mario was able to change animations without scaring off the bird, allowing it to be seen perching on his nose while he is standing up.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: syrkl_dsc
During the introduction of the Mecha-Bowser Mayhem minigame in Mario Power Tennis, Bowser’s Castle is seen in the distance beyond the court before the camera tilts down and it is not seen again for the rest of the minigame.
Zooming in on the castle reveals that it is based on the design of Bowser’s Keep as seen in Super Mario RPG, a rare example of that game being referenced outside of an RPG context.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: MPT (NA, GC)
In Mario Kart Wii, the giant Luigi statue in Luigi Circuit has collision that exists purely to provide a realistic interaction if a player for some reason decides to throw bananas at it, and is not relevant for gameplay otherwise.
Most notably, the pipe into which Luigi’s left leg is going actually has an opening in the collision, allowing the bananas to correctly fall inside it, despite the hole not actually being modeled and instead being merely painted onto the statue. Note the bananas falling down into the pipe next to Luigi’s leg.
This amount of effort is likely to go completely unnoticed since a regular player is unlikely to throw even one banana at the statue, much less enough to notice how detailed the interaction is.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: B_squo
Top: collecting all 120 Shine Sprites in Super Mario Sunshine rewards the player with a low-quality image of many of the game’s characters standing around in front of the curtain in Casino Delfino. The image is not actually rendered in-engine and saved as a lossy compressed picture in the files, causing many of the details to be hard to distinguish.
Bottom: an in-engine recreation of the image created by Super Mario Sunshine dataminer AngryMax, made by placing all of the same NPCs in the same positions, allowing the scene to be viewed in greater detail. Please zoom in to view.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: AngryMax
Modified version of Super Mario Galaxy artwork where Mario normally looks off to the side, changed to make him look directly at the viewer, seen in a 2007 issue of the UK GamesMaster magazine.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: cometobservatory