One cool detail about the original graphics is that the few “regular” levels in world 8 (eg. 8-1, 8-2 etc as opposed to the tank and battleship levels) use the tiles from world 1 levels, only everything is monochrome and the underground music is used for the background theme. It makes “Dark Land” feel like a spooky cursed bizarro world. The All-Stars version instead uses parallax graphics that make it look like nighttime which is, uhh, fine i guess
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The remakes also change the card rotation timing at the end of the stage so you can’t just time a star card everytime. My brother who is a huge nerd for these games had a whole list of physics differences, so they are there.
When I think about Kuribo’s Shoe I wonder how many people never got in it.
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Yeah the SNES version of this and SMB1 look booooooring. ofc so does SMW imo.
I have a few ways i like to play:
- straight shot to the end, using whistles
- EVERY level
- no deaths (this one is really fun–I’ve never gotten past world 3 though)
- my current favorite: no power-ups (but yes deaths). you’d be surprised how radically the game changes when you can’t damage boost through a tough situation, and have much more limited mobility! it’s really really fun!
For both #3 and #4 I play all worlds but skip levels arbitrarily
thou MUST catch the wand in mid-air
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Gospel.
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So Mario Bros and Donkey Kong are King’s Field and Shadow Tower??
I’ve always found the All-Stars versions of the Super Mario Bros. games visually repulsive. I couldn’t bring myself to play them enough to notice any mechanical differences.
It was so convenient to have them all together on a cartridge like that. If only they’d included the option to play the original versions. Those were my thoughts back then, anyway; today there are of course many convenient ways to play any version.
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i kind of like how everything in SMW looks low key edible. like not like it’s actually food ,just that you could probably eat it and it would taste OK. it’s a good aesthetic
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Donut Land
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well, nearly all the areas are named after some form of confectionery
(i guess “butter” is debatable)
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I played All Stars before the NES versions of SMB3 or SMB2. I really dig the backgrounds in SMB3 all stars especially, but yeah most of the changes were for the worse.
My favorite Mario Aesthetic memory is:
I was playing a Mario Bros ROM Hack that looked like this:
Specifically, I had it on my GBA SP in an airport, can’t remember which one but probably DIA. My wife looks over and is like “what’s that?” So I showed it to her and she was like “Oh, this is cool, can I play?”
So yeah, she played through most of Mario Bros like that and we had a cool discussion about how readable the game is even in that state. She ended up liking it a lot.
Anyway, that’s it, okay bye.
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All Stars is better.
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No, it isn’t.
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I think SMB1, 2, 3 and World all have pretty much perfect looks. All-Stars also looks awesome in its own way, although not replacing the existing ones. It’s the most Amiga Mario look.
The motifs of Mario games are so weird and dismal - mushrooms in castles, robed cultists in masks, hills with eyes, black cannons - yet he’s the safest most Mickey Mouse character in gaming. That people casually accept this bizarre contrast never fails to weird me out.
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I’ve been disappointed to see Mario become more and more clown-like over the years. I realize that those games were probably intended to be whimsical all along, but at least the original Super Mario Bros. had a slight edge to it.
Part of that might be technical limitations. But if nothing else, reading in the instruction booklet that you don’t see any of the Mushroom Kingdom citizens because they’ve been turned into the plants and bricks and things adds something to the atmosphere.
Also, the C64 version of Super Mario Bros. (which I didn’t know at the time was just Great Giana Sisters with a substituted sprite) likely colored my experience with the Nintendo game a little, with its blowing wind sound and slightly more sinister enemies.
I’m always hoping to see more fictional worlds that are fundamentally bizarre or absurd but presented without overt comedy. The original Super Mario Bros. is a game that I can see in that light if I look at it the right way, and so I choose to do so. That’s more difficult with the later games, and impossible after the serious misstep of giving Mario a voice.
By the way, did you know that the guy who voices Mario also did the voice of Homunculus in Shadow of Destiny? He did a fine job with that character.
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it’s funny how no one really thinks about how the NES has superior versions of Elite and Archon and Maniac Mansion and Mule and every other C64 title but C64 devs didn’t really crack platformer smooth scrolling until the machine was a decade old
(and in fairness they had to do so via extremely unintended hacks of the C64’s vram when the NES was basically fully designed around having superior vram to every other 8-bit computer)
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the other cool thing about Super Mario World is you can irrevocably transform the whole game into a literal nightmare version of itself where all the enemies wear masks of Mario’s face
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almost certain of this now. some of the graphical changes i could chill with; i mean parallax is always cool, but running around just never hits that urgent peak of slipperiness that it does in the original. i wonder if they subtly tried to make it easier or if some floating point maths just got screwed up by the different processor architecture
(i know nothing of hardware sorry if this is not how it works)
the gba version seems to more openly mess around with a few details. speed feels a little better than snes, but the gameplay is more choppy overall
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sometimes i respond to my own 4 year old IMs as well
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feel like there was a tim essay that mentioned at least one of the all-stars games changed it so that mario didn’t bounce as fast when he bopped a block with his head which made speedrunning an entirely different procedure
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sometimes i’m not sure if tim’s mechanical analyses are full of shit; there’s at least two places where he’s gone on about how long it supposedly takes to turn around in castlevania: rondo of blood (and how this is motivation for the ability to walk backward), at one point claiming it takes “almost a full second”, and iirc the turning in rondo of blood is instant?
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