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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Boo falling off a tightrope in Mario Party 8.
In Mario Party 8, minigames played in first person still render the players’ characters behind the camera. One exception is the minigame Snipe for the Picking, where four copies of Player 1′s character are rendered instead.
In most 3D games, characters not in the camera’s field of view are not rendered to conserve processing power. In Mario Party 8, due to a high degree of optimization, this technique extends to parts of characters’ models in addition to entire characters. In this example, as the camera turns to view Toad from the back, his eyes are no longer rendered.
The menu screen of Mario Party 8 shows the Star Carnival, full of visitors, from afar. Zooming in, we can see the characters in the plaza are 2D sprites with only a low-frame walking animation. Whenever they are not moving, their animation simply stops.
In the Water Ski Spree minigame in Mario Party 8, Shy Guys drive motorboats. Zooming in, we can see that the driver Shy Guy is too short to look over the front of the boat. In addition, his arms can’t reach the steering wheel, leading to him steering the boat with his face.
Background details from the Grabbin’ Gold minigame in Mario Party 8.
Top: screenshot of the background of the Shy Guy’s Perplex Express board in Mario Party 8.
Middle: the texture for that background extracted from the game files.
Bottom: photo of the Tokachidake mountain range in Hokkaido, Japan.
Characters using Bitsize Candy in Mario Party 8.
