Mario Kart World has an extremely aggressive implementation of Lakitu to prevent abuse of the Feather item. If the player attempts to create a shortcut that in any way even grazes an out-of-bounds area, Lakitu will immediately appear and punish the player.
Note how in the footage, the player very slightly touches the space above the colorful boundary blocks of the course, which is considered out of bounds for a Grand Prix race.
Even though Toadette lands in roughly the same spot she would have been if she simply drove along the ground with a Mushroom (so that this shortcut can not be considered a “skip”), she is still severely punished.
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In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, several factors combine to create a unique way to collect arbitrarily many extra lives:
-the Drill power-up automatically defeats enemies falling onto the character from the top
-as long as the character is not touching the ground, this builds up a combo that can reward 1-Ups
-enemies from a pipe will not emerge indefinitely if the player is too close to the pipe to prevent abusing this to farm lives…
-however, the Grappling Vine badge circumvents this, and allows the player to move away and immediately latch back onto the pipe without ever touching the ground, preserving the combo.
If any of these factors was not in place, this trick would not be possible in that form.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: LooygiBros
It is possible that the Moleville theme in Super Mario RPG is a reference to a classical music piece called “Spinnerlied” or “Spinnliedchen” (“spinning song”) from the mid-19th century. The post first features a piano performance of the beginning of the song, followed by the beginning of the Moleville theme, for comparison.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: music, info: EmeryCox4
Super Donkey was a platformer that was in development for the SNES from 1991 to 1992, parts of which would be used as the basis for Yoshi’s Island. The game was never publicly revealed by Nintendo; its very existence is only known due to internal development data surfacing in 2020.
One extremely curious detail about the game shows just how long Nintendo is willing to hold on to an idea they believe is good before finally implementing it in a finished game:
Top: in Super Donkey, one of the abilities of the main character is a stomp attack that releases two dust clouds, one on each side, that continue the attack horizontally. The dust clouds visibly have chomping jack-o’-lantern-like faces to show that they damage enemies.
Bottom: in Super Mario Maker, 24 years later, this attack was finally put into a finished game, being the Ground Pound attack specific to the Big Goomba’s Shoe. It acts and looks nearly entirely identically to the Super Donkey version.
This means that at least one developer at Nintendo has been holding on to the idea for 24 years and waiting for the perfect moment to use it.
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Officially licensed 2018 Donkey Kong hand puppet.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: VGPlushDaily
In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the Pit of 100 Trials does not actually consist of 100 separate rooms. Instead, it is only a few rooms (one for each visually distinct type) and the game uses a lookup table to put different enemies in the room based on the floor number, making the entire Pit much more memory-efficient.
Even though the game never lets Mario progress past floor 100, if cheats or glitches are used to do so, it becomes apparent that the game uses an unsigned 8-bit integer (a variable with a maximum value of 255) for the floor number, but only has table entries up to 100. If any greater floor number is accessed, the table draws from data not intended to be part of the Pit, leading to bizarre results.
One very notable scenario occurs when floor 114 is accessed. After defeating a Goomba (who appears in-battle as nothing, making it an instant victory), the Goomba drops the Boat Mode ability, as an item. Every ability Mario gets actually exists as an item in the game, but Mario never obtains them in that manner. After picking it up, it is correctly added to Mario’s status screen and he is able to use it.
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After the release of Super Mario Odyssey, there have been many reported, and multiple documented, cases of Mario suddenly being able to swim in mid-air as seen in the footage.
Unfortunately, despite extensive attempts to reverse-engineer and reproduce the glitch, none have been successful and the mechanism behind it remains a mystery to this day.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Fir, stoneclasher