Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 167: Super Mario Oddities - Mario Bros., Wrecking Crew, Lost Levels

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

Ray Barnholt and Henry Gilbert join Bob and Jeremy to talk about the OTHER Super Mario Bros. 2—plus, we fill in the 8-bit Mario gaps we've never touched on before. Call Foreman Spike, 'cause we're the Wrecking Crew, baby.

This weekend Retronauts, this one goes out to the ones we love, even though they're not super. whatever the hell. I've lost count. I don't know what this is going up. But you're listening to it now, and that's what's important. And I am Jeremy Parrish, disorganized as ever and here to keep things on track and within the guidelines we have. Hi, I'm Bob Mackie, and I love shell creepers. That's what they're called, right? That is what they're called. They are the prototypes for coupas. How about you over there in the corner, the opposite, like kitty corner from me? Oh, I don't know what that means. I'm Ray Barnhold. I think that's a Midwestern term. Is that Linguistic note it is. You can either say kitty corner or catty corner, but don't see either one.

Too late. The seal has been broken. I don't like people knowing him from the Midwest. It's very embarrassing. I'm just going to have a cold glass of pop. Hey, LCD Super Mario lover, Henry Gilbert. Hi. And yes, we are here to talk more about Mario.

You're sick of Mario. We're sick of, no, it's not true. We all love Mario games. And this is actually a follow-on from our most recent Mario episode. Last time we recorded an episode about Super Mario Brothers 2. And it was supposed to be an episode about Super Mario Brothers 2's, but we didn't have time to tackle the second one. And rather than just cram it in and give it short shrift, I felt like we should talk about Super Mario Brothers 2, Japan, the lost levels. And, you know, since that might be a tough conversation to have an entire episode about, I thought, well, why don't we, you know, bring in some of the other.

sort of odds and ends that kind of exist on the periphery of Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Brothers 2 as we know them in America. So this has become an episode that I'm calling Super Mario oddities. It's a very funny joke. But this will be a lot of the games leading up

to basically Super Mario Brothers 2 the lost levels that don't fall under the banner of Super Mario Brothers. And we've called in people who know and love Mario games. And I wanted Ray here to be here. I wanted Ray to be here specifically because I know he is willing to go to the mats for the Japanese

version of Super Mario Brothers 2. That's right. Would you consider yourself a fan? Yeah. Okay. I feel like that that game does not have a good reputation and I'm actually not really that big on it. So I wanted to have someone here to balance my negativity out.

I'm totally ready to yell and scream about it. All right. Do it. Let's get very fired up. So without further ado, let's yell and scream. So we're actually going to start with Mario before he was super. to talk about Mario Brothers, which we've never, I don't know that we've ever really discussed that on Retronauts, and it's, it's, it's, that's kind of weird because it's, you know,

as much as we talk about Nintendo games and Mario games, this is kind of a linchpin title. It's very like a, like a keystone almost, and a lot, a lot of things come out of it. You know, Super Mario Brothers definitely was the more impactful game, but there could be no Super Mario Brothers without Mario Brothers. And I'm actually, you know, this is a game that I liked as a kid. and then decided wasn't that good, and now I've come back around on it, and I really like it again.

Sorry, I thought you were done with your sentence. But this has been my wallpaper for the past three years on my phone. The Mario Brothers art for the arcade cabinet is some of my favorite art of all time. I love it so much. I love their floppy hats and dumpy bodies. And the little plus sign teeth. Yeah.

Very Fleischer meets anime. It's great. I love this game so much, and I remember this game. I'd played things like Atari 2,600, and Pac-Man and stuff, but I just remember being drawn to this game as a child, just because of just all the characters and stuff like that on the screen. Yeah, so this game came out in June of 1983, I want to say.

Very, very, like, right around the same time that Nintendo launched the family computer in Japan. But they were still, you know, applying the arcade trade at that point. And I think this was one of the games that they developed internally, which is why you see it on things like arcade archives, whereas you don't see Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., skyscipper, that sort of thing, because those were done externally, and I think there's a lot of rights issues with those. But Mario Brothers was their own work, their own creation, top to bottom,

and it was a pretty big game. It represented a big change for Mario the character, and it represented kind of the establishment of Nintendo's very sort of, I don't know, like their favorite approach to multiplayer gaming, I would say, which is cooperative but also competitive. like there's room to be helpful and friendly and support the other person, but also room to be a total dick and screw over the other person. Yeah, I especially like how they have.

It's like a shared resource thing, that pal block. It's just this thing that you could both use, but you kind of have to plan to use it together, and it's like a trust exercise almost. And then if you want to just be a dick like, well, I'm just going to use them all and once. Bav, no, fuck you. Well, that's not even the biggest way to be a jerk in this game.

Like, the fact is Mario and Luigi has newly introduced brother are vulnerable to the same mechanics that the enemies are vulnerable to. And you can punch the ground under the other player to screw them up or, you know, when they're going in to kick an upside down enemy, you can punch underneath the enemy to flip it right side up. So, like, you can really be a jerk and totally screw over your friend or rival or sibling, whatever, if you want to. But that's not the ideal way to play. However, it does exist. It doesn't accomplish much, no. Except making people mad. When they put this game into Mario 3 as a mini game,

you could steal cards or trade cards from the second player, but no one ever really tinkered with that that much. But you could play Mario Brothers in Mario 3. That was the first time I played Mario Brothers because my local arcade didn't have it. My local pizza plays had D.K. and D.K. Jr., but not Mario Brothers. And so only when I tried out the versus mode in Mario Bros. 3, did I get to finally experience it? Then I discovered it at some arcade afterwards.

Yeah, actually, I was going to ask when you guys discovered the game. So now I know with Henry, it was in Super Mario Brothers 3. What about you, Ray? I probably rented it for NES. Yep. Okay. And then I think I also saw, I hadn't seen the arcade version before, so I think I only saw that at like Circus, Circus in Reno. So I was in a family trip once.

Were you there on the set of The Wizard? No, I mean, it felt like it because there was like this basement arcade with a bunch of the retro Nintendo games at the time. I was just like, oh, shit, I haven't seen any of these before. Don't let me go. Reno's very impressive to children. It's a little less so when you're involved. One part of it. One basement.

What about you, Bob? I think I could be conflating this with Popeye or maybe kangaroo in terms of where it existed, but it might have been in the lobby of like a Big Lots or a Hills Department store in Ohio but I remember always being drawn to the art and the characters of the game for sure. Actually, yeah, my pizza place, they did have Popeye.

That was, I think now I think back on an Amazios pizza. That was by, in Arkansas, that was my... Mattio. That was my favorite of the machines they had there was Popeye because I knew who Popeye was. Yeah, me too. A giant ape is fun, but here's Popeye and Bluto, characters I've heard of,

and I don't know why Popeye is punching bottles all the time, but it looks fun. Yeah. Yeah, and because I'm an old person, I played this game in the arcades when it was brand new. It was, you know, pretty widely circulated at the, you know, in 1983, 84. So it was all over the place and I played it a lot. And sometimes I got to play it with other people, but mostly I just played it on my own because, you know, it was always at like roller rinks or whatever and other kids wanted to skate. And I was like, hmm, physical activity. I don't know, but I can play video games.

No, thank you. Yeah. So, yeah, so I definitely have fond memories of playing this back in the day. But, of course, you know, once Super Mario Brothers came out and I was like, Pff, Mario Brothers, that's stupid and old. Who cares about that? That's just one screen. There's no boss.

You don't have really cool stuff to do and power-ups, et cetera, et cetera. So it kind of got thrown by the wayside. But Nintendo still loved it. Yeah. And kept revisiting it. over and over again. It's an important part of Mario continuity history, too, and then, well, obviously, you know, the first appearance of Luigi,

but also it's when they decided he's a plumber and not a carpenter. Right. And from then on, he kind of would be as much as Nintendo, I feel like they don't want him to be a plumber anymore. Like Canon, they're like, well, no, he's just, he's Mario. Yeah, it's fun. But they can't get rid of the pipes. Yeah, the pipes are just a whole pipe thing that's stuck there. Like all plumbers, he climbs through pipes, like the human body.

size pipes. The plumber is some sort of American invention in terms of Mario's lore. I think they leaned into it a lot more because of that. And yeah, like you know, you don't see him holding a plunger or a wrench in anything but like American cartoons. Yeah, and you know, Mario had a lot of odd

jobs in the early days and we'll talk about some of those later, but like there was a game and watch game where he joined the army, but you don't see Nintendo like Mario the Soldier or Mario the Demolitions guy. For some reason, they really seized on Or the owner of a cement factory?

Yeah. That's right. Well, he is in the mob. But, uh, so plumbing is sort of like Mario's, uh, like Sonic's chili dogs almost, where it's this iconic thing that no game actually references. Sure. No, it's not a generation. He eats a big chili dog.

Yeah. He's recently, recently done that. They've even accepted, like, fine, chili dogs, whatever. But, uh, but, uh, but yeah, this was the first year of Luigi in 1983. That's right. But, uh, though he technically, I think, by a couple months, Once, the Game and Watch version of this came out first. Really?

Is that right? Well, this is old research I did for an article like five years ago, so I could be wrong. But as I recall, the dates on at least a Wikipedia page, which have to be true. Oh, well, yeah, it's on Wikipedia. Yeah, they pegged the Game and Watch hitting the Japanese market before Mario Brothers Arcade did. Interesting. Well, this game did. Yeah, let's bring that to the talk page, Henry.

Mario Brothers did make its way home very quickly. This was, like I said, the arcade game debuted right around the same time as the family computer, and the Famicom version of this debuted in, like, September. So that was about three months, which is a really quick turnaround time. And, of course, the home version was not as impressive looking as the arcade version. There was like some severe flicker on character sprites, and the characters didn't look as nice. And, you know, that didn't have the little sort of glowing, vanishing effect on coins when you picked them up.

And there was just a little less color depth. But still, it was a very accurate version of the game. It captured all the content, all the enemies, all the play mechanics, the physics felt right. And so I kind of feel like this was sort of an important work for Nintendo to say, like, hey, we are really serious about the home market. Because here was this brand new arcade game. And you could have the version that they created. to play at home just a few months later, you know, if you were a kid in Japan. But it was one of the last Nintendo games they really started licensing out big time to the U.S. consoles, right?

It was definitely on, it was on Calico? It was on Atari. Yeah, that's $2,600. And $5,200. Yeah. I think the Atari version is where we get the amazing commercial that references Parvats. It's coming up the plumbing for Luigi's in a bite, giant turtles out to get in creepy. Crabs are right behind.

Fighter flies, cheaper shites. They're all coming out the pipes. Mario, where are you? It's Atari Mario Brothers with Mario from Donkey Kong. That's where it really dug into people's brains, the plumbing thing. I didn't see that ad when it was new because I was like two, one or two. But I did buy old comic books that were published in 1983 or four that had the backpage ad was a comic book version of Mario, where are you? Yeah.

The novelization. And that's right. See the hit comic based on the commercial. It's interesting, though, because the American commercial for the home version of Mario Brothers for some competing system is kind of the first instance we see of Luigi characterized as a little bit of a nebish, where he's like, Mario, where are you? Not quite Charles Martinet there. But, I mean, that's like the characterization they give him is a little bit helpless without his brother. And that's really sort of stuck as, like, Luigi's always in Mario's shadow. But it's closer to the Lou Albano-type voice, though, as well.

Because they're Italian, don't you know? Yes. It's funny on the art for the arcade game, Luigi is the more aggressive one. He's, like, shaking his fist that monsters while Mario's just sort of, like, looking in the pipe quizzically. Yeah, he takes more of the lead there. I wonder if they hadn't done that ad if we would think of Luigi as the wuss of the group. Agroigi.

Because otherwise, like, that wasn't even his characterization in the Super Show so much as the guy who was afraid. He was just, like, him and Mario barely had characters on the Super Show. I guess the only characteristic was like Mario was hungrier than Luigi because he was drawn fatter. That was the one difference. Well, in this game, they're completely, identical.

They have no differences whatsoever. They are the same sprite with different colors. Yeah. I also wasn't, is this an old wives tale about the game, but that they, Miyamoto wanted them to be able to jump on the turtles and the enemies, but they couldn't so, like, technologically wise, so they had to hit, that's how they invented the hitting them and kicking them. I don't know.

I feel like hitting a static object in a level and making it ripple is more technically challenging than coming up with the collision detection for someone like, for one sprite to jump on the other. I could be wrong, but... I had always heard, well, this, again, is this a wise tale? I mean, how different could that be from the, you know, the routine that caused fruit to fall onto birds or trap jaws or whatever in Donkey Kong Jr.? Like, that idea was already there.

I feel like the ripple effect on the floor, that's more complex, more challenging. I'm sure something predates this, but I think Mario, Super Mario Brothers, unlock this idea for all of humans that, like, oh, yeah, jumping on things. That's a way to kill things. And every game before that's like, no, you cannot touch anything. You're dead. You touched it. Just shoot it.

Check. Yeah, I can't think of games before Mario where you could actually collide with enemies and come out ahead unless you were powered up or whatever. Yeah, and Packland or Smurf, like, you were dead if you touched anything. And Mappy had to use microwaves. Yeah. Burger times you had to drop burgers. Yep, yep. But Mario was his own burger.

So, yeah, the play mechanic here, you did. don't jump on turtles, there are no gumbas, the turtles are called shell creepers, there are fighter flies, which are little hopping flies, they're fine, shell creeper crabs. You can't jump on anything. Instead, what you do is the enemies come out of pipes and make their way down to the bottom of the screen and basically go into a loop. And to clear out the stage, which is the goal of each level of all enemies, you punch the floor underneath the, you punch the floor underneath the, you punch the floor underneath the, you punch the floor underneath the, that enemy and it'll flip the enemy upside down. And there's a little bit of complexity here. Like if you punch directly under the enemy, the enemy will flip straight up in the air and line on its back. But if you punch adjacent to the enemy, then it'll

hit it at an angle and cause it to flip, you know, like it fly at a 45 degree angle as it flips over. And you can use that to your advantage by hitting the floor between two enemies and causing both of them to flip over. And then once they've flipped over, then, you know, they're helpless for like five seconds. So you run up and kick them off the side of the stage. But you have to

be careful because they will flip over the right way and after a few seconds and then they become more aggressive and will come after you. Some enemies have to be flipped over twice or hit underneath twice. Yeah, so it becomes more complex and it becomes faster and there's more variation. And I think we neglected those ice demons. Slipp ice. I was about to mention those. And you have to kill those before they infect the entire platforms.

Yeah, so they'll come out and they come out of the pipes at the top and slide along the ground and whenever they come to the center of a platform, the first clear platform that they come to the center of, they'll take anchor and start to spread ice along the entire surface of the platform. But if you

punch them from beneath before the platform is completely iced over, you'll prevent that from happening. Ice physics in a game of 1983's vintage is pretty complex. I'm actually surprised there were no ice levels in Super Mario Brothers or ice effects. Yeah, it's interesting.

because I think I mentioned it's in the Super Mario Brothers episode, but people would call certain levels the ice level because they were kind of like a white or light gray palette. But I never read them as ice because you don't slip on them. And Mario Brothers, you had ice and you slipped on it. I think it was placebo effect. They just thought they were slipping. Well, that ice, that ice slip ice guy,

it's one of my favorite attack items in Smash Brothers as well. Like, they're great. You just throw them, you froze the dude. and they go through the stage that's the same way. And I think, I mean, I don't think this was inspiration for it, but this kind of single-screen area where you fight in, it does remind me

of Smash Brothers as well in a similar vein. Yeah, I mean, that was pretty much arcade games at the time. And really, this has direct precedent in joust, which was a 1982 game by John Newcomer for Williams. And, like, that was a single-screen arena with, you know, multi-tiered platforms and two players could compete at once, like cooperate and compete.

So, and it even had kind of the same effect where you would like, uh, affect an enemy and then you would have to follow up with an attack to get rid of it. So I feel like this game must have been somewhat inspired by joust. I, I know there's like, you know, Nintendo is kind of its own little bubble, but at the time, I find it hard to imagine that they,

were completely oblivious to the existence of other games. And, you know, Joust was even one of the games that Sotori-Owada and Howell converted to NES to Famicom as part of Nintendo's pitch to Atari, like, please license our console for sale in America and distribute it for us. And that was happening. You know, they were making that pitch in 83, 84. So they had to have been aware of Joust. And that's fine. Like this, you know, they made a much more direct Joust clone. a couple of years later in the form of balloon fight.

But I feel like, you know, they probably saw that style of game and we're like, oh, that's a, you know, I like the dynamic there. That's cool. Let's create our own take on it. And they came up with something that was wholly unique. And go ahead. It's interesting to see what they didn't keep for the super version of this game, the super sequel, in that only the Kupa survived and you never saw crabs again,

you never saw flies again. Maybe there's, I guess there's kind of crabs in Yoshi's Island, but they're very different. Well, there's crabs in, there's cloglip in Swamower. True, that's like, that's the dad of these things. But I also noticed that I think they real, like something that always got to me, and even though I love this game, it's like, I always feel so bad for the turtles when you knock them on their back. So they're just looking around like helpless. So I feel like turning them into shells when you stomp on them in Super Mario Bros.

It was like it was a game design thing, but also a way to make it seem less cruel. Right. But that's one of the places where the game's personality comes through. You miss it in the NES version, but in the arcade version, once a turtle is ready to write itself, you get kind of like a visual signal because it hops out of its shell and it's wearing like an A-neck and boxer shorts.

Oh, that's where this comes from? Yeah, and it flips over its shell and climbs back in. I'm so used to the NES version that I forgot about that detail. Yeah, well, the NES version lost a lot of that because it was a very early game, so ROM space on it was extremely strict. It was probably like 16K or something. But they did revisit the game for Famicom Disc System,

and then that version came out in Europe in like 1992 or 93 or something. It was way later called Mario Brothers Returns. And that was one of the games that they took a lot of their old Famicom, like early day software and sort of upgraded it for Famicom disk system, sometimes bringing in versus version arcade upgrades into the remakes. So this one was basically just like they restored the graphics to look better, less flicker, more animation, bigger sprites

and also advertisements for a ramen topping and for Super Mario Brothers 3. So I guess that was 1988 that they would have done that version. And for whatever reason we never got that version in the U.S., but they did release it extremely

late in Europe. So it was like the arcade classic series. Nintendo of Europe's weird. So we kind of got the short end to the stick on that one. Nintendo of Europe is weird. They release things whenever they feel. Especially then, they They were just kind of fumbling in the dark in a Sega-controlled continent, so they didn't really know what they were supposed to be. The important thing about what Mario Brothers did not include is that it did not include Donkey Kong at all.

There is no Donkey Kong in this game. And so this is kind of the point at which Mario spun out from Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong three happened around the same time and did not have Mario. It had Stanley the Bugman, who, you know, I've thought about this a lot. Like, whatever happened to Stanley the Bugman? And then I discovered Donkey Kong 3 Di Giacu Shai or Daiyakushu, the Hudson developed sequel to Donkey Kong 3, which basically has this unfolding narrative through the background art where you're, like, fighting Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong 3 style through like a cornfield and then a highway, and then, like,

there's a UFO, and then you're like fighting Donkey Kong in the UFO. So I think to Stanley, the Bugman, was actually abducted by aliens and taken away from Earth, and that's why we've never seen it. Went back to his own planet. Something like that. So the Smash Brothers Assess Trophy is like a memorial to Stanley, M.I.A. I know in the background of a stage in Tropical Freeze, you see his bug zapper there, but no Stanley. It said they walked through the old, they walked through a stage, and in the background is the setup for the first screen of DK Are all the level layouts the same in Super Mario Bros?

I mean, Mario Brothers, in terms of level layouts? I want to say yes. As far as I've played, which is like, I've probably made it to like level 12 or so. It's always the same. Was that a new idea to have multiple levels, but the layouts still all be the same? I mean, no, that was usually how games worked with. Like Pac-Man, it's the same maze the entire time. It's amazing because the maze changes.

I'm conflating them. Yeah, I'm conflating those in my head. Donkey Kong was amazing because the levels. changed with each stage that you cleared. So this was actually kind of a reversion in that sense, but it was probably more focused on just taking that same framework and increasing the

speed. This is the game that introduced coins to the Mario toolbox which is something that they've only recently begun to escape the tyranny of. It was nice in Odyssey to finally not have to care about coins. Oh, I died and

lost 10 coins, whatever. What am I going to do? But they look shiny and they're so cool in Mario Brothers, especially when you get to the bonus stage. It's like, oh, it's only coins? There's no enemies? I've got to get every one of these things. And that's where the competitive element really comes in because you want to get more coins than the other player. But you also want to clear out the coins entirely. It's a similar rush to getting a star in Super Mario Brothers.

I've just like, I've only got so much time. I've got to get all I can. Nothing's in my way but me. And, yeah, finally, this, you know, like I mentioned, you punched the ceiling above you, and so people, you know, for a long time think that Super Mario Brothers is about Mario smashing bricks with his skull, which is not the case. It's just not as clear here that, you know, in those games that you're punching, whereas it's more distinct in the sprites here. I, in my brain, I always read in Super, in my brain I always read in Super Mario Brothers like it was, no, he's going, hooray, as he sees. smashes it with his hand and just lifting a fist up like, yeah, I'm doing

a smash. Yeah, that's Occam's Razor, failing badly. So, yeah, this game, like I said, Nintendo kept it in circulation for a long time. It was remade for Game Boy Advance and showed up in any game on Game Boy Advance that had Mario in the title. Even Super Star Saga.

That was inexplicable to me, and I mean, it makes sense in any way. I mean, it doesn't make sense that it's in the other games, but I mean, it's a nice addition, but to put it in an RPG is just like just add it, we have this. Right. And then there was also, there's also Mario Clash, which I have never played because it's for Virtual Boys, so I missed out on it.

But it's pretty much Mario Brothers is. I had a good time with it. I never owned a virtual boy. Can you describe how it plays? Well, yeah, it's, it's, they can make it now. Like, it would work just the same, but it is just, the pipe takes you into foreground and background. And so you're, you're killing all these pests in the world, but you also,

warp between the foreground and background and sometimes you can, Mario now can kick things. He has his kick ability and hold ability to throw things at it. And it was a clever idea that, you know, they played around with the foreground

and background stuff like even in that warrior, I think the first Mario land that too. So it was cool, but it just... Even in Wrecking Crew, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Yeah, but it was just sad that they just kills your eyes

like every other game. So it, and I guess, too, it was, it wasn't enough to sell me on the system because I was used to a Mario game not being that thin. Like, it didn't, it didn't have a big world. It didn't have that many tricks to it. It was just a remake of Mario Brothers in the truest sense. I was hoping for a time, I was like, they could just recolor this and make it work on the 3D. I was thinking, yeah. This could be a three-d-s-one with every virtual boy game, but it's a shame.

They haven't yet, you mean. I want to play that. They've abandoned. There's a Wario game I haven't played yet, and it's supposedly very good, that Wario game for the... It is the killer app. Back when Wario mattered. But yeah, Clash. Clash was fun.

I think it was the last time they had any super nostalgia for it enough to make a new Mario Brothers game. But the arcade version did come out recently on Nintendo Switch from Hamster, and as with all the arcade archives, a very nice conversion. So if you've ever wanted to play Mario Brothers and not the Baudlerized N-E-S version, that is the way to do it. It's like $8. It's a pretty good price, in my opinion. Eight bucks. Eight, eight human dollars. I probably spent $30 on Mario Brothers in my lifetime.

I mean, yeah, like I could easily pump $8 worth of quarters into Mario Brothers over the course of, you know, a few conventions. There's another one on this list that I'd pay the $8 for more. So, okay. Unlike Pac-Man, I can get pretty far in Mario Brothers on one quarter, like at least four or five stages. I feel like it's extremely fair for a game of this era. I agree. Yeah, so I mentioned Donkey Kong 3 Dai Giacushu earlier, one of those games developed by Hudson as a sequel to a Nintendo release for Japanese personal computers. And we have a few of those to talk about, including a direct follow-up to Mario Brothers called Punchball Mario Brothers, which is,

Mario Brothers, but with this one weird Adam mechanic. Ray, do you want to talk about this one? Because I feel like this is very much in your wheelhouse. Uh, is it? Just like, I haven't actually played it. Of, of, esoteric Hudson games. Well, I mean, you pretty much explained it as much as it

needs to be, I think. The only thing about this game is that instead of, well, adding to it, they just add a projectile weapon called a punch ball, which it doesn't which you might think might bounce around like it does in Super Mario Land, but it doesn't kind of. It just kind of, flops in front of Mario

and it's just used as a weapon to kind of hit the enemy. It's like a botchy ball or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, it's interesting because it's a persistent element. It doesn't go away. Like, you use it, and it's permanently there in the stage, and Mario has one, and if you play two player, Luigi has one. And you pick it up and

kick it and it, like, flies forward a little ways and flips over an enemy. So it's almost a little bit like you know, the mechanic that would be introduced with Super Mario Brothers 3, where you could pick up turtle shells, which is kind of weird. Like, now that I think about it, like this sort of, hey, here's a crazy new element that

it's totally surprising in Super Mario Brothers 3, but Hudson kind of did it in this weird spin-off in 1984 that, you know, only people who owned 8801 or X1 or whatever ever played and experienced. I'm watching footage of this right now, and instead of the enemies flying off the screen when you kick them, they explode. That's a pretty good addition. I think a lot of it, yeah, I think they were just trying to like, uh, work within limitations because obviously those computers

were more limited as far as game capabilities that the Famicom was, so they just tried to tweak things a bit to make it work. Yeah, so I haven't played this game myself, not owning an 8801 or X-1. No? What? Yeah, it's funny. Come on. All this Patreon money.

Can you flip over enemies in this one by punching underneath them, or is the mechanic strictly the ball? Do you know? I don't really remember. Yeah, I don't think I have. I tried to find information on that. I watched a bunch of videos, and all I ever see is people throwing them all, and I tried reading about it, and none of the, like, entries on it or reviews of it say.

Which is why I say what I do, because they probably, let's see, you know, there's limited animation, limited graphics in general, so they just had things where, like, oh, you just, the enemies just explode. We can't, like, have them fly off or anything. That would be too much, too expensive on the old, the old processor. Right. Not just be a sad corpse flopping off. I mean, so many people made bad ports of Mario Brothers that I'm, I kind of impressed they just, like, added an extra mechanic to it to explain the limitations that it couldn't be as good as an arcade version. So they just added a new concept to it, though.

I can't see Nintendo being cool with that with most developers, but Hudson, they're usually pretty cool with Hudson. Yeah, I want to talk about that when we get to Super Mario Bros. Special, but I have some thoughts on why we see these games. I'm really curious about that. But we'll talk about that later. First, we need to talk about Mario's other job Demolition Man with Wrecking Crew. And Wrecking Crew is kind of an interesting game in a lot of ways because it's the last Mario outing before Super Mario Brothers. So that was the game that really defined, like, this is Mario, this is his universe.

This is everything that's around him and everything that he's about. And it was not made by Shigeru Miyamoto and his EAD4 team. it was made by, or R&D4, it was made by Yoshio Sakamoto and Nintendo R&D1. So it's a little bit weird and has its own kind of thing that it does. I was, you know, as I was writing about it this morning, it occurred to me that it does feel kind of like an attempt

to go back to some of the mechanics of the original Donkey Kong because it's very heavily based around ladders instead of jumping. And Mario has a hammer. But instead of using the hammer as necessarily a weapon to crush things, it's a permanent tool he uses. And you use it in sort of like a puzzle game, and you're trying to clear out a hundred different levels of this terrible construction site of destructible objects. And to clear a stage, you have to clear all the destructible objects on the stage while avoiding enemies and your rival, who is not Luigi. It is the Dread Foreman Spike. He's got a beard.

He's early Mario. He is, yes. I mean, he's Bluto. It's the closest to actual Bluto he's been bothered with his entire career. Yes, definitely. It's Mario's dark shadow who looks pretty much like Mario. Yes, exactly. It's his persona.

He hasn't accepted him yet and to truly defeat him. That's what the door is for. I like to think this game takes place after Donkey Kong and sort of like a post-apocalyptic sort of thing where Mario's civilization decides that they don't want any more guerrilla attack, so they just knock down all. infrastructure to make sure it never happens again. That's great. I love it.

A nuke and pave approach. Yeah. Yeah, so the way this game works is there are 100 stages, and in each stage, like I said, you have to destroy all the destructible objects. So these construction sites are basically arranged in platforms

that scroll up one vertical screen, so it's two screens high for pretty much every stage, and there are objects. Some of them take like one hit to smash, some of them take four or five hits. And then there are indestructible objects that you can't destroy, so you don't have to worry about them.

And then there are these doors. And Mario can't do anything himself with the doors. If you hit a door, there's a door there. It's open. Okay. But the doors will close after a few seconds. If you happen to hit a door while the monsters that roam the stage, which are like wrenches and eggplants and stuff, of course it's an egg plant.

Of course, it's an R&D1 game. So, of course, it's an egg plant. They will walk into the... the door and they go to the back side of the stage. And so there's like the foreground where Mario exists and then the background, which is where Foreman Spike lurks, and also the enemies will go back there. If you send an enemy into the back, then it's basically out of play. It'll still walk around and you can see it in the background, but it can't hurt Mario. So it's an unusual mechanic. And if you hit a door and open it while an enemy is in

the background, it'll walk through the door back into the foreground. Forman Spike never comes into the foreground that I can remember. He's always lurking in the background and doesn't go through doors. And what he does is basically just tries to dick over Mario. Like he is the, I almost feel like this was meant to be a two-player game and it was

just like too much too complicated for them to handle. So he became like an AI controlled second player because he is basically like what you experience as the worst case scenario when playing Mario Brothers with someone else. It's like someone who hates you, does everything within his power

to screw you over. And that's, that's Foreman Spike. That's what he does. He, he will hit you from the background and it will knock Mario off his current platform and drop him to the bottom, which doesn't hurt you,

but it can keep you from being able to finish the stage. Like if you don't have a way to get back up like with ladders or whatever, some ladders are destructible, then you have no choice but to reset the level and start over. Ray has his own head cannon, but I have mine. And it is that Mario is a scab and the, the workers are on strike.

And Spike is a union thug hired to roughly, I'm up. I see. That's my head canon. But I think I can work with Ray's as well. I'm actually surprised that you put the villain in the role of the union here. I thought you were very pro-union. I didn't make the game.

I'm against this. He's saying the Nintendo is very anti-union and thus casting the union as the villain. That's true. I think it's very strange that in 85, they were, at least in the Game and Watch sphere, they were calling things Mario's Blank. And so it's just odd that this is not Mario's Cement, Mario's wrecking crew. It's just wrecking crew. I mean, Mario's right there on the cover.

You know he's in this. So it's just weird. They took away that branding possibility from them, like from a just a sell point issue, you know. It's very, I mean, Mario looks off to me in this. Just his head is so weird. I think he's got like a hard hat on, but yeah. He's off model here. Everything about this game is off model.

It's a little odd. There is a sequel that's sort of like a poyopo-poyo-style game, which is kind of fun. I have tried to bring that, and I do not understand the mechanics of it. I got into it one weird summer where I was playing a lot of weird rums. What a weird summer. Ranking for your 98? Is that the one you're talking about? Yeah, 98. That's right. But I think, like, Nintendo could dust off this idea and make a new puzzle game out of it. I feel like there's a lot of unexplored territory with this idea.

Yeah, I think some of the puzzle mechanics need to be refined a little bit. There are a lot of situations in which a game. a level just becomes unwinnable. And I feel like if you have to quit by, like, sacrificing a life, that's not really an ideal puzzle. No, I think you press select or something and it resets. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you, but you lose a life if you do that. Yeah, that's what I don't like.

That's like a cardinal sin of puzzle games. Yeah, I feel like that one element, if they could figure out how to make that work better, it could be good. That's why I couldn't get into that Klanoa Game Boy Advance game. I do like those a lot, though. Sorry Actually, could you explain Wrecking Crew 98 to me Because I've tried to play it like two or three times

And I just bounce off it I'm like I don't know what's going on here It's been a long time since I played it Ray wasn't it part of that Nintendo Power Not the magazine But the marketing campaign What was this? It was a teleview game

Wasn't it? Not originally. I don't think so, no It was like one of those convenience store things they would burn onto a disc Yeah, so technically it was a cart release Yeah That's why it's 98.

Man, Foreman Spike is a lot hotter in the 98 game. Oh, yeah. Though he has a Wario nose, which again tells you it's R&D. I've never heard anyone express thirst for the Forbant Spike before. You're not in my corners of the end. Sorry. Yeah, Riking Crew 98 is like where the levels of the, you know, the levels of the game,

they just sort of are turnable on a reel, sort of. But they're all colored panels and doors instead of. the usual. It's sort of like Yoshi's cookie meets poyopoyo and then you can move the rows and you can

also like break stuff in order to have things drop. It's very, it's complex but I feel like once you play a few rounds and kind of understand it, you can get into it.

I enjoy it and again, I feel like they could trot this out and make something else out of it. I think it's that I would blame this not coming back all that much to

the same reason. Like any Mario game that wasn't under Miyamoto's purview doesn't get to return to all that much. I think aesthetically, wrecking crew stuff appeared in

Super Mario Maker just because of really fit with the construction aspect. But... Well, we didn't get to like the little wrench dudes or whatever. Yeah. Apparently, there is a sprite of Form and Spike in Mario Maker with a mystery

mushroom. I just found that out. But other than that, and I mean, construction Mario on the cover of Mario Maker is that guy could star in a new wrecking crew. Yeah, he is definitely like the A Wrecking Crew 98 Mario.

They should have called Super Mario Maker Making Crew. And of course there's a Recing Crew thing in micro games at a Warioware at some point. But that's just because R&D won references every game they ever made, even pitching machines in micro games. So the other notable thing about Wrecking Crew is that it was one of three programmable series in ES games, none of which really lived up with their potential in the U.S.

because they were designed to take advantage of the Famicom data recorder, a cassette tape recorder that would plug into the Famicom basic keyboard and allow you to save programs. But you could also save Excite Bike tracks, mock rider tracks, and wrecking crew courses with the data recorder in Japan. I have tried using that setup with NES games, and it just does not seem to work. It was so cruel of them to include the save option on those carts for Americans. I think they intended to bring over some sort of solution for that.

And then, you know, once it actually came over, they were like, eh. So, yeah, if you try to load a stage in Wrecking Crew, you have to reset your system because it just hangs. I think saving does the same thing. Speak. Yeah. No, I think save, it'll, like, it sends data. And then once it's done, it'll be like, okay, you're done. But if you load, then it's waiting to hear, like, cassette data, and it just hangs forever.

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Geico, 15 minutes could save you 15% or more. All right, so here we are at the main course, the main event, Super Mario Bros. 2, the loss levels, released in June 1986, a mere nine months after Super Mario Brothers. That's a very quick turnaround. The original Super Mario Brothers was famously designed as the ultimate expression of what you could do with cartridge-based technology. Like, they really just made an incredible. incredibly efficient video game, like some of the tricks that they use to get that much content, 32 stages and, you know, a dozen different enemies and all kinds of, you know, hidden bonuses, et cetera, et cetera, different environments. To get that onto a cart, they used all kinds of compression tricks and, like, you know, clouds as bushes and that sort of thing, or bushes as clouds. I don't know, whatever. They didn't have those limits with Super Mario Brothers to the loss levels. So it's a more visually diverse game. and also a game that exists to basically, like, take you by the shoulder and then repeatedly punch you in the face.

Yeah. It's the first the MasoCorp. It's the first MassoCorp games that we call these games, where it's like... I think this style of game, the style of sequel, was actually pretty common, especially in arcades at the time. You would get, like, you know, Space Invaders or Zevius or whatever that was just, it's the same game, but it's way hard. harder now. I think it came from back then when there were fewer games around. They could count on that everyone had played Super Mario Brothers to death that they all needed an extra challenge.

You could release a game that would finally kick you in the butt after that. Well, and also, this game came out for Famicom Disc System, which means it had the ability to save your progress. So they could afford to, like, you know, punch you in the face repeatedly because you didn't have to go back as far when you lost. I'm curious, do you know how often it would save after every world maybe, or I'm just curious how much you'd have to replay. I haven't played that much of this on disk system. I've mostly played on virtual console. So, Ray, is that something you can answer? I don't know, definitively.

I don't know. Sorry people expecting expert dependence here. We don't have them. But, yeah, this is like a super, super difficult game. Sometimes it's difficult in a way where I'm like, I don't know. It feels a little cruel. A lot of it is, you know, poison mushroom at the very start of the game.

No, I think that's fine because you, like, that, I'm totally okay with that because you lose like five seconds of progress if you die to that. And what it does is it teaches you like, oh, crap, I can't count on anything that I relied on before. Right. Like all the power ups were my friends before. This is a little mushroom guy. He is not my friend. I have to avoid this one.

I think the wind stages cross the line for me, and I can't forgive them. So, yeah, Ray actually linked to a comment on Reddit in the notes. I said, this game never came to the U.S. or at least not until many years later in a different form because it was supposedly deemed too difficult, but citation needed. And Ray, being awesome, cited citation. And that was a Reddit Ask Me Anything with Howard Phillips who played a role in, you know, giving, like saying, hey, this game. He advised basically like this is a good U.S. relationship. least this is not. He's like the key source on all this stuff because nobody else is talking.

I guess he did not sign an NDA, which is pretty, thank you. I just think nobody else would remember as well as he would. Right. I mean, he was kind of like a kid who was like super excited to be playing on Nintendo games and offering a piece. This was not a kid, a young man. It was above Howard Lincoln's pay grade to know this. He was also like assembling arcade cabinets and doing everything.

Yeah. He had like the dream job in 1986. Until it turned into a nightmare And then he went to LucasArts But he's a nice guy He seems like a nice old man He wears like a bowtie I trust anyone who wears like a vacation dad all the time

I actually saw him do a great presentation At the Classic Gaming Expo in 2012 I went there for one up I believe And he said something which I feel is a highly dubious claim and that he finished every NES game up to a certain point in time And I'm like every game I don't know

Maybe he's that good Look, if your grandpa says he had to walk through the snow 10 miles to go to school, you're not going to question grandpa. Those are his version of war stories. Yeah, I cut him a little slack there. I found another quote of him saying that, like, he thinks Miyamoto was maybe just depressed during the making of this game. Yeah, so the AMA, the AMA, the AMA, he was, Jeremy, what's that? I was waiting for you to continue. Oh, I don't remember what I was saying because everyone else talked, and I've lost track.

Talk about the Reddit in which it was found that he actually did think it was too hard or something? Someone said it was too hard. Like the wind specifically. Actually, that was a comment that someone made. Like, it seems very arbitrary, but it's not. There's like set points in the stage at which the wind will change direction. So it is manageable. Like everything in this game, if you take the time to figure it out and,

and understand how it works. It is manageable. It's just a game that throws a lot of stuff at you that shouldn't work. Like, you know, squid flying through the sky and that sort of thing. I never played the Famicom version. Does the Famicom version give you any sort of indication, visual, or audio in terms of the fact that there's wind? Or is it just there? It's pretty much just there.

Yeah. The last levels, I believe there's like leaves that fly by. Oh, no, there's leaves. I'm sorry. There's the leaves. I'm sorry. I'm just thinking audio only. I was curious.

Yeah, definitely has the leaves. at least they give you that I didn't get far enough to get to the win I played the NES well I guess Famicom Mario 2 when they put it out on the Wii

but I didn't get to the way I didn't play long enough to get to the win I was like fuck this after like two stages I I remember that when Nintendo Power was covering Super Mario All Stars the contest was finished level D of this game

and take a picture of the screen like that is the challenge and there was a big prize for that. Yeah. Yeah, so according to Howard Phillips 40 days ago, this was recent, huh? Mario 2 was deemed too hard for American audiences. I believe so ultimately Mr. Arakawa and I decided, but I lobbied hard that the game had some sucky bits in it.

Unpredictable and so unavoidable kills like the wind gusts on jumps is not good design, in my humble opinion. So there is that. One thing they improved in this game is the Princess Peach Sprite. it is much better and she looks like a human and yet that's not the one that Nintendo keeps going back to

when they make retro references they always go to like the horrifying misshapen Super Mario Brothers Once I will say it's still not good but it's not like what am I looking at some kind of cubist nightmare

that the first peach is so I'm sure the difficulty did factor into the decision not to bring this game over but I also think the timing just didn't make sense you know the NES This game launched in Japan in June 1986.

That was right around the time the NES really went national in the U.S. And so, you know, over the next year and a half or so, that was the NES kind of trickling into homes. And people were still just picking up Super Bowlry Brothers for the first time. So why bring over this sequel when people are still buying the first game? It ended up being one of the greatest, you know, best-selling games of all time. So, you know, once the NES had gained traction, say the end of 1987, 88, I think we talked about this on the Mario 2 episode. Yeah, like Super Mario Brothers 2 loss levels was not that impressive looking, and I think

Nintendo wanted to put its best foot forward, so it brought over a better looking and, you know, more fair, more congenial game. So I feel like this one just lost out to the slow localization of the NES into America. Yeah, I would have just been redundant on the shelves, too. I would bet I wouldn't be surprised of that also informed Aracawa's choice for

Nintendo of America not to bring it over. Also, it was released for a peripheral that didn't exist in the U.S., which is kind of an impediment. And we did get disk system games starting in like late 87 with Metroid, Zelda, like that was summer 87.

Yeah, but those games had a lot more put into them, but, you know, Super Marvelers 2 is essentially an expansion pack, and that was for, you know, disc were much cheaper than carts. So if they had sold this in America for like, you know, whatever, $40.

$30.30. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Probably wouldn't have been exactly this kind of a sensation that the Mario USA would have been. But Ray, why are you a fan of this game? What is it about it that you like so much? Be nice. That's fair. No, I'm just mostly confused to why people just sort of go to default that it's bad. you know, the sort of narrative, actually it's bad. But I think people just don't understand a couple of contexts that were surrounding it. I think the first thing is a historical context, which is, you know, as we already mentioned sort of already, that, you know, arcade games were sort of changing how video games were thought of in Japan at least, and especially in 83, 84, in the middle of the Famicom boom. So you had games coming out in the arcades like Tower of Juraga.

and Packland, which had a little bit more depth to them, a little bit more length. And Draga especially had, you know, lots of tricks and secrets to it. Yeah, that was a social experience. So, yeah, as you had these arcade games slowly evolving, that sort of starts to dovetail into the home market. And you have the home developers realizing that, oh, we don't have to just make arcade ports. We don't have to just make these games that are sort of just like escalating repetition, basically. We can add some stuff to it. But then they also took the lesson that, you know, there should be some secrets and trickery to it.

And then Nintendo releases the first Super Mario Brothers. And that's like a flashpoint of not just how people are releasing and designing the games after that, but also this flashpoint of you have all these players in this entire country trading mysteries with each other. And so I think after that you start to see the progression of Mario clones and so on and so forth and a lot of games that. basically have mystery in their title coming out for Famicom, you know, the mystery of Atlantis and like superzevious, the mystery of Gamp or whatever. And these games with lots of me, Mara Sam, Joe. Yeah, myelin's secret castle. Yeah. Things like with a lot of literally hidden stuff in it that you'd probably have to buy the strategy guy for.

So then we have Super Mario Brothers 2 coming out at what I pretty much think is the zenith of this trend in the Famicom world where you have a game that is built upon. on more secrets and trickery. And like Jeremy said, the secondary title of it is Super Mario, but there's four super players. So you have Nintendo making this game essentially as a gift for all these kids who have obsessed over Mario 1 for like the past year, basically, and just giving them more to it and also giving a gift, I guess, to the book publishers to have more source material to make things for.

And also it was, I think, a good sales pitch for the disc system. like, hey, there's this peripheral and, yeah, you can play Zelda you've never heard of before, but there's a new Mario game. It's totally new. It's not just the same game. It's a system seller, yeah. I feel like, no, I agree with Ray in that we were not given the proper

we were not given this game in the proper context to appreciate its design philosophy. And I think this really shows just how much context will inform the evaluation of a game, like both like the cultural experience surrounding it and the history behind it and everything like that. I feel like it just shows You can't evaluate a game in a vacuum.

So many things affect the evaluation of a game. I completely disagree. You should only objectively review games and just be blindfolded to everything else about it. That's one way to feel. Listen, yeah. No, I'm a kid. I'm joking.

We all know Henry's kidding. Okay, it's okay, Henry. We're all wounded in this room. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. For not being an expert enough. That's my first point, though.

My second point is just regarding the game itself in that I think people complain too much about elements of Super Mario Brothers 2 that have now been used or seen or referenced in Mario games in the 30 years since. We have, you know, even in Mario 3, there's very difficult levels, World 7, World 8. In Super Mario World, there's the Star Road in the special stages, which are this, you know, this briefcase full of levels that are like, you know, just extra challenges for you. And in fact, one of them spells out in coins, you are a super player. So it's, you know, it's calling back to Super Mario Bros. 2. Then we have, you know, the Mario Sunshine Block levels and Super Mario Galaxy 2, which, again, is a whole game full of challenging levels that builds upon the first game,

which may not be as challenging. Right. And then after that, I'll see, you know, Mario Odyssey and so on and so forth. Up to Mario Maker, which is, again, headed by Tezicaa, much like Super Marvelers 2 was. and it's just like now the guy who probably has the most intuitive knowledge of how to make a Mario level is letting you make them and guess what all you're doing is making a bunch of hard-ass levels that's true for you and your hardcore buddies that's not what their dream was with Mario Maker but it's just how it turned out yeah I mean with Mario Maker unless you were given levels that were curated it was either something a child made in like three minutes

or a level designed to like shove bamboo or your fingernails so it's like it's a duality of well you know I like having a good Mario game with lots of challenging levels but not if it's too mean like Super Mario Bros. are lost levels I mean

I think I think you know one one sort of point to balance that out is that the games you cited

almost all of them build up to that level of challenge whereas Super Mario Brothers two lost levels is balls hard from the very start

like you kick off the game and you're like wow Oh, I just got shredded. What the hell? Whereas the other games, you know, you're talking about like World 7 and 8 of Super Mario Brothers 3 or the Star Road of Super Mario World. Like, you build up to that.

This game is just like, you know, it's full throttle from the start. It reminds me to of like Super Meat Boy. If you started chess with the dark world and Super Bowl, like that, that was World One of it. Yeah, I can't. It's tough for me when looking back on Mario to like I can't, I can't, I can't separate. my feelings from it at the time I experienced it, which was the All-Stars version. And when I played that, I was like, I don't like this. This makes me unhappy playing it.

And maybe it too was, I think maybe a thing that heard it in my subjective viewing of it at the time was I was playing two other games, sorry, three other games that I was feeling immense nostalgia for already as like a 10-year-old, which I, or 12-year-old, which is weird to think I'm feeling nostalgia for something. I felt the same way. But then I'm playing that. I'm like, well, I love this because I always love this. And then I'm playing lost levels.

I'm like, this is not familiar and it's hard. This is the worst. Like that was probably what's as darkened my memories of that from the beginning. Well, I was delighted with it from the beginning. Because it's like, well, first of all, I always wanted to see what Mario 2 was, the other Mario 2. And just like, well, you know, as I'm playing it, it's like, well, I've seen everything that the first game can do. But here's something that is basically like expanding my mind of what we can do with the level. design of this. So I enjoyed it quite a bit that way. I think also like there is a

progression to it to what Jeremy said. I just think that the base level is a bit higher than some of the other games. Yeah. That's valid as well. Honestly, I really feel that if this game took a few worlds to sort of build up to crush you and destroy yourself a seam and happiness, people would feel a lot more kindly disposed to it. But because it's just like you suck at the very, like from the very start, like it's just gloves off. I think people bounce off of it really quickly and I think I mean I think there is a escalation it doesn't just plateau from the first world no but it starts out I can it doesn't take long to just be like wow I think I can at least beat the first world and then I'm just I'm just I just give up yeah I mean it does it does some really cruel things like I wrote it down in the notes for the last episode and didn't bring them over but you know there there is one stage that has multiple warp zones in it and none of them are good warpses zones, all of them are bad. Like, they will take you back to the beginning

of the game. And yeah, there's, like, if you get into them, okay, so one of them is midway through a stage. You think, oh, it's just going to be like a normal coin room, but then it is actually a warp zone back to the beginning of the game. So if you know about that,

then you're like, okay, I can't go down into what seems like a normal coin room because it's not, it's a trap. And then you go to the end of the stage and you're like, oh, Wait, this is really interesting. This flagpole here is actually really close to the final staircase. I could jump over.

What would happen? Well, what happens is you go to another warp room that takes you back to the beginning of the stage or the beginning of the game. So every time you try to use these tricks that you learn in the first game, it's like bad and it slaps you on the wrist. I love that reverse warp zone in its cruelty because it also gives you a choice of like, well, you don't have to go down this. You could also kill yourself. kill yourself right now and start over this day. What a great lesson. Yeah, I mean, it's, I'm actually not, I don't know, I've come around on this game and I sort of respect what it does.

But I have to admit that what it does is really, really, like sometimes it is just, you think, okay, well, I've avoided one trap, so now I'm safe. But no, no, you're not. You got complacent, and now that was your mistake. You screwed up. Yeah. I think it's all about subverting your expectations. And I think, again, we go back to it was made for a software climate that was designed to challenge these hardcore kids who had basically seen it all up to that point and just wanted something more. So I would say that the game that maybe best embodies the spirit of the lost levels in kind of like taking your familiarity with the classic game that you love and flipping it on his ear and does it better is Mega Man 9.

Like Mega Man 9 That whole game is designed around Like hey, all these comfortable play patterns You got into with Mega Man 2 and 3 No, you can't do that anymore You are right, I do think Mega Man 9 is bad idea I do think that game is way too hard Oh, I love it though

I do like it because I guess you know Because I have so much love for Mega Man 2 Like going into a game that's just like Oh, you know Mega Man 2 Huh? Well, that's your problem You should not be such a fan of Mega Man 2 because it's going to be your doom. I forgot.

You're not allowed to say you think a game is too hard on a podcast. But no, it shows your weakness. It gets really hard at the end. Yeah, I couldn't beat the wily stages.

But there are some really clever moments in that game where I'm just like, oh, you got me. You assholes. You knew what I was going to do there. You got me. And that's what this game does. And I think playing Mega Man 9

helped me come around on this and be like, okay, I get what they're doing. I still don't like it all that much. I don't think it's that fun for me personally. Wow, I didn't know this. I don't think, what's that? Shocking revelations. That I don't think Super Mario Brothers 2.

Oh, I thought you were by the Mega Man 9. Oh, no, no. I think Mega Man 9 is amazing. I love it. I thought I was going crazy. No, no, no. I'm saying Super Mario lost levels. I don't really personally enjoy it that much, but I do think it is a good and interesting and clever game.

I think they reacted strongly to this too and development side of like, oh, they then made, Mario 3 is so much more inviting than even the first Super Mario Brothers. Like, it seems it's, they definitely declawed them. themselves a lot after this game. Well, again, I mean, I think also, I would say, despite everything I said, I think putting a two on the title was a mistake because they should just call it Super Mario Brothers for Super Players and treated it more as an expansion pack, essentially, and just made it like this cheap disc that you can get with more Mario levels.

I think putting a two on it would just kind of twisted things in the future as we in America would learn about it and be like, oh, there's another Mario 2, oh, but they thought it was too hard, Oh, but and so on and so forth. So I think maybe that's also a key thing behind sort of the narrative that's cropped up in recent years. And, yeah, I don't think Miyamoto was depressed because Miyamoto wasn't really involved with it. Yeah, I, that's a weird narrative. Hey, I'm just quote Howard Phillips guy. Yeah, well, he, did he say that?

That was a quote of Howard Phillips I saw on the event. I'm sure he was joking, but people were like, oh, Howard would know. Yeah. Yeah, he was depressed. He and he and Miyamoto were. I think part of this game also just got E-Ted, like, in the same way. Yeah. He's better than he got, really.

Here, I'll read the whole quote here. This is an interview he did right when the game came out on the virtual console in 2007. Classically on Miyamoto, in that there were random and out, in that it's random and out of the player's controls, maybe Miyamoto was depressed at the, the time he made Mario 2 end quote I felt like that could have been said in jest we're not getting the we're not getting the intonation there yeah it probably

just came through attacks but that's a I'm believing in a destructoid headline from 2007 why not I'd be careful there either way it's inaccurate either way it's inaccurate All right. So what haven't we talked about with Samori Brothers to the Lost Levels?

We haven't talked about the bonus stages at the end of the game where there's a whole lot of extra levels. The game is 32 levels long, 32 grueling, punishingly cruel levels. And then there's a whole bunch of bonus levels that are actually much crueler. And I am not going to lie. I have not played those levels because I am not good enough. I am not a super player. So, Ray, can you walk us through what all that postgame stuff is about? Yes, sort of. I've only genuinely played through them all at least once in earnest. That's once more than I have. Yeah.

And it was some years ago. But, yeah, there's a secret world nine and then a secret world A, then B, and C, then D. And each of those have four stages a piece? Yes. So it's 20 extra stages. And do you access those just by finishing the game? You finish the game eight times in a row. Oh, cool.

Originally on the desk system. Holy. And then you can access those. Those are tallied by the stars on the title screen. Okay. Wait. You don't have to be. it like eight times in one sitting, though, right?

It's a cumulative thing that saves on the disk system. Oh, God, now you're really challenging me. I don't remember. That's got to be. Like, I can't imagine. It can't be that mean. 32 stages eight times through. I'm buying this suppression theory now. It's got to be one of those, like,

each time you beat the game, like, you know, it gives you an extra star on the same screen. Well, the one thing is that if you do use forward warps, it's okay. So if you do warp at some... There's forward warps, not just backward ones? Yeah. So, you know, they grant you that. But I don't know what to say really about the levels of content themselves.

It's just that's more of the same sort of punishment than just trickier. Yeah, I mean, some of the, they do start breaking more rules in terms of like, you know, putting Bowser out in the daytime just in the middle of the thing. Sure, of course. So it really does turn into Mario Maker. Yeah. Okay. For sure, for sure.

And that's exactly what I'm talking about when people are like, well, But you have to... You have to beat these levels all the way through on a single play-through, right? Like, you don't get to continue. Without warping to really genuinely get through them all. Wow. So not just in these levels, but in this game as a whole, do they put any extra spice on the Bowser fights?

I wasn't sure about that. No, I think they pretty much... No, I think Bowser's limited to just throwing more hammers. Okay. And there's like a blue Bowser and a green Bowser that... Some people are convinced our different characters or something. Oh, sure. That was like a weird rabbit hole that I discovered while researching for this.

Yeah, I'll just read the wiki on that thing. Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, it's different colors. The Forman spike of Bowser. Yeah, exactly. Bowser's foreman. Who works for it? It may work to you. So not just in the post game stages, but are there any levels that particularly stand out to you that you think, oh, yeah, this one was really great or this one was really clever, like things that you really stuck with you and made you love the game.

I mean, I did mention the sort of Bowser in the middle of the daytime stage before. I mean, that's kind of really, that's one that jumps out of you, sort of. I don't think any of the later ones really stuck out to me. I just sort of like some of the main game levels, the ones that, like, if you go too forward, if you scroll the screen too forward, you basically screwed because you can't jump up to a rear invisible block. I've done that one, too. Yeah. Yeah, just classic ones like that.

That happens right around the same time as the backward warp stages. So I feel like that's where the game really takes off its glove and is like you're actually not getting any further than this. If I can remember, like, some of the characteristics of 9 through D are just kind of a little bit less puzzly and just more like endurance challenges, basically. You know another thing that I didn't like about it was I was just looking this up to confirm it was like, yeah, they use, they reuse enemies in different ways. like the bloopers outside of water but there's no new enemies in it. Like they didn't make even just one new

enemy sprite in it. It's just that's lazy is not the right word. They're working too hard on that Princess Peach makeover. Yeah, exactly but they couldn't it again just felt more expansion packy of just like, well we have these assets and we're going to remix them in this

way instead of developing a new enemy for that world, even just one. Just one. Just one. They put smiley faces on different things, too. I mean, big cute. Everything is happier, which is weird because the player's not happier. So it's like there's a certain level of sadism baked into the universe here.

I guess my argument to that would be just like, well, again, they are just like working with what they've already established and just giving people more of the same set of tools, but just sort of tweaking things. Right. Well, they did tweak all the background graphics. Yeah. There's more depth to the visuals. Yeah. A lot of the tile graphics are changed in. improved. And of course

there's the red pirata plants. That's technically a new enemy. I stand corrected. They're the ones who don't hide in their pipes if you're close to the pipes? Yeah. I thought so. They'll walk off the edge of a pipe when they come to... Well, and Ouija does play a little

differently in this one. Oh, that's true. Yeah, we didn't talk about Luigi. Yeah. I mean, it's not two-player. So it's a singular challenge for a single super player who wants to either try traditional Mario Physics or Luigi's special brand of physics. They're a little bit more slidy.

Speaking of ice physics. Yeah, so what is different about Luigi here? He jumps a little higher. He's a little floatier. Yeah, and a little bit slightier. So, yeah. Basically, looser. He's a bit loosey-goosey.

Kind of similar to how he plays in USA than I guess. Similar, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, and as much as the fact that, yeah, we want to establish Luigi as a different character with it. Lighten the loafer. Is that true? I don't know about that. Howard Phillips, everybody, he said.

Okay, we mentioned that this did not come to the U.S. on N.S. They didn't? But it did come to America in the form of Super Mario Brothers All-Stars, which of course does make some changes not just to the visuals, but to the physics of how the games work. Yeah. But it kept all like the bonus stages and everything, right? Yeah.

Okay. And then it also came in a more unexpurgated form on Game Boy Color in Super Mario Brothers Deluxe. I forgot about that. And you can't play that right from the beginning. You have to unlock it by getting a certain score like $240,000 or something in Super Mario Brothers. That's the right way to do it, I think. Like that, presentationally, I think that's the best way of handling it because then you know a person has finished

Super Mario Brothers to the extent that they've earned their badge of like, okay, you're certified is this good enough of a player. Here's the new stuff. This is for super duper ultra players because of how zoomed in the screen is the... Yeah, this is... One of my recurring complaints on Game Boy Works is when Game Boy games

try to use NES graphics directly and you lose a lot of exterior screen information and things become much harder. I played through the whole thing. Wow. Wow. Well, Mario Deluxe was important to me to begin with, but yeah. In what sense?

I just, you know, it was a purely nostalgic thing of just like having a key game to me at the beginning, the original Super Mario Bros. And just like having that in a portable form was like super duper novel to me. And I just... And now with a world map. Yeah. And Red Quillard. But I would say the super players levels are a bit of a letdown just because they didn't use the new graphics. It's they didn't, that was the biggest letdown to me is that they just couldn't, I guess, find extra space to.

add the change to graphics. Oh, really? I didn't realize that. Yeah, so it's the same old... It's the original... It's the original where there's one graphics. Yeah. Oh.

And no extra bells or whistles in that way. Interesting. But they did add red coins. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do the lost levels or the Mario 2J levels have red coins in them too in this version? I don't remember.

Because that would be hell. Okay. You got me. I don't know the answer on that one. Boy. I didn't think about that. It's not important. I remember red coins, and I don't remember where I remember the red coins from.

They're not necessary, but having a zoomed-in screen and that extra red coin objective would make this like the ultimate exercise in Mario expertise, like in someone playing this and getting through it. I remember collecting all the red coins. I just remember if they were all the models. Right. Sorry about that, folks. We're lame. Well, we can always edit it out.

Yeah. Try it. All right, you know, so we didn't get Super Mario Brothers, the loss levels, in America, NES, but we did kind of get little bits and pieces of it in the arcade. For those who happened to come across versus Super Mario Brothers and the arcades back in 1986, 87, may not have realized it, but they were playing little bits and pieces of Mario 2. So Super Mario Brothers or versus Super Mario Brothers came out as part of the Versus series that

Nintendo created for, like, you know, arcade counterparts with some upgrades to its family common NES games. And in the case of versus Super Mario Brothers, instead of adding new mechanics and that sort of thing, what they did was they tweaked the arrangement of the NES game. So they took out some of the easier stages and pushed some of the harder stages forward in the game. So, you know, stages like World's 2-2 and 23 are basically repeated later in the game, 7-2 and 7-3, but with more enemies, more challenges. So what they did was they took out a bunch of those early stages that were kind of toothless and easy, and they pushed the harder versions of them forward. And then in those slots where you suddenly had level spaces freed up, they took some stages from Super Mario Brothers 2, which was available in Japan around the same time and mixed those in. So versus Super Mario Brothers is this kind of weird, not a remix.

I guess it's a remix, but it's not like a remix. It's not like a half-and-half game. It's mostly Super Mario Brothers, but there are these stages from the other game in there. So it's a really interesting kind of halfway rendition of the game. Well, because they've got to get more quarters out of you. Right. If they take it too easy on you, you're playing too long without the quarters.

I did play this one because my local Applebee's had it. And so, and then we'd go out for a family dinner at old Applebee. beats. I played it a couple times and was just in shock of like, well, wait, the thing I always do in 1-1 isn't here. It felt like a finger was missing or something. Yeah, well, I thought that was a me problem. I was like, this game is way harder than the Mario I've played at my friend's house. And like, he showed me all these tricks and none of them seemed to work and I don't understand. But yeah, it takes out a lot of the invisible mushrooms. It takes out all the, or the the one-up mushrooms.

It takes out a lot of the power-ups. It takes out the ability to do the minus world. It takes out the ability to do the infinite lives trick with the Turtle in 3-1. Like, it just changes a lot of things to make it harder. The countdown has been shortened in most stages. It's just, like, you know, the arcade version of Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Bros. was a game created for home consoles. So it does go kind of easy on players.

It's challenging, but it's manageable. Whereas, you know, arcade games around the same time, Stuff like Ghost and Goblins, where it was just like, okay, you have, you've had your three minutes, now give us another quarter. And that's the philosophy that they infused into versus Super Mario Brothers. I played a bit of this at my local arcade growing up, and it did feel weird. I think I really ultimately could not get over playing this game with a joystick because of how comfortable it felt to just hold in B. The stubby Nintendo joystick. But yeah, I would notice a lot of things like, oh, instead of the tinier tweaks were like, instead of a Kupa here, instead of a Gumba here, it's a Kupa.

Instead of a Kupa, it's a Buzzy Beetle. They would just, like, put the harder enemies in instead of the easier ones. Yeah, it's kind of like the second play-through of Super Mario Brothers after you beat the, you know, Bowser in 8-4 the first time. You can play it again and, like, Buzzy Beatles have been, have replaced Gumbas and that sort of thing. It feels a little bit like that. It's not quite that extreme, but... I had no idea, though, that they added in 2J levels to this game because I only played, like, the first three levels of versus Superman Brothers, and I assumed it was all just, like, swapped around enemies.

No, there are some substantial changes in addition. and everyone can play it for themselves very easily now because the game is on Switch Arcade Archives thanks to Hamster. And it is one of the top-selling e-shop games, but I don't think people really know what it is. What have I gotten myself into? I think that's really smart of Nintendo that they know, well, maybe they just stumbled into this, but they can rest assured that when Super Mario Brothers, for real, comes to the Switch, that will sell quite a lot.

So why not give people a weird-ass version of it first to then sell all of those copies, sell a shitload of those for people who are jones in for Mario. Yeah. And I am not going to commit myself to this game fully until Horry's Ersatz's JoyCon, let JoyCon comes out where I can play with a proper D-pad. I feel like that's the way God intended for me to really play versus Super Mario Brothers. And until that can happen, I mean, there is, you know, the pro controller, but I want to play that. in a handheld format. I did, but I bought this one over the

holiday break because I brought to the switch to my mom's place to show it off. We ended up just playing jackbox party pack the most. But when we wanted to play an old game, I was like, well, we could play sort of Super Mario because it just, it brought us

Super Mario especially has a real special place in my heart with my mom because you know, I begged and big and begged and begged for an NES and I got it, but one we got it, she played Super Mario Brothers at least as much as I did if not more because she didn't have bedtime.

She could stay up and play it all night. And like so, I mean, it was fun to play, you know, 30 years later, 33 years later, Jesus. Playing Super Mario with my mom again, even if it was, Verses was all I could download. But,

though in, yeah, one last thing I'll say about it is that I only played it a tiny bit at Applebee's as a kid. because then once I realized the tricks to it, I was like, well, I'll just go over to the Play Choice Stand and play RBI or something else. For three innings, and then I need to beg for another quarter. I wanted to add something, a couple of things. First of all, you mentioned they shortened the countdown sometimes.

That reminded me of Super Luigi U. New Super Luigi, there's another game made just with challenging levels. So there you go. There's another example. And also, just on the general subject of tweaking levels, Like, they reminded me also in Mario Deluxe, the superplayer levels are kind of, they took out the wind and they shortened some bits of it to make some jumps easier in other levels. So it's a bit of a neutering. That might be the only sense in which this game is a neutering.

I don't know. But yeah. There you go. So we didn't get Mario 2 in America, we did get Versus Super Mario Brothers, but we didn't get another game, which was Super Mario Brothers. But then again, I don't think most people, played this one. This was another one of those Hudson games. It came out around the same time as Mario 2 for Famicom Disc System.

This game came out for PC801 again, and I think Sharp X1. And yeah, it's one of those Hudson joints where you're like, oh, it's the Nintendo game, but everything's off and weird. And I discovered this game thanks to Ray actually back at One Up. And so I think I will let you talk about this one.

When I think of like oddball, esoteric, Hudson games that are very interesting and a little confusing. I think of you. I feel like that's something you have a fondness for, at least a lot of knowledge of. Well, thank you. I guess I'll say

you know how Super Mario Brothers is known for its horizontal scrolling. Super Mario Bros. Special has none of that. It is a screen flipper, basically. You go to the edge of the screen and there's the rest of the level. This was not unheard of. There were a few other games that had this effect

that, you know, this terrible handicap thrust upon them, such as Adventure Island for SIGA SG-1000. Yeah. Like that, wow, that's a, that's a rough one. So, I mean, this was a common problem, I think, not just these computers, but also computers are here. I have PC standards, which basically had to have scrolling completely hacked in, like years after these platforms were invented. So, I mean, it's, again, just Hudson trying to work within limitations, but also.

also deliver a Mario game with like completely new levels. Some of them might be as punishing as some of the lost levels, not just entirely because of the lack of scrolling, but just like they're kind of like trying to puzzle things out. And it's also made by people who are not at Nintendo. So they don't really know. I don't know what colors they had access to, but they chose the worst ones because it hurts to look at this game. Yellow Mario's Adventure in Orangelands.

Yeah. It's basically it. Ice for, I guess, people that want to go blind. They probably had access to like six or eight colors, so I'm sure they did their best. The game looks pretty, I mean, colors aside, it looks pretty much like Nintendo's visual design. But not having played to myself, but just looking at it, the physics seem off. Like the way turtles fall, like it's a weird arc that doesn't like Super Mario Brothers. It's like, what are they doing?

The way Mario moves, like, I, you know, watching YouTube videos of people trying to do the maneuver that Mario does where he jumps and twists around in mid-air so he can like, you know, reach a platform that's directly above him, you just can't do that here. So I feel like they did their best and it wasn't good enough. But they compensated by throwing in some stuff that wasn't in Super Mario Brothers. And the further you get into the game, the weird things start to be because after a while it's like, it's Super Mario Brothers, but here's elements from Mario Brothers. and now here's some elements from Donkey Kong.

So, like, the point at which you are in Bowser's castle and you need to go up the staircase and there's barrels falling down the staircase and a question block and you hit the question block and a hammer comes out, that's where you're like, all right, okay, sure. Bringing the punch balls. I feel like that's heightened by the screen flipping, basically,

because, you know, every time you're reaching to the screen, the screen blanks out for like a split second and then you're presented with something else. and you had no idea if it was coming or not. I mean, if you're playing it at first time, it's complete discovery just because of the screen change. Yeah, well, I do think they make the best of the screen flipping here, whereas Adventure Island on SG 1000, like I've played that,

and they didn't really change the level layout to accommodate for the fact that, hey, like, you don't know what's coming up after you flip screens. Here, each screen becomes its own kind of like, you know, microcosm. Exactly. And everything is self-contained. Like, there are no stages that I, or no, no transition that I've seen in like the 20 minutes of video that I've watched where you do a screen transition in it. Like, if you're not jumping, then you're going to bump into something. Or if you are jumping, you're going to get screwed over.

Like, it's always fair. When you transition into a new screen, you have a chance to respond and react. It becomes unfair later in this game I'm looking at right now, where you jump off a platform into nothing. You don't know where you will end up. Yeah. Yeah. So in some cases, you know, they got even more cruel than Mario too. Well, so I watched the first half of the game, I guess, and it seemed okay.

I feel like that could be just a late game sort of addition. Yeah, I jumped ahead and skipped around toward the end and, you know, didn't watch every single transition. It's hard to watch. This game is hard to look at, so I don't blame me for a little 20 minutes of age. I did kind of blank out for a while after watching it for a bit. I mean, everything is based on the fact that these computers were just like a generation or two removed from a calculator. Right. I mean, it's impressive that they manage.

to, you know, squeeze this game into this tech. Like, it is an effort, an act of self-abuse, and also a little bit of love. It's a triumph in that way for Hudson that they even made a game that could be presentably confused with Super Mario Brothers in a screenshot. God, I wonder how many kids they ruined with this game. I just turn them away from video games. I don't think this game is actually all that special, but it definitely is kind of Super Mario Brothers. But, you know, the existence of these Hudson games, there's like three or four of them that they adapted from Nintendo games. Like, they're just strange that they existed.

And Nintendo by this point, you know, this was 1986. So Nintendo was pretty much all in on, you know, Famicom, NES, and they weren't licensing stuff. But then Hudson was still making these games. So it makes me wonder, like, did Hudson have a special exception because they supported the Famicom really early on? And in a lot of ways, you know, Nintendo owed some of the success of the Famicom in the early days to the work of Hudson, games like Load Runner and nuts and milk. I don't know. Well, they also made the software for Family Basic. So that was a really, that was the tightest they probably ever got.

Okay. And I forgot about that, yes. Or it could be a business deal was made over drinks and one person didn't remember. Sure, maybe. Yeah, it was a more informal time. You hear stories of Yamuchy's capriciousness in making decisions sometimes. It could have just been a golfing buddy or whatever. It's the bubble.

Anything is possible. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting that, you know, and Nintendo was okay with this terrible butchery of Super Mario Brothers, but then a few years later, when Id came to them and were like, look, we put Super Mario Brothers 3 on a PC, let us make this game for you and publish it and you're going to be rich. It's going to be crazy.

And Nintendo said, no. Like, that does kind of speak to, you know, I think how the company clamped down by that point because you started to see less and less American-designed weird Mario paraphernalia, merchandise at that point. But I also wonder how much of that is just about relationships because Nintendo and Hudson were tight. Whereas Nintendo probably saw Id come to them and were like, who are these people? Like, we don't know them. We don't have a relationship.

Nobody's from Texas. Like, telling him they made a game. Yeah, I mean, Japanese business is so heavily predicated on relationships and trust and getting to know people and, you know, building that bond over time. So I could see where, you know, Hudson built that with them. Whereas Id did something that was, I think, in a lot of ways, more impressive than what Hudson did here and brought it to Nintendo and probably could have made Nintendo a lot of money on the PC market. But Nintendo was like, who? are you Texans? What's up? Well, and for Nintendo, like,

they do make a lot of money, so it is, it's, it's, it is weird to think of somebody just leaving millions to millions of dollars on the table, but for them, it's just like, eh, we've got money. Or also maybe at the time they were thinking, well, we've got a deal going

with Phillips or whatever, to put this somewhere else. So you get, you Texans are getting in the way of this shit. Yeah, Nintendo is always happy to turn away monies as long as they do so on their own terms.

So this was, yeah, it was them saying no on our terms. Like this is going to be, you know, how we do things. Phillips was them saying no to Sony and sticking with their own terms even though it was, you know, the outcome was terrible there. It's just awful.

I mean, PlayStation's great, but the CDI games, not so much. PlayStation doesn't have Hotel Mario. It doesn't. And we're going to have ourselves a Hotel Mario episode, one of these days. Mario checks in, but, but. but he doesn't check out. Anyway, yeah.

So, I like that. Super Iron Brothers special, weird little game. Okay, just two more things to wrap up here. All Night Nippon Super Mario Brothers, which is one of those things that in my younger days, I almost bought just because it's such a weird little novelty. But I think at this point, I have more financial responsibilities, and the game has gone up in price a lot. So it's not really something that I'm tempted by anymore.

This was basically an official Nintendo authorized ROM hack. Pretty much, yeah, one of the originals, but also not exactly unique in a realm of, like, other promotional-type games that were coming out. Right, but what was unique about it is that it is Super Mario Brothers, where things have been hacked to be, like, very, very time-and-place specific radio personalities. Yeah. It's a, yeah, it's a strange game. They took Super Mario Brothers, put it on disk system, which happened. on its own, like you could buy Super Mario Brothers on disk system. But this version of it, I guess they were like, well, we've got some extra disk space, and this

is a cheap medium. So let's give this away as a prize and use it to promote this radio program on Fuji, you know, Fuji Radio. So Gumbas and other enemies, piranha plants become like caricatures of radio personalities,

which actually is really interesting. Like, how did people even know what these radio personalities look like? Because it is radio. You don't see them. Well, I don't know what Rick Dees looks like. I could not point out Casey Kasem in a police lineup.

Wait, what? There are like eight people on the cover of the caricatures of eight people on the cover of this game, but I recommend everyone look up the cover. It's very hilarious because it has a blue sort of like the Ox King version of Bowser holding out a piranha plant to one of the women in the radio show. And it's Kotabe art. Is it Kotabe? I think so.

Yeah. It's really worth looking at. because it's just bizarre and hilarious. And they're driving in a car. Right. They're driving in a mushroom car. Well, for like a crash course in Japanese pop culture and celebrity, like you have comedians who are famous mostly on TV, but they also go on all night Nippon, which

is a long-running sort of comedy radio show that runs late at night, of course, and they have rotating hosts. And so it's a very popular sort of in-and-out thing where all these comedians come by all the time. So I guess, you know, the most contemporary regulars on that show were featured in the game. Oh, that makes sense. Okay. People would know who they are just by looking at them on TV and magazines and such.

There's more Fuji TV as opposed to Fuji Radio. No, I just mean everything. Instead of the mushroom retainers, I was going to say, instead of the mushroom retainers, it's the eight people they're caricaturing in this game. So they show up at the end of every level. They look like me's, actually. Yeah. On this cover.

I'd say this game has more in common with versus Super Mario Brothers because it has some of the change graphics. So this was only given away as a prize for a contest, is that correct, in extremely small numbers. Well, relatively small numbers. You know, there are some games like the Capcom, Rockman games, the gold Rockman games that were given away to six people who designed or eight people who designed the robot masters. It wasn't that rare. And I think, you know, like 10 years ago, you could buy it for $100, $120. Now it's a lot more.

Yeah. But so it's not like ultra rare, like where it was, you know. $2,000 a couple of like 10 years ago. If it was gold-plated, sure. Sure. I think they were just gold plastic. I plated, quote, unquote. Yeah, so anyway, it is a pretty unique and rare Mario oddity.

I don't know. Would you say it's the rarest Mario game? Or do you think maybe some of the Hudson PC games would be hard to define? Yeah, maybe. Also, it depends on what you define as a Mario game. Would you include, like, the sweater? tutorial software? Maybe not.

Mario teaches sweating. Sweeting? There's also the... Nitting sweatings. There's the version of Yoshi's cookies that sells an oven. Oh, right. That's true. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably the rarest. What version is this? I've never heard of it. It's not like another tie-in thing, but it's like Yoshi's cookie, but with like imagery for

like an oven. Oh, okay. or something like that or something else. Yeah, you had to like buy an oven in order to get this game. That's so great. Yeah, it is super scarce. Okay, so maybe not the rarest Mario game, but definitely up there. And it does have some unique content, like Ray said, it remixes some of the levels.

So it's not just like, you know, Super Mario Brothers with some slightly hacked graphics. It is changed. So if you're interested, you could, you know, download a ROM of it and try it out and be like, oh, some weird stuff here. well, that's great. I'm glad I didn't spend $200 on this. The end. So finally, to wrap this up, I want to talk about at Ray's request or suggestion, the final, would you say it's the final version of Spenryor Brothers, the final take on Super Mario Brothers besides like lost levels? Oh, I see.

Yeah, maybe. And that is Game and Watch Super Mario Brothers, which is one of the very final Game and Watches. There weren't that many more related. I think Zelda was last. Yeah, it's not the last one. They were making Game and Watches until 89, I think. This was 1987, but there weren't a lot after this. And it is kind of an impressive technical showcase of what the Game and Watch could do.

You tend to think of Game and Watch as being like a very simplistic, limited sort of single-screen game. And they used with this game, the Game and Watch technology to create a side-scrolling, you know, 2D platformer. It's very simplistic. Obviously, it doesn't have like Mario's amazing physics and fluidity and that sort of thing. But given that it was basically a calculator playing Spider-Brothers, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, it's kind of a trip, too. But it's basically just Mario weaving his way up and down through platforms. So it's less of a platformer kind of maze-ish as well because they grow in complexity, of course.

Right. Eventually in later stages, you'll just be like have Mario flying in mid-air around like barriers and things. It gets kind of trippy. It's almost in some ways like the lost levels and the ways it sort of like flips the script on itself sometimes. Does it have enemies in it? Or is it just platforming? I don't remember any enemies.

No, I think it was just, I played a lot of it too when it was new. And it was, I think it was just platforming. I just remember the constant like tick, tick sound of moving through it and just seeing new things appear like just. new platforms appears you're moving forward which are just lines like they're just different lines

and things but yeah digital bars and just digital bars but to think that you know technology that they had only used for single screen experiences for so long

even when they did Donkey Kong they're just like Donkey Kong Junior that's like well we're not doing more than one screen somehow they are able to put Mario's like for the LCD to work too Mario's Mario's character

has to be everywhere on the screen for him to be illuminated wherever you put him. That's just like a lot of real estate for a character to take up. Yeah, I imagine they had to use a more advanced watch processor for this because there were, you know,

the original idea behind Game and Watch was that a calculator chip could only produce X number of, like, you know, illuminate X number of positions. So however many pieces there are, on a digital watch, like that's the number of different phases or stages that an early

game and watch could have. And I'm pretty sure this goes way beyond the limits of those early systems. So this is an example of, I think, you know, the technology growing in a very sort of tiny and almost insignificant way. I mean, I would wonder, really, because, like, I would really like to know how this particular one was made. Yeah, for sure, because I'm sure they must have used some real trickery to, like, squeeze in all these sorts of level layouts and stuff.

And it's like almost a decade's worth of experience making these Game of Watch games. So you have these guys, I don't know, who knows what they could have figured out by then. Yeah, I have very specific memories tied to this because it was when my family moved for the first time, which is like that you're always going to remember that for the first time your family moves or if your family ever does move. I was like seven. It was 89. I'm seven. We're moving from Arkansas to Atlanta.

And this is before we had the Game Boy. Like, there was no Game Boy yet. So they, I think it was because I was just so sad or just to make me feel better. My parents got me this game and watch to play through the trip. And so it's what I remember playing the entire drive from Arkansas to Georgia. And just over and over again, like just the sound of it, the playing of it. And also as a little kid who did. didn't have a watch, just having a thing to tell me what time it was.

It was like, wow, look at this. And it was just, like, so sturdy and cool. I really like that about it. I never played it, so I can't speak about it. I haven't either. I played a lot of these Tiger games, but looking at a video of this, it seems like it's not as visually interesting, but it's way more ambitious in terms of conveying. It's very sophisticated, yeah.

In terms of conveying, like, space you're traveling through. Yeah, yeah. They reinterpreted it a few times. There is, like, a crystal version of it, like a special edition game and watch. It's just, like, a transparent version. version of it. And then they made a watch version of it as well.

That was the first sort of watch, game and watch thing that came out in America. Yeah, I had the Zelda watch, which was very well done in terms of conveying a dungeon on like an LCD watch. It didn't even fight a Glioc, right? I think there are multiple bosses. I think there's at least

two bosses. Aquamentus. That's it. It was pretty cool. My only other problem with it now, though, is because I dug it up and actually bought watch batteries and played it like a decade ago again. But it's that I really miss a D-pad on it. It does not have a D-pad. It is for

it's two buttons on one side, four on the other for the D-Pet. It's just getting you ready for Switch. Yeah. Yeah. But they already had the the D-Pad on game game and watch technology was definitely existed already. That was where the D-pad came from. Yeah, so

it's just weird to me that they didn't have it. It makes sense to me because Mario is not moving smoothly. No, that's true. You're just just tapping directions. really are just going to like, oh, now I've got to be up. No, now I've got to be down. Oh, you're not playing Mario Odyssey with a switch deep add or anything. That's true. Okay, so any final thoughts on these Mario oddities, these odds and ends of the series?

I mean, nostalgia definitely means a lot for me, because I have way more positive memories for the game and watch Mario than I do for Mario 2, which just came, lost levels just came to me at the wrong time for me to like it, perhaps. I don't know, Ray's talking it up maybe has gotten me to, maybe I'll try it again whenever it eventually comes out on the switch when I'm sure they'll have virtual console figured out of it. They're working on that one. Yeah, but maybe I'll finally give it a real shot on the switch in the future. That's all I would ask for, really, because like I just, like I said, I don't, this thing's kind of getting E-Ted. And I think that people are just relying on rumors and people on other people on forums saying it's bad or whatever.

And it's just like just try it for yourself. I mean, it's a Mario game. It's not, it's not some crazy, super table flipping thing. I mean, it is just, it's a Mario game at its core. It's platforming. It has Mario physics. Just try it. And whether you like it or not, I mean, that's fine.

But you should just try it for yourself. My standout is the original Mario Brothers. I can always slip back into it. I feel like it's, in my opinion, I think it's the most playable game of that vintage. It's still very playable today. And, again, just stare at that arcade art. I love that era of Nintendo's arcade art. If they ever make Cuphead for Switch, they should add Mario and Luigi in that side.

That would be amazing. Yeah, and also, I think it was the Metacom. Is that the name of the? Okay, yeah, they make figures of all the off-model Nintendo characters. So they do have a great little model Mario and Luigi, and I recommend you buy those and stare at them. Yeah, I missed out on those. And so you turn them to any angle than the one they're on the cover, and you're like, this is freakish.

Yeah, I also really love Mario Brothers, and it's one of those games. I mentioned on our recent Namco episode that anytime I come across DigDug in an arcade, I have to play it. And Mario Brothers is one of those also where I see it, and if the arcade actually, this game actually works, I will drop a quarter of it and play it. People always have photos of their loved ones or their pets on their iPhone, lock screen, but mine has been Mario Brothers for the past three years because those enemies are so happy and they're smiling and I love nobody. So Mario Brothers is my one true love. All right.

You love it more than your bird. Well, that's true. Well, my bird's my wallpaper, so they share equal footing in my life. Of course, of course. My mistake. All right. Well, that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts. Thanks everyone for listening and thanks guys for coming in.

Retronauts, of course, is a podcast that comes out weekly. and then some, and you can listen to it at Retronauts.com on iTunes and other such networks, and on podcast one. We are supported through Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts. That keeps the lights on for the show and for our lives. So your support is awesome, and we reward you for that support with early access one week ahead to each episode and a higher bit rate with no ads.

and that is a great and amazing deal that you just can't pass up. But if you do pass it up, that's okay. We still like you. Listen to it for free. It's cool. There's no barrier to entry here. We just liked having an audience of people listening to us. Talk about old video games.

Okay, that's enough for me. Guys, tell us about yourselves. Well, hey, I'm H-E-R-E-Y-G on Twitter. Follow me there for all my saucy opinions, but also to hear about my own podcasting empire I share with Bob. Talking Simpsons, where we do every episode of The Simpsons in chronological order, deep into season seven at the time of this recording. But you get so many more things, including what a cartoon where we go through a different cartoon episode every week in a different series in the Talking Simpsons style.

We dig into all of the references. We dig into the history. We explain it all in our fun, nerdy way. And if you love Futurama, we did the same for Futurama, but it's only on our Patreon. at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, along with a ton of other exclusives. And probably by the time this goes live, Jeremy, will be on a few episodes of Talking Futurama. Hell yeah. Maybe.

But yeah, that's, I call this. So this sales pitch has one over one person, so I consider it successful. I consider this. So I'm going to call this the combo meal for Patreon. If you get Retronauts on Patreon for three bucks and Talking Simpsons for five bucks, it's the price of a burrito. And for sacrificing one burrito meal, you will have a month of too many podcasts, frankly. You'll be drowning in podcast.

and we'll be holding your heads underwater. And you'll live longer. Yes, and you'll live longer. But yes, please donate to all of us. Even Ray. Can we Venmo you, Ray? Yeah, yeah. Cool, cool.

So we'll put that on the website. But yes, I've been Bob Mackey. Find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And please listen to all the podcasts. Thank you. Yeah. And the star of the show, please. Well, first of all, I need that breito meal.

My family is dying. Felt it's star for one night, so we might live. I'm on Twitter, R-D-B-A-A-A-A. I also make video games as Bipiddle Dog on Twitter as well. I made a game called Blast Rush, which is about as dickish as Mario Brothers at Lost Levels, which means it's much better and you should play it for sure. That's on iOS and Android and Amazon. Blah, blah, blah.

Very good. And finally, I've been Jeremy Parrish. I mentioned that maybe before, but I didn't mention that you could find me on Twitter as Gamesbyte and at Retronauts.com and other places where I do stuff and write stuff. It's great. Yeah, that's it. So we'll be back in a week with another full episode and probably this Friday for the micro. So we'll look forward to those.

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