mario is definitely a truck in SMB1 vs a ballet dancer in 3, yeah
ooh. well i don’t wanna drift (or skid-turn) off topic too much but i feel like metroid 1-4 all made me interface with and ask questions of the world in a different way, 1 being the most kind of inexplicable and unknowable
This was my first video game, too, no lie. Would have been 1992(?). My parents left me at a family friend’s house while they went out for dinner. They sat me down in front of a NES and their daughter taught me how to play the game. I imagine it’s kinda like if a kid growing up today’s first video game was Fortnite on an iPad given to them to keep them busy.
Super Mario Brothers = Fortnite, basically.
Level-Headed
SMB1 romhack utility
I found out about it from this video by ace SMB1 player Kosmic : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UymksEaX_8E
The art selection/randomization is fun but a lot of the tile sets seem to have swiped designs from other games or IPs, so I’m not gonna mess with that–except Sonic maybe, since Sega have said they’re cool with fan games.
I didn’t seem to hear any added music I liked, although I was mostly running it with tone randomization which probably wouldn’t have helped. ; D But also I’m not sure how much of it might be swiped tunes.
(I THINK maybe a lot of the graphics and music come from other romhacks.)
The sound FX randomization is fun for a minute, then usually sounds like nails on chalkboards. ; D
The stage generation/randomization is fun for a minute, then you realize it’s quite bland and repetitive, ah well.
But the color palette randomization is HOT AS HECK. This is gonna be how I play regular SMB1 now, 'cause why would you play it in the vanilla old colors when it can be NUCLEAR COLORS. = DDDD (Found I like it most at the highest settings, Excessive / Extreme / No Limits; +Extreme might be the sweet spot but those other two can make great palettes too.)
In theory if you generate a ROM with randomized colors you like, you could load it into just about any SMB1 editor, note/copy the colors, and edit them into other SMB1 ROMs you might want to glow up.
Took me a while to figure out how to get Level-Headed to generate these cool colors in a ROM with standard SMB1 gameplay–trickiest bit was finding I had to set “Difficulty - Level Difficulty” to “Purist,” otherwise it was inserting funky settings like having you revert to Super Mario if you took a hit as Fire Mario, which was confusing me for quite some time. With non-“Purist” settings, you can dig into weird monster settings and all kinds of stuff–basically combining tons of Game Genie codes or whatever into a hardcoded ROM.
It’s also kind of fun to play the regular stages with “redistributed” powerups and enemies (“Chaotic replacement” setting shown with air Bloopers above, you can tone it down), and setting funky powerups to replace the standard Fire Flower–although the only one of those I’ve really liked so far as been the Hammer Bros. hammers, which are great fun and actually feel like they fit the game (oh right Nintendo used that in SMB3, didn’t they? ^ D^).
It only just occurred to me that SMB1 is about 1/3rd dungeon crawler. ^-^
Disabling “integer FPS mode” and enabling vsync in Mesen’s “Video - General” panel fixed the irregular framerate I was feeling when racing along in “bridge” stages.
The 16-bit Sonics and Super Mario World (unofficially) got the widescreen treatment, so I was curious to see if there was anything decent out there for SMB1 (or 2/USA or 3). Best I could find is a Mario Maker creator named Mayro who remade SMB1, with some artistic liberties, in MM2. I’m not entering all these codes though.
I think they have it as a “World” or whatever
so just YF6-89P-S2G
Maybe?
A few days ago I was sort of skimming a video of Kosmic playing it:
Glitch worlds
With a little light romhacking you can access 248 glitch worlds.
I found out about the glitch worlds from this video by SMB1 player Kosmic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6qRbk5Cscw
I used an SMB1 romhack utility to open up access to the glitch worlds:
S.M.B. Remodeler: https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1319/
In The S.M.B. Remodeler utility, I loaded my dumped SMB1 rom, clicked “General 1,” and under the “Stages” tab, set “Max Stage Select World - World” to 256, checked the “Stage Select Setting - Enable Stage Select at Start” checkbox; then I saved out the rom–a copy, not my original dumped file, of course!
Running that ROM, pressing button A–not the usual button B for the standard World Select you get after beating the game!–cycles the World number at the top of the title screen, and pressing Run will start that world; the numbers go from 1 (or actually, 0, but you have to loop them for that to come up) through 9, then A through Z, then some symbols and mostly tiles from the ROM. ‘p’
(There’s a romhack that starts the game with a world select menu that shows the worlds in regular numbers, but it doesn’t work with my dump of the game; Kosmic demonstrates it in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyQjQ8DiBDI and it can be downloaded from author Threecreepio’s github page here: GitHub - threecreepio/smb-glitchedworlds: A world picker for SMB1, hopefully without breaking too many of the levels in the process. )
I ran them in the emulator Mesen in Windows, and was using the infinite lives and infinite time cheats from Mesen’s built-in cheat library. I didn’t use other cheats like walking through walls or whatever, so I didn’t completely explore the few glitch worlds that aren’t fully accessible by normal movement.
The vast majority of the glitch worlds are just standard SMB1 worlds–or sometimes, underwater variants of them–but the pipes restart the stage instead of going to a bonus area. Some of them have missing–or extra–enemies. In most of the stages, if you can get to the end, it will either loop back to the start again, or return to the title screen; some of the glitch worlds do have more than one level, but sometimes these repeat–World “I” in particular seems to keep going and going with repeating levels; I quit at level 7 but in theory it could go to level 256? (World “L” seemed similar, I quit at 3 there.)
The usual warp zones in these glitched versions of the worlds mostly still work–and will warp you to a STANDARD, non-glitch stage, so from that point you’re just playing the regular game, as far as I can tell.
EXCEPT, the right-hand pipe in G-1’s warp zone took me to minus world (“[blank]-1”)!
This RGMechEx video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ysdUajrhL8 summarizes the 6 actually unique, highly dysfunctional glitch worlds, and explains how the glitch worlds are generated.
This Skelux video neatly summarizes the playable glitch worlds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riaf2vwMzMo
imagine if the trajectory of mario’s aesthetics had been to gradually look more stark and gothic rather than more round and toylike
I can only wish. It’s bothered me for years the way each new generation of Mario games since SNES has become ever more visually unappealing along with the most banal rehashed storytelling imaginable. But I’ve mentioned it before and I won’t belabor it further.
P.S. I know they are designed for kids and it makes perfect sense for them to be just the way they are.
re: alternate official Mario styles ive always loved the vibe of the Mario & Luigi RPG series art
look at these sweet boys
AAh I love the RPG art.
Luigi with the highwaters + striped socks is such a cute look i forget its not part of his normal design
He’s just wearing Mario’s hand-me-downs.
the way Mario says SPIN! when you switch to the long jump power is so good
“Quest for the Missing Hat,” the oldest Super Mario Bros. romhack on romhacking dot net of the 600-plus SMB1 romhacks there; QftMH dates in their system from “12 June 1997”:
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7/
The stages are the regular SMB1 levels, but the graphic and text changes switch the story around rather ingeniously, and I found I just had to play all the way through to see how it ended. And loved the ending. ^ D^
(Note to self: no you can’t use patched ROMs in the Level-Headed color randomizer utility. : P)
Added:
Oh huh judging by its URL, Quest for the Missing Hat may have been just the 7th hack ever on romhacking dot net! … Or maybe the 2nd? (2-6 don’t exist.) … Hm well on their search form, it’s the 6th-oldest–but it looks like a date reading there can get updated, 'cause for instance the “1” hack by URL is currently dated 2003–or maybe the URL numbers don’t really mean much, I dunno.
this would be a much better style for them to incorporate into the main mario games (mario 64 like marios) and its sad to me that they will probably use the movie designs instead 
they’re not bad just very bland. i do like the movie donkey kong though.
oh i hope not [about the movie ones] those versions never looked right to me
There have been a lot of very sweaty YouTube videos about the half second image of Donkey Kong in the Switch 2 Mario Kart game footage and all that it may portend…
