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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2015 illustration by the Super Mario Maker development team for the Japanese Nintendo Dream magazine. In the corner, the signature of the game’s producer Takashi Tezuka can be seen, which always includes a doodle of a plant inspired by Yoshi’s Story, the first game for which he was a producer.
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A rarely-seen interaction in the Super Mario Maker games is that if a vine is currently growing out of a block, and the block is destroyed, the vine will stop growing. One way of seeing this is to quickly put on a Spiny shell helmet after hitting such a block and then destroying it; the reason this would rarely happen is that if the helmet is worn before hitting the block, the vine would never grow in the first place.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source: SMM2 (Switch)
In the Super Mario Maker games, if a Bullet Bill Blaster is put inside a Lakitu’s Cloud in the New Super Mario Bros. U style, it will follow Mario closely so that Mario can repeatedly wall-jump off of it, allowing him to cross arbitrarily wide gaps using this method (top).
However, if a Muncher is put on top of the Bullet Bill Blaster, it will change its behavior to no longer follow Mario in the same manner, making it impossible to wall-jump off of it repeatedly (bottom).
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Source: twitter.com user “candyjeep”
Illustration from the cover of a Japanese official guide for Super Mario Maker. The guide mainly provides tips for course creation, with details on the movement and interaction of various elements.
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Top: in the Super Mario Maker series, the lava in the Super Mario Bros. style is animated, compared to the original game where it is a static image. However, the animation is relatively simplistic; the top layer of waves moves left while the bottom one moves right.
Bottom: there exists a more elaborate animation of the lava in that style, which can be seen in Super Mario Bros. Deluxe. Here, the waves change shape on each frame. Why this animation, which predates Super Mario Maker by 16 years, was not used in favor of introducing a new, lower-quality animation is unknown.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Store | Small Findings | Source: twitter.com user “ComJayOfficial”
Top: one of the preset stages in the Wii U version of Super Mario Maker, “Sunken Mario”, contains pixel artwork of Super Mario Bros. sprites made out of blocks. However, there is an issue with the Small Mario sprite. Three of the pixels on his face that should be green Ground blocks are pink coral instead. This is due to the game automatically displaying all 1-block wide columns of underwater Ground tiles in this theme as coral; there is no way to let them appear as regular blocks outside of adding or removing Ground blocks.
Bottom: a mock-up of how the issue could have been avoided. By replacing those blocks with Hard Blocks, which are also green, the color scheme can be preserved. Alternatively, the entirety of the green pixels could have been made out of Hard Blocks, avoiding the problem entirely.
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Super Mario Maker makes extensive use of multi-track songs in its soundtrack. The Edit themes all consist of 8 tracks playing simultaneously and fading in and out randomly to create a dynamic mix. However, it is not only the Edit themes that use this technique. Every single track playing in the Course World section of the game (Courses, Makers, and all 100 Mario Challenge themes) is actually a separate track of the same song fading in and out as the player changes between the subsections.
Here is the song with all tracks playing simultaneously, which is impossible to hear in-game. Despite being designed to be played separately, the tracks are harmonized with each other.
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Top: Super Mario Maker includes many different cursors the player can choose to represent their hand moving objects on the screen; one of them is Mario’s hand. While only a small portion of the arm is seen in-game, extracting the texture reveals that the arm is actually much longer.
Bottom: In fact, the arm is too long. I have overlaid the Super Mario Maker arm onto official art from New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe to show the discrepancy between Mario’s normal arm length and the length of the cursor.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Store | Source: see bottom of both images