Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels, Issue 3, Week 38/2018

Welcome, Supper Players, Broth Siblings and Supperstars, to the third issue of the Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels feature! Thank you again so much for your support! In addition to this article, extra content for all patrons regardless of membership tier will be published this week. I hope it will be satisfactory!

Before I start, let me briefly restate some things of note about the  article series. For more detailed explanations, please refer to Issue 1.

• All images without an attribution have been recorded/created by me. If you wish to know what emulators/programs I used, please leave a comment. I will reply promptly.
• All comments and criticism are greatly appreciated, and all suggestions are evaluated and incorporated into future issues. You can shape the form and content of the articles with your feedback, so don't hesitate to tell me anything!

Now, let us climb a vine to the heights of obscure Mario information.
This is Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels.

Luigi's Mansion Beta Breakdown

(Topic suggested by Supperstar patron Callumbuddy) 

Luigi's Mansion, released for the GameCube in 2001, is a game that changed quite a bit between its initial reveal and its release. Here is a summary of the most relevant changes that we know about.

The story of Luigi's Mansion starts before it is shown publicly, in the Nintendo GameCube Optical Disc Drive Guidelines, a part of Nintendo’s GameCube software development kit documentation. There, the Luigi's Mansion name is mentioned, along with a banner reading "Luigi Mansion" and a subtitle, "Luigi's Big Adventure", which did not make it into the finished product. (Note that the same document also misspells it as "Lugi's Big Adventure".)

The first footage of the game was shown at Nintendo Space World 2000. Here, we can see the original design for the mansion itself.

The design was mostly unchanged, although the 3rd floor windows and the edges of the building were made more ornate in the final version. 

(Source)

The trailer showcases Luigi's expressiveness with this brief scene of him looking toward the camera. Another scene has him scream while the camera zooms in on him:

This scene was later used in the Japanese commercial for the game.

Of special interest are the beta ghost designs showcased in this version. What is presumably the first ghost in the game has vampire fangs, a much more menacing look than the cartoonish ghosts from the final release.

In a few images released to the press, these ghosts appear. They have a design that resembles Portrait Ghosts from the finished game in features, but generic "created by Vincent Van Gore" ghosts in their single-color palettes. They appear to be playing some manner of card game, with the card backs being decorated with spiderwebs.

This image of Luigi sliding down a handrail is the only image from that version that was released to the press as a high-quality, uncompressed PNG file, leading to it being the most prominently used image to advertise the game in many magazines prior to release.

The game was next shown off and became available to play at E3 2001. The trailer finished with this scene:

(Source)

The look on Luigi's face, with the white pupil-less eyes surrounded by dark shadows, is unused in the final game, however, texture files for the eyes are still present in the code.

There is also this unused "bad ending" graphic, also found in the finished game, utilizing the same eye textures:

The E3 demo was much closer to the final game in design, with differences that were numerous, but minor. One of the few major changes was the apparent removal of the common Small Boo enemy from the game:

In the release version, Small Boos appear only in the Boolossus boss battle, while normal-sized Boos are fought throughout the mansion instead. 

Many rooms in the E3 demo had different, or differently-arranged furniture compared to the final version. For example, the brass instruments in the Conservatory were mounted on the wall, which is more appropriate than them simply sitting on chairs in the finished version.

Finally, footage of a few other unfinished versions exists, such as the clip starting at 2:37 in this promotional video. Some differences include a border that seems to appear during cutscenes, as well as a generally brighter amount of lighting.

The release trailer is almost identical to the final game except for minor aesthetic differences like door textures.

In the end, what we can gather from this is that the game was intended to be much darker in the beginning, but was gradually made more cartoonish and brighter until its release. 

Battle of the Giant Coins

If we think of truly giant coins in Mario games, only two examples come to mind. The giant coin from Supermassive Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy  2 and the giant coin from Mondo Woods in Paper Mario: Color Splash.

Now, this may not be a "battle" in the sense that it is unclear which would win - as clearly the Paper Mario: Color Splash coin is larger - but it would be of interest to try to determine just how large the coins are relative to their respective Marios, and if possible, relative to each other.

I have overlaid my best guess of the full shape of the Paper Mario: Color Splash coin onto the screenshot - which due to a lack of tools to view the coin's model directly is unfortunately our only source for its size - and calculated how much larger it is than Paper Mario.

Note that while Paper Mario is a minuscule distance closer to the camera than the coin in this frame, and thus the calculation cannot be completely accurate due to perspective distortion, Paper Mario collects the coin immediately upon touching it and there is no known way of making him stand next to it as it is blocking the passage, so this is the closest we can work with.

I have also done the same with the Super Mario Galaxy 2 coin, which due to Wii emulator capabilities, was able to be photographed in the correct position to not have any perspective distortion relative to Mario, and it is remarkable that the coin is not just close to, but precisely 6 times Mario's height.

Now, it is clear that the Paper Mario: Color Splash coin is roughly 1.8 times larger than the Super Mario Galaxy 2 coin, but let us try to determine the exact number. In Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, we can see Mario and Paper Mario next to each other, allowing us to compare their heights.

Using this screenshot that depicts the two an equal distance away from the camera, we can determine that Mario is 1.09 times taller than Paper Mario. Finally, we can insert this into the formula and find out how many times larger the Paper Mario: Color Splash coin is compared to regular Mario.

The answer is 9.9 times, or 1.65 times the size of the Super Mario Galaxy 2 coin. Now we know precisely the size of the Mario franchise's largest coin - at least until a new one appears, in which case you can be sure I will make another article about it.

The Natural State of the Super Mario World Map

The Super Mario World overworld map has many paths, especially in the fully uncovered state.

When the game begins or Mario enters a new area, there are usually relatively few paths, but certain ones are always present. This made me wonder: what would a completely pathless Super Mario World map look like?

I have used a combination of screenshots, ROM hacking tools and image editing software to create versions of Super Mario World maps without paths. Note that I had no information on what to replace the path tiles with and simply tried to fill the space in with whatever tiles were the closest; thus, this is by no means a reflection of what the original developers would have put there if they were in charge of the decision. However, I believe seeing these maps in this state can still be interesting.

Donkey Kong Jr.'s Lost Nose

You know what Donkey Kong Jr. looks like, don't you? He looks like a younger version of Donkey Kong. Except when he has this kind of nose.

As a character that existed during the time Nintendo licensed out their franchises to other companies' consoles (1981-1983), Donkey Kong Jr. has seen his fair share of reimaginings, but one particular design decision - the decidedly un-ape-like nose - appears only a few times. The above image comes from the 1983 Saturday Supercade cartoon show - but it is not a design Donkey Kong Jr. has all the time within it.

In fact, just a few seconds before this in the same segment, his nose is a different color. 

I have attempted to catalogue every other known instance of Donkey Kong Jr. displaying this kind of nose. Here are the ones I am aware of:

Perhaps the most well-known illustration of Donkey Kong Jr. with this nose, this is one of Nintendo's own flyers for the original arcade version of the game.

This one is from the packaging of the Panorama Screen version of the Donkey Kong Jr. Game & Watch. Note that the regular version has, appropriately enough, a regular nose.

A commercial for various Game & Watch series titles uses a design similar to the arcade flyer above. You can see the full commercial here.

This is a particularly unusual nose variant, seen on the back of the box for the relatively unknown Atari 800 version of Donkey Kong Jr.

Note: I specifically excluded sprites and only concentrated on artwork, as sprites from the early 1980's are known to be very heavily distorted and due to the extremely low resolution, would be subject to debate over what the nose shape in question was supposed to be anyway. 

Over 15 years after the last appearance of this nose on Donkey Kong Jr. and its absense from the Donkey Kong series, it would return as Lanky Kong's default nose in the 1999 Donkey Kong 64; although now that Lanky Kong himself has not appeared in 11 years since the 2007 Donkey Kong Barrel Blast, this hiatus is almost as long as the first one.

Is This Fireball Friendly?

Often, when coming across unused content, it is hard to determine exactly what its function was supposed to be. However, most of the time, it is more or less simple to tell whether a graphic belonged to a power-up, or an enemy, or an NPC simply due to many games having a strong visual style that clearly delineates how those classes of entities look.

These are unused enemy sprites from Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3. They were found together in the code and presumably are somehow connected in their purpose. At first, nothing here seems out of the ordinary; nearly all of these are reused sprites from other games such as Super Mario World or Yoshi's Island. It may seem strange to include Dolphins as enemies, but they were stored with the enemies in Super Mario World's data as well (and were edible by Yoshi in the Japanese version, something that only applies to enemies).

Yet, the fireball sprites are actually new. They seem to be standard Lava Bubbles (also known as Podoboos), merely pointing sideways instead of upward as Lava Bubbles usually do. But there is one more thing to consider:

In Super Mario World, Yoshi spits out three fireballs - pointing sideways, like the ones above - when he has a red shell in his mouth. And it just so happens that Super Mario Advance 4 contains Giant Red Koopas, whose shells would presumably result in the giant fireballs when spat out.

However, none of this explains why the fireballs have angry eyes. They didn't in Super Mario World, and adding angry eyes to an object that can only have a beneficial effect (it is impossible to be hurt by Yoshi's fireballs; only enemies are affected) seems to be a peculiar decision. 

Then again, actual Lava Bubbles have never had angry eyes like the ones depicted in the unused sprite compilation, either. This might be an attempt to introduce horizontally-moving Lava Bubbles (similar to the Lava Drop enemy in Yoshi's Island) and to visually distinguish them from normal Lava Bubbles, while the extremely similar look to Yoshi's fireballs may be simply an effort-saving measure.

All we can say for certain is that we will never know.

A Guide to Dropped Badges

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door features a complex badge system. Using Badge Points, which can be raised by selecting a certain option after leveling up, Mario can equip any number of badges as long as his Badge Points cover the requirements of the badges. What makes this system special compared to the one used in Paper Mario, the first game in the series, is that there is not a fixed amount of badges in the game world, but rather, it is possible to buy an unlimited amount of some of them.

A famous exploit concerning buying very large numbers of the same badge is the famous "Danger Mario" trick. One of the badges that can be bought freely is the Power Rush badge, which raises Mario's attack power by 2 for only 1 Badge Point, but only as long as Mario is in "danger", i.e. has 5 HP or less. Since Mario's starting maximum HP is 10, it is not normally possible to stay in danger for too long, as most healing items heal at least 5 HP and will bring Mario up to 6 HP or more when used. 

However, by talking to Chet Rippo in the Rogueport Underground and paying him to "delevel" Mario's HP, it can be reduced to a maximum of 5, thereby giving him permanent Danger status without the risk of healing himself out of it. This, together with up to 50 Power Rush badges, can raise Mario's attack power to the point that he can defeat every enemy in one turn.

(Without stacking Power Rush, it is not possible to get to 50 damage per attack without some time-consuming strategy like using the Charge move for many turns.)

This raises the question: are the badges one can buy in this manner the only ones available in unlimited quantities? As it turns out, no. It is possible - with a lot of time - to get large amounts of many other badges that one may initially think are limited to a certain number. The key is to constantly engage the same type of enemy in battle, over and over, and eventually, after an average of hundreds of encounters, the enemy will drop the desired badge after defeat.

Below is a table I have created of the badges that are possible to obtain in this way, as well as what enemies need to be fought for them.

The information was taken from all across the In-Depth FAQs section of the GameFAQs page for the game. I hope it can be useful.

Are Shy Guys Behind This?

Yoshi's Island DS is not exactly knows for having many intricate, detail-filled backgrounds. Here is an example of typical backgrounds from that game:

This makes World 4-8, Castle of Big Guy the Stilted, even more special, as it contains an animated background depicting many scenes of Shy Guys seemingly going about everyday activities.

There are Shy Guys doing laundry, talking next to a store of stilts, growing Piranha Plants in pots, and even listening to some sort of lecturer in front of a chalkboard. This background alone has shown more of what Shy Guys do in their spare time than the entire Shy Guy's Toy Box chapter of Paper Mario, which while focused entirely on Shy Guys, does not depict them doing much besides walking around, engaging in battle, and stealing people's belongings.

Let us look closely at that chalkboard.

Doesn't this seem familiar, the concept of Yoshi drawings on chalkboards?

The drawing the Shy Guy is pointing at highly resembles the style of Yoshi drawings found in Message Boxes - and not just in this game, but in the original Yoshi's Island as well. Now, the next part is pure speculation.

It could be, and is in fact the most likely scenario, that the chalkboard was simply put there as a visual nod to the messages. However, I would like to suggest that there is a small chance it was intended to show that all Yoshi drawings of this type were drawn by Shy Guys.

Now, you may think, "this is just one element of one background in one game", but please consider the following:

The train tracks in the original Yoshi's Island appear to be drawn by Shy Guys, as they include drawings of them - including ones that come to life. It would make little sense for a benevolent species, like Yoshis, to draw disruptive Shy Guy doodles of this kind. 

Finally, the Shy Guy's Toy Box area from Paper Mario mentioned earlier contains similar drawings, including the slanted tulips from the train tracks, again cementing that Shy Guys drew them and that this is what the Shy Guy's drawing style looks like.

I believe that while this evidence may be circumstantial and certainly proves absolutely nothing, it would be a pleasant bit of worldbuilding that all Yoshi drawings you see are made by Shy Guys - if it was intended, that is.

Gendered Viruses

The three Viruses introduced in Dr. Mario were, in the beginning, intended to be merely representatives of a larger virus population and not individual characters. This changed in Tetris & Dr. Mario on the SNES, where the Viruses were, in addition to their usual role as obstacles to be destroyed in the main game, opponents in the Vs. Com mode.

The viruses represent difficulty levels, but the manual expounds on that, painting them as individual characters. 

The interesting part here is that two of the Viruses are given genders. The Blue Virus is referred to as "he" and the Red Virus as "she". No pronouns are given for Yellow Virus. While this may appear to be a one-off occurrence, consider the following:

In Dr. Luigi for the Wii U, the design for the large Viruses is changed, replacing Blue Virus with Cyan Virus and Red Virus with Magenta Virus. However, this only applies to the large character models; as the small icons used inside the bottle during gameplay still depict the usual Red, Yellow and Blue designs.

Defeating all Blue Viruses in the bottle will make the big Cyan Virus writhe in pain and disappear, and the same goes for Red Viruses and the big Magenta Virus. What this implies is that Magenta Virus is somehow connected to Red Viruses; perhaps it is merely a form of them. And Magenta Virus is the only Virus design that features eyelashes, which according to the standard Mario character design philosophy, likely means it was intended to be female (although of course not certainly - I am merely going off the established trend that Mario characters with eyelashes are mostly female). This could either be a coincidence or a callback to the identification of Red Virus as female in the Tetris & Dr. Mario manual.

This Is As Far As You Go!

In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, a late-game boss fight pits Mario and Luigi against Popple, a recurring thief character, and Birdo, who had shortly before the event become his apprentice. As this is the fourth battle against Popple, the player is likely to know that he is usually weaker than the other character he fights along, and is more likely to try to take out the larger threat first. Therefore, it is more likely for a player to defeat Birdo first in this battle, than to defeat Popple first.

However, if Popple is indeed defeated first, Birdo will say the following:

(Note that this footage is from the remake of the game on the Nintendo 3DS, "Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions", but the dialogue is present in the same form in the original game as well.)

The phrase "that's as far as you go" may be a reference to Birdo's voice line in Super Mario Advance, released two years prior. You may hear the line in this video, it is the first line spoken, at 9 seconds.

I concede that this may be only a coincidence, especially given that the phrasing is slightly different, starting with "that's" in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga and "this is" in Super Mario Advance; however, I believe that given Birdo's relatively low amount of spoken dialogue in this game, it is unlikely for a line this specific to have come up without being an intentional reference.

A Flag of the United States of Mario Party 5

The North American marketing campaign for Mario Party 5 was focused entirely on political imagery, most likely as a pun on the word "party" also meaning "political party". Why this decision was made for that game in the series in particular, and not for an earlier or later installment, is unclear; as it released a full year before the 2004 US presidential election, making it unlikely that it was the decisive factor for the theming.

Note that there is nothing in the game itself that would justify the campaign, either: the plot of Mario Party 5 is visiting dreams of concepts like toys, candy and rainbows; a thematic very far removed from politics.

Here are some examples of promotional material from that campaign:

(Source)

Please note that regretfully, the sources of some of these images are lost to time. The first two wallpapers showcased are from Nintendo of America's official site for Mario Party 5, which has been defunct for years, while the blue "Mario for President" sticker is from my Raw Material Collection and has been saved a very long time ago, before the introduction of my veracity and sourcing policy, resulting in no attribution information for it being accessible. If you know the source for the sticker or a site that mirrors the wallpapers, please let me know and I will amend this article.

Strangely, even the Japanese marketing continued the political imagery (yes, continued, as opposed to started, since Mario Party 5 is one of the minority of Mario games released in the US before its Japan release prior to Nintendo adopting a simultaneous worldwide release policy). This is a wallpaper from Nintendo of Japan's official website for the game:

Now, while being much more subtle than the US campaign, there is an undeniable "stars and stripes" motif here, mirroring the US flag. This image gave me the idea of trying to recreate the flag with these design elements, to see what a (semi-official) Mario version of the US flag would look like.

I present to you: the Flag of the United States of Mario Party 5. While this image is created by me and constitutes fan content, the design itself is based on an official Nintendo release and I thought this would be an interesting experiment. I am releasing this image into the public domain and you may use the flag however you wish.

This concludes this week's Supper Mario Broth: The Lost Levels. Thank you again for your support. Please forgive me for being slightly late on this week's issue, as I needed to visit the hospital due to an unexpected allergic reaction; however, I was still able to publish this before Wednesday was over in all time zones, which makes this technically meet the deadline as I described it in my schedule announcement post. I hope such delays will not have to happen again.

Please join me next week for Issue 4, featuring such topics as:

• A Misplaced Mario Infringes on Yoshi's Eyesight
• Fire Flowers: Round to Spiky and Back
• The Secret Fandoms of German Kongs

Thank you very much for reading.