Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 281: Mario Goes Portable

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Ray Barnholt, and Chris Kohler abandon color and extra lines of screen resolution to take a deep dive into the 2D portable Super Mario games, from Super Mario Land to Super Mario Advance 4.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, oh, Daisy! Hi, everyone. Welcome to a scintillating episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, bite-sized and monochromatic. And this week, we are talking about bite-sized monochromatic adventures for Mario, as well as some other adventures. And to join me on this tiny discourse, we have cool people in the studio, including,

Hey, it's Bob Mackey, and number one, fireballs don't bounce. That's all I'm saying. It's true, but super balls on the other hand. True. Yeah, I'm Ray Barnhold. I'm all about super balls. Let's go. Super balls.

I'm Chris Kohler. I'm wearing bunny ears for this podcast. It's very delightful. And yes, so this episode, we're going to talk about. Super Mario's portable adventures pre, his old portable adventures, not the new adventures as a new Super Mario Brothers.

Quite a while back, we actually recorded an episode on the new Super Mario Brothers series, and I'm afraid that has not actually run as of this recording, because that's kind of how things get, they get tangled up on the schedule. So what we're going to do is we're actually

going to hold on to that one, by we, I mean me. We're going to hold on to that one to run after this episode, so it's going to kind of like a chronology. So you're going to get a twofer. Nice. So this week, what you are getting is a look at Mario's portable adventures before the 3D graphics kicked in, basically. So that's Mario Land one and two, not three, and what came after that on Game Boy, because that is Wario Land, and that's a different thing entirely. But we will be looking at Super Mario Brothers Deluxe and then

the Super Mario Advance games, most of which are games we've already talked about in other contexts. So I don't think we need to go as deeply into those. But there is some kind of weird stuff about the advanced games that I didn't really realize until I went back to revisit Super Mario Advance 1 for Game Boy Works Advance

a video and was like, wow, this game is way weirder than I realized. And so now I want to talk about it. I'm sure you folks have played a fair amount of that. I know Chris, you've certainly internalized Toad's voice from that game.

you do a great toad impersonation, which you don't have to do now if you don't want to. Maybe at some point. Maybe at some point we get to it, yeah. Warn me beforehand. You've got to really build up to it. Everything in moderation. But this is also an episode

kind of designed to lay some context, some groundwork for Bob to be able to go back and revisit the Wario Land games. Because we have touched on those, but in sort of like a, I think it was like a pocket episode, wasn't it? It was kind of quick and fleeting. It was episode two of this independent run,

but it was every game. Yeah, it was every game. And I feel like some of those games deserve a deeper dive. And at the time, we hadn't really played much of, I know Bob and I hadn't played much of Virtual Boy Wario Land. No, and I still need to, but now it's going to definitely be played before I do another Wario episode. Yeah, yeah.

Like, it's, having played all the way through it, there's a lot to talk about there, too. And I think you do need to look at Mario Land one and two as a run-up to the beginning of the Wario series. Yeah, absolutely. But the Wario games are kind of their own thing, so I feel like they need to be broken out. Oh, yeah. So, yes, it's another Mario-centric episode or three.

Deal with it. That's what we're doing. That's why me and Chris are here, because we've been doing fairly consistently. Exactly. Or me and Henry, I guess. Yeah, no, Chris has been in some of these, too. It's kind of a, you know, a roundtable sort of thing, round robin. I don't know.

Right, right. Something in here is round. It's the Super Bowl. Well, of course you expect Chris to be here. I don't know why I'm here. I just, like, you know, I just defend the lost levels too much. But you're the boss of portable games, Ray? You are the Game Boy King

Okay Okay we are going to travel back in time to the dim and distant year of 1989 and the Game Boy's launch when Nintendo gave us a tiny game called Super Mario Land, which nowadays I think people tend to look at somewhat disfavorably because it's a pretty short game, it's a pretty easy game, but by God you've got to look at it in the context of 1989 where it was like, holy crap, here's something pretty similar to Super Mario Brothers,

and I can play it in the car and continue playing and beat it before it gets too dark outside for me to see. Right. It has at least like 10 times as many screens as a game and watch does. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there was a game and watch Super Mario Brothers around the same time, but it was very simplistic.

It was just like platforms that you were jumping up and down across. We talked about that weirdo. Yeah. There's not a lot to that game, whereas this does have a lot of variety. Like every stage kind of has its own theme, its own art style, grouped within four different kingdoms, all of which have their own kind of overarching theme. There are some strange gameplay variants

that you don't see in any other Mario game. They did a lot with this game. And by they, I mean, Nintendo R&D1, not Nintendo R&D4, also known as EAD. This was not a Shigara Miyamoto joint. It was going back in time to the folks who worked on Mario Brothers with Miyamoto,

and they also happen to be the Game Boy crew, basically. So they... It's like, you made the Game Boy? you better make some software for it. Something like that. This is the one Game Boy launch game, I believe, that was developed entirely internally at Nintendo, as opposed to being worked on by intelligent systems.

They're like baseball and I think Yacoban. When I say launch, I mean Japanese launch in April of 1989. And whatever the third. Oh, Alliway, yeah, those were all intelligent systems joints. But this was just Nintendo R&D-1. Gumpai Yokoi overseeing it. Satoro, Okada, the lead designer

of the Game Boy hardware, designing the game as well. So it's like the people who made the hardware were like, let's do this thing. Let's put Mario on here. And the outcome is a little odd, but it's good. So what was your first encounter? Your first journey through Super Mario Land, Bob?

So I'm not a fan of this game, but I can appreciate it intellectually. Actually, I watched a speed run of this game before I came here, so I had to spend about 12 minutes seeing the entire thing, which is, I mean, all the games of this era are that short. If you just do a speed run but um even 12 sounds long yeah i guess i guess it's more like an eight minute game i mean those uh four scrolling sections really slow down a speed run because you can't go any faster oh yeah uh but uh i had a game boy and uh probably christmas of eighty nine probably

or christmas of 90 and uh like all the kids had the game boys or at least some of the kids but um i didn't have this game but i played it on a friend's game boy and something about this as a mario fan felt wrong to me so i didn't really care for it in 89 and uh i don't especially like to play it now. I'm more of a Mario Land 2 and Warioland fan, but I do appreciate the weirdness of it. I do appreciate the sort of globe-trotting aesthetic of the game where it's sort of pulling in real world, you know, elements for Mario to play in. I just feel like the control is off and that is so important to me in a Mario game that the jump has to be right. And the jump just feels very, very wrong to me in this game. So now that I can articulate it, I know why I don't like it,

but as a kid, I was like, this just feels weird. This feels a little off to me. I guess for me, and we got the Game Boy pretty much when it launched in like this spring of 89, and it was, you know, because there was only Super Mario 1 and 2, you know, we're on the market at that point. I really had no rubric for what makes a quote-unquote real Mario game. Yeah, this felt a lot more like Super Mario Brothers than Super Mario Brothers too did. Yeah, certainly, yeah. And so I didn't really have that kind of, you know, reaction to it. I just really liked it. I just love the idea of, oh, I got a Mario game to play.

the fact that it was, I mean, I sucked at video games at that point. So, I mean, the fact that it was really easy was good because it could actually, like, beat the game. Like, I remember just, like, beating it, like, oh, my God, I can't believe I beat this game. And, like, playing it recently, it's like, how did I, how could you not beat this game? Like, how could you actually fail to beat this game? I finished it with, like, 25 extra lives in the hopper, you know? Yeah, but how did, how were you replaying it recently? Was it on original hardware?

No, it was on the, it was on the 3D. I just grabbed my 3DS because I had the virtual console version of it. Yeah, I mean, this game, you were fighting against, the Game Boy screen, which was dim, dark, blurry. Yeah. That added an element of difficulty to it. Probably, probably. Although I always, I wasn't like playing it on, you know,

I was probably just playing it underneath a lamp at somebody's house, you know, so I was playing in the most favorable conditions possible. So, yeah, that could be an issue for sure. But the total weirdness of it was something, I mean, you know, Mario games were already weird to me. So this was just weird in a new, exciting way. Right. Well, it's weird.

I kind of have the same experience as Chris, you know, when I was little, it was like, wow, I finally beat a game, that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jeez, how about that? And, you know, being a year younger than Bob, I was not quite as developed in my taste. So, you know, the things that were weird and off about it were just, like, interesting to me. Like, wow, oh, he jumps differently. Oh, these aren't really fireballs.

How about that? Because I could still go back to the real Mario games, as it were. So, yeah, I mean, I don't remember exactly when I got. It was either my birthday and summer of night. 1990 or before that, but yeah. Yeah, I played this a little bit before Super Mario Brothers 3, so I had the context of Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Bros. 2, USA. So I wasn't as put off by the fact that it didn't line up.

Like, it was weird to me that the fireballs didn't skitter along the ground, but like, like, carromed around the room. Yeah. But, you know, I was just like, well, you know, last time Mario couldn't even shoot stuff, so I guess this is better than nothing. So, yeah, like, I was willing to kind of roll with the weirdness. And I do remember finishing this the first time I played it, which was on my brother's Game Boy, a friend of mine, his father, bought both his friend and my brother Game Boy's. So when they hung out together, he had a lot of money.

They could just, like, play Game Boy together. Nice. So my brother had a Game Boy, even though he didn't really care about video games, but he very rarely let me play it. So the one time he did let me play it I played Mario Land and like cleared the game and then he was very upset with me because he hadn't cleared it and was like you can't play this anymore because

you're doing things that I haven't done yet so that's not fair I wonder if I enjoyed it I wonder if the idea of the Super Bowl in this game came from the fact that simultaneously they were developing alleyway the breakout clone for Game Boy which of course starred Mario

who was inside of the paddle and jumped out for us. you died. No, because he jumps in it, I think, at the beginning of the game. Does he? I think so. I think so. But yeah, like, I wonder if that was it. I wonder if they were just like, oh, yeah, bouncing balls. Let's just put that in Mario land, too. Yeah, I was going to say, because they figured out, like, how it just works like in a programming sense. They may be.

Sort of how, like, a balloon fight and the swimming in Mario are related. Or the same, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it could be. It could be. I mean, my thought was always that there were, you know, spright line limitations. So having the fireball go forward. basically on the same line as Mario would have caused slowdown or glitches or something. But your explanation is probably better. It could also, I mean, it could also be because they wanted the fireball to be just like solid black. And they're like, well, it doesn't look like a fireball.

Maybe it looks like a bouncing ball. That thing was so hard to track on the original screen, even though it was solid black. I mean, it made it seem like it was going faster than it was. It's not fired forget. It has a pretty clear trail of ghosting. Right, right, right. Yeah, it kind of does. Some say you can still see the lines of scroll today.

The Super Bowl does kind of go back to that weird, failed idea for Mario that he would have a gun and shoot at enemies. So they replaced with fireballs. But this kind of gets into that. And then he hops into a submarine or a biplane. Yeah, both. And actually, both. And does have a gun where he's like gunning down enemies.

So it's the most aggressive Mario game. I can't think of any other game where he's like actually shooting stuff. Right, right, right. And Nintendo did acknowledge this game for the first time, I don't know, ever, with Mario Maker 2, where that is a power-up is the Super Bowl. Like, they acknowledge a Super Bowl in a game. I don't know if they've done that outside of,

they don't like to acknowledge this game at all. Or Mario Land 2, really, I don't think. They tend not to acknowledge the games that Miyamoto's team, his crew, didn't work on. But you get the music and everything, too, for Mario Land 1, yeah. But it's not like, you know, this is some counterfeit bootleg game.

Like I said before, the people who worked on it, some of them had worked on Mario Brothers before. So that's why you get things like fighter flies and some weird little elements that you're like, oh, hey, I remember that from six or seven years ago in Mario Brothers, which back then seemed a lot longer, like a much longer time. But yeah, the thing to remember is that the Game Boy

was the first really good portable handheld system with interchangeable cartridges and dynamic screen graphics. Like, you know, the microvision had come before that like 10 years before, but that was like a, 16 by 16 monochrome Not a lot of stuff going on there. I got to play the Epic Game Pocket

Computer for the first time earlier this year and it was interesting but it was still a lot more limited than Game Boy. That came five years before Game Boy, but it didn't go anywhere. It had like six games. I don't know. Do you guys have any info on why the game

pocket computer flopped? It seems like it should have been huge. Was it just too expensive? Did Epic just not know how to sell stuff? I mean, I'm just guessing maybe it was too expensive, maybe it was too large, you know, because it was a pretty big kind of thing. It wasn't that huge. But the game and watches were a lot smaller than you, right?

I mean, the marketing for Game Boy was very good, and it was also riding the Nintendo Wave, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Epoch was a toy company, so, I mean, you have other examples in history which is like, this toy company doesn't really know how to market a video game, right? You know, Epic had a lot of portable game and watch style games that were pretty prevalent at retail. Like we had Epic Man and there were there were quite a few others that they made that made it into the market and I feel like they sold okay. Well pretty much they matured and basically resigned themselves to making Dorai Mon games for for Game Boy. But the cassette vision also

released before Famicom right. So that's like twice that they basically beat Nintendo to the punch and yet I feel like with Nintendo's own thing and Nintendo like it didn't do anything and Nintendo came along we're like here's how you do it. Yeah who knows maybe it's just like you know engineers being pulled in different directions and not having time to work on games and software and stuff because it wasn't like they would... Obviously, they didn't come up with a licensing system

and get other people to make games for their stuff. In any case, yeah, it was just a real novelty to be able to play a game like Super Mario Brothers, even if it was like half as much of a game with 12 stages. Actually, that's like a third of the game. Yeah. But, you know, it still felt like a real accomplishment

as opposed to something like, on Gamein Watch. Right. It was not a single screen of kind of pre-printed graphics, but it was, you know, dynamic and changing. It scrolled. It had, you know, secret stages. It had one-ups hidden. It had just all the stuff you expected.

There's a lot of really kind of cool stuff in this game. Lots of little details that I really enjoy. Like the way at the end of each stage, the levels kind of split. And you have, like, the hard path and the easy path. And if you go the hard path, then you get to play a little Amma Dikuchi game. where something is kind of like coming down. Yeah. It always goes on the right path.

Is that how it works? I can't remember. No, it's upper and lower. So, I mean, if you can get into the upper exit doors, then you get to play. Well, so it's not the game whose name I can't quite remember either, but it's... I'm a Coogee. That's it. Okay, so that's in Mario Land 2 as one of the bonus stages.

The Mario Land 1 is literally just, it's four platforms, and then Mario bounces between each platform. And there's also a ladder. So it is kind of based on that. Yeah. And then you either get a one up, a two, up, a three up, or a power, or a Superball flower. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, like I said, there's the, you said a high, low path.

I mean, I consider it. Yeah, I consider the high path, the hard path. Because you can't always get up there. Like, if you don't know it's coming, then sometimes you can't, you know, go back and make your way up there. There's, like, falling platforms or something or just some sort of platform that's too high for you to reach. So you kind of have to prepare yourself, like, oh, I'm getting close to the end of the stage. it's time to prep for this alternate route. Yeah.

What I remember most about it is, I mean, the weirdness, you know, not just in the fact that like, you know, the enemies are slightly different or the physics are slightly different, but also just like, okay, there is the one stage in World 2 in which there are invisible platforms that you can stand on to go to stand an invisible platform to go underneath the stage, which is very anti- Mario. Oh, yeah, because there's no indication that they're there.

But instead of, it's the stage in, I think it's like World 2, 2, I want to say. And you go into this sort of like a tunnel with a ceiling where you can get underneath it. And you can see if you're on top, you can see that there's platforms underneath you. It's like, how do I get there? Oh, you jump like you're going to jump into the water, but you actually end up landing on invisible platforms that will let you walk underneath the stage. Or even in stage 1-2, I think, where there's a part where there's a whole big collection of coins that you can only get if you're small Mario.

But if you're big Mario, you can duck and wedge yourself under the bricks and sort of jump and move forward. There's a lot of points in the game where you can sort of skip things by kind of ducking under and, like, you know, moving yourself through the geometry because there's so much weirdness with, like, hit detection and things and clipping and stuff like that in the game. And I always, because the game is so small, you can kind of find out all that stuff because you're playing these levels over and over. And also, again, I think in World One, two, there's invisible blocks that have little elevators in them. And you hit the invisible block. Yeah. And you can hit the invisible block and has a little elevator in it. You stand in the elevator and it brings you up through the ceiling into the ceiling where you can get the coins on the top and then get to pipes.

And there's some, you know, you go down pipes to go to hidden bonus areas with extra coins. But there's some bonus areas. Some of the bonus areas have spikes in them. some of the bonus areas you have to go down the pipe and then immediately hold right or else you won't get into the area with the coins you have to make Mario falls. All this stuff that like Miyamoto would probably look at

and be like, well that's just mean, we can't do that. But then this game just sort of did all that. It was still easy, right? But it was just they put in all these weird little things for you to do if you would kind of master the game already. And yeah, that is something to do because the game is very short and so there is the kind of expectation

that you're going to replay it. I mean, even if you beat the game, again, it is very brief, and, yeah, there's no way to save your progress. So you're always starting over from the beginning. So there is a lot of, as you say, kind of variety and different ways to do stuff and little secrets to look out for. So, yeah, there's some stuff here that I didn't know about. I've never really poked around to find the secrets in this game. It's all in the official Game Boy Players guide, Jeremy. I didn't do my reading.

I could have brought that. Yeah, okay. Actually, one of the credits in the game is. is to Masaro Yamanaka for Amida, the middle mini-game. So they did refer to it as... Oh, oh, they did. Oh, okay. There we go.

Yeah, so that's something. But this is another Mario game. The second in a row released in the U.S., not so much in Japan, where Bowser does not appear. Yep. Princess Peach does not appear in this one. You're rescuing Princess Daisy from Tatanga in the Kingdom of Sarasa land, as opposed to rescuing Peach from Bowser in the Mushroom Kingdom.

It's all kind of the same thing, but it's... It does kind of, I don't know, like if you were following Mario games as they came out in the U.S., it actually kind of felt weird with Mario 3 to go back to Bowser and teach. Right, right, right. There had always been a different plot, so up until that. So it felt more regressive than it was. Whereas in Japan, it was like Super Mario Brothers lost levels, Super Mario Brothers 3, then, you know, Mario USA came later, and that came after Mario Land. Right, right, right. So it was kind of like these little sidebars.

Yeah, it was Mario 3 and then Mario, yeah. So if you had played Mario Land after one, two, and three, that would have been a big switchup for you in Japan. Yeah. Yeah. I think this game is also wacky because it's reflecting what Japanese pop culture was about in the 80s and that's supernatural things. Like, so you fight an alien as the main boss. Yeah. And there are like Easter Island statues and Chinese vampires and it's just all very, like, of the occult of the supernatural of the otherworldly, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, you even start world two by being like dropped off by a UFO. That's true. Yeah. There's, like, a UFO at the beginning. Is the water level, like, the Bermuda or something? Is that what they're trying to say? I don't know.

I don't think they're trying to say much of anything. Oh, muda. That's the name of the kingdom. So I never made that connection. But, yeah, I guess it's like the Bermuda Triangle Stee. Wow. We discovered something here today. So you can only escape by submarine, not by plane.

Yep. So, yeah, the kingdoms are Birabuto, which is pretty much like Super Mario Brothers 3, World 3, with pyramids and stuff in the background. Lots of platforms and mushroom style things to jump across. Muda Kingdom, which is apparently Bermuda Triangle, lots of water, long expanses of just, you know, platforms over water. The Eastern Kingdom, which has the Easter Island and also kind of like an Amazon vibe where you're in underground caves and there's waterfalls and stuff. And then Chai, the Chai Kingdom, where you have bamboo trees in the background and Kionchi hopping vampires to attack. It's all very...

The only thing I can't figure out is Biorabuto, what the... that would I do not know. We need a Legends of Localization book about this. What would they name all of these things? That would be one page, basically. Yeah. Yeah. But also, I buy it.

Speaking of the Japanese names here, like mystery Japanese names. Yeah. None of the enemy names were localized. Right, right. All of them are basically, like, just taken from the Japanese. Yeah. Which makes everything seem really strange if you're used to seeing, you know, turtles called cupas.

Right. And mushrooms called gumbas. Yep. Here, they're noco bones, which is like nookinoco plus bomb. Right. And that's what they are. They're exploding coupas. You jump on them and they explode.

And chibi bow, which is a chibi curibo, which is what they are, like small gumba in Japan. But at the time, we didn't. I didn't know. I had no idea. I didn't know any Japanese at all, except for Sayonara. And that is not one of the enemy names. So, yeah, like, it's just they didn't bother to, for whatever reason. They didn't localize any of the character names.

I've wondered why that is. now the character names have been localized, so when they show up in other games... Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, some of the characters have shown up or enemies have shown up in other games, and they have, you know, kind of standardized English language names. They're like bomb trupas or whatever instead of... Yeah, but it did give everything like this sense of, wow, it's weird. There's this like Tatanga guy and you're flying around in an airplane

and the mushrooms are called different things and it's Princess Daisy. Wow, what's up? this is kooky and weird. Right. But then there was no, it was all a dream explanation or anything. No. It's just a... Mario's just a world traveler.

At the end, you shoot the hell out of Tatanga and murder him forever. Oh, not forever. He comes back. Does he? He's a boss in Mariland, too. Oh, right. Yeah. He is.

Okay, so you get to fight his revenant a game later. Pretty much. But he's not even the main boss of that game. He's a boss. Okay. He is a boss. That's right. Because Wario is the boss of the second game.

Oh, yeah. So is there anything more to say about Super Mario? The music is excellent. Excellent. And that's really like that's like one of the best parts about going back and replaying that game for me. It's just like having a fun, good old time with that music. I actually like the overworld music better than any of the main Mario games overmute world music.

Yeah. It's just, it's so catchy. The Chinese music is very funny for how on the nose it is. But that's the only bad song. Although it gets better after that initial part. Right. So that's it, that's a small game, and there's a small game and there's a small game and there's not a little bit of the, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's, it's, it is a small game and there's not, uh, what about the, uh, the daisy stuff? Like, we didn't talk about, as a kid, that, that, like, troubled me where you would, so in Mario 1, you would rescue, you know, you would think you're rescuing Princess Toadstool, but that would be a toad or be a toad creature.

And this one, you see Daisy, you approach her, but she becomes an enemy and, like, jumps away. So, like, I, in my brain, I was like, that she is this, like, a monster in disguise? Does she curse? Like, what's going on here? Yeah, it's the same magic that causes the Bowser's in Worlds, 1-4 through 7-4 to. turn into a different thing when you shoot them. For some reason, it really upset me as a kid, that whole, that whole thing. I don't know why.

I always took it as, you know, just like a variant on our princesses in a different castle. It's like, you think you've rescued the princess, but actually it was a monster in disguise. You suck her. And Daisy really became sort of the female Waluigi and that the joke is how one note her character is, where it's a slightly off version of this thing you know. Right, right, yeah. Yeah, she doesn't have a lot of personality. Like her main character take in other games is that she says her name a lot.

That's true. Hi, I'm Daisy. But she is a shadow fighter? Is that what that is? Whatever the Smash Brothers. Echo fighter? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's an echo fighter, I think, for Princess Pete.

She is, yeah. Well, she also shows up a lot in Mario Card and the Mario Sports game. She shows up in the movie. She does. She does. That was really, that was kind of strange. The Dennis Hopper movie? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, when they were like, oh, yeah, she's playing the princess, Daisy. But she has a pink dress, you idiot. It's not called Super Mario Land of the movie. It's where they went to dipped into that lore for one character. What year was the movie? 93.

Yeah. Oh, so it wasn't even like a recent thing. No, no, no, no. Oh, so I have a localization note from Nina Matsumoto who is sitting behind me. And she says, Birabuto is a localization mistake. It's supposed to be Piraputo, Pira as in Pyramid and Puto as in Egypt. Oh, no. Aji Puto in Japanese is Egypt.

Yeah. Egypito. I guess. But someone mistook the P sounds as B sounds. Really? There you go. Huh. So basically they didn't even, thank you, Nina.

And so they didn't even like, they didn't localize it. They didn't even not localize it correctly. They didn't transliterate it correctly. Wow. Good times. So your P's as B's. Wow. I think we broke that new story.

Fantastic. Our Nina broke it. Incredible. You put it here first, folks. When all the blogs run it after this episode posts, we'll credit Nina. Man, we've got, we've got someone going to scoop us right here in this podcast. I promise not. We see it on Kotaku.

This is your last retronaut's invitation. Maybe it's one last thing to dovetail into Mario Land too. It's kind of funny how Daisy and Wario are like the only Game Boy universe characters that still like survived to like today or like now they're like the main reoccurring characters. Yeah. I guess there's no Captain Syrup. Is that the witch in Mario Land? She's never been in, uh, I guess there's a Syrup in Zelda. There's like there's a witch named Surrup in Zelda or Syrup.

Probably want to say that word. Yeah. Yeah. Unrelated. Unrelated. Yeah, get out here, Mr. Wario Land. Jeez. All right, so let us talk about Wario and other sad things.

So Super Mario Land 2, six golden coins, came three years later, 1992, and looked a lot more of the part. Super Mario Land has very tiny graphics. Mario is, he's so small. Everything is so tiny. Yeah. And Super Mario Land, too, that's not the case. everyone is much larger. Like Mario, you know, when he starts out small,

he's basically as big as Super Mario in Super Mario Land, but then he gets the whatever the hell power up. Is it mushrooms in Mario Land too? It is. Yeah, yeah. But then he gets carrots and turns into something else. Yeah. But yeah, he gets a mushroom and he gets much bigger.

Yeah. But yeah, going back and replaying this game a few weeks ago to prep for this podcast, I was actually really surprised by how off the physics in this game feel. Like, Mario Land, you know, everything's kind of limited and kind of compressed. but here everything feels sort of floaty and... Yeah.

Oh, there's lag. It chugs. I will say, like, it's trying to do too much, but I do respect it for that in a Link's Awakening sense, where that game also chugged at times. Yeah, I don't know if it was, like, is it chugging because it's trying to do too much and put too many big sprites on the screen, or is it slow because all of the elements on the screen are so large

that they kind of, maybe they had to make the game play a little bit slowly, just so you had the ability to react, you know, when an enemy was to come. Because there was a lot of times, I didn't play through all of Mario Land, too. I probably played through about half of it in preparation for this to get to remind myself. And there's a lot of times when, like, you know, major things are just off-screen, you know, like you jump off a platform and, oops, there were spikes underneath you sitting just off-screen all the time because, you know, there's very little screen real estate because they want to make those sprites really, you know, big this time around.

And I wonder if just making the game play slowly was an effort to compensate for that. Yeah, this gets to sort of a recurring thing that I address in Game Boy Works videos that I've been producing is that you do occasionally come across these games where they're like, look at how big the things we can put on the screen are. We're not going to make little tiny, squatty sprites. We're going to make big sprites. And it really compromises the game because the resolution of the Game Boy is so low. when you get any S-sized sprites in Game Boy's resolution, it just compromises the game a lot of the time.

And I don't think it's a coincidence that in this game, Mario's kind of his main new power, the bunny ears that let them fly, are about hovering. So when you see something come up, you can be like, oh, crap, and you can start mashing the button and cause them to slow down so you can steer yourself away.

It's kind of to avoid those hazards. I can see why they immediately move to Warrior Because the sprites are, I think, even bigger in that game, but it's a character who can't run and say it's about moving very slowly and trying to find things instead of just zipping from point A to point B. Like, I can definitely see why they've decided, like, let's go a different way. Like, we like how good this game looks and how many ideas there are in it, but it just doesn't run the right way. Yeah, and, you know, by taking an even slower approach with Warioland, they were able to make more detailed worlds. Like, the graphics in Warioland are a lot nicer than Rarioland, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I feel like this game is just, like, I really liked it when I played it for the first time about a decade ago. But going back to it now, after having spent a lot of time with, you know, other games in the series and other Game Boy games, I'm kind of like, mm-hmm. This is what I mean. I don't know about this one. This is what I mean when I say to understand the Wario-Land games, you have to play the Mario-Land games and understand the design of those because they, so I did some reading what I was doing an article a couple of years ago about the Wario-Land games, about, like, Mario Land 2 especially. And, I mean, a couple of things where, one, a lot of people on the Game Boy really found it difficult to hold the run button and jump at the same time. And so then when you look at Wario Land, you don't actually have to hold B and jump. The B and the A buttons do sort of, you're pressing them at different times.

And so that, that I think, is one of the reasons why Wario Land was designed the way it was more. It is a slower game. Like, I think just in general they were learning that fast action on the Game Boy, was kind of hard to keep up with. So they slowed it all down. Again, even Mario Land 2 was slowed down. The other thing is that... So with Mario Land 2, you know,

they kind of took the sprite design right from Super Mario World World, right? Like Mario looks like Mario World Mario. The mushrooms look like Mario World mushrooms. And they were kind of torn as they were developing this game between... They wanted to make it weird because they were like,

well, if we try to just copy Super Mario World, people will see that they're playing an inferior copy of Super Mario World. So we've got to make this game, weird so that it is its own thing and so people don't you know think back to the game that they you know compare it and think that it's an inferior version of something else but then as they're developing it they were getting weirder and weirder and weirder and then there was a sense of somebody putting their hand up saying yeah but is this Mario like it's so weird is

it Mario and so that's kind of what you get with Mario land too which is a lot of times when they stay tend to diverge quite a bit from you know what what was becoming at that point and established, quote-unquote, Mario game. But at the same time, we're trying to make it a little bit more Mario-ish as well. And so that's kind of why it's like it's not super satisfying. Like it doesn't really feel cohesive. It's kind of a strange halfway point. Do you think maybe there are some lessons learned there when they were making Link's Awakening?

Yeah, maybe. It has its weirdness, but it also feels like a proper Zelda game. Right, right, right. But, of course, the weird thing was that Link's Awakening was that it was like all the, the Mario games weren't made by the Mario team, but Link's Awakening was made by the Mario team. So the Mario Games didn't use Mario characters. Then Link's Awakening used every Mario character.

It's true. Strange days. Oh, also, remember how there's one level in, and I'm not the first person to think of this, obviously, but I only just realized it because the last time I played Mario Land 2 was when it came out, and then I just played it again now. There's a level that's built out of Legos, like Legos, and there's a little, not super secret,

but there's a secret-ish room in there. where you pick up a whole bunch of coins. And as you're getting the coins, you can see one of the Legos says N and B on it, N ampersand B. And at the time, being a child, I was like, I don't know what that is and, you know, forgot about it. And now, of course, I know that that was actually Nintendo's brand of Lego style blocks, Nintendo Block, N&B. Well, and, you know, the Nintendo R&D1 group was back at Nintendo. Sure. When Nintendo and Block was an actual product.

Yeah. Gunplay Yokoy was, that was the 70s, right? So he had been there since the mid-70s, 60s. Yeah, so they get a little throwback with your own product. I mean, R&1 was always good about little throwbacks to the pre-video game history of Nintendo. Yeah, in 10 years, you'd see that in Mario where, like, oh, did you know about this cowboy toy or this, you know, ultra-hand thing? They would like to sneak those references in. Right, right, right, right.

Yeah, but, you know, kind of talking about the, you know, is this Mario? Like, maybe it's not a coincidence that Mario's enemy in this game is. kind of himself. It's like a weird, twisted version of himself. So there's like this, this kind of existential conflict. Like, Mario is sort of struggling against what he is here on Game Boy. Mario Land 2 is a persona dungeon. Yeah, it pretty much is.

Wario is the shadow of the true self. Oh, God, the Wario. So I watched Spearna of this too today, and I forgot how amazing the Wario Sprite is. You don't see it until the end, but he's huge. He's got bug eyes. He's ugly. He's, like, asymmetrical. Like, Wario Land One Mario is like sort of my preferred Wario.

just ugly enough, but this one is just sort of like, it's my fat Garfield to today's, like, over-designed Garfield. I love him. We need a Wario with a pipe. Yes, exactly. But, man, and, like, the boss fight is so cool because you fight him, and he uses all of the power-ups in the game, like, in each stage of the boss fight.

You go for, like, room-to-room. Like, first it's, like, the regular Mario, then it's a, you know, bunny-eer warrior, then it's fire Wario. So you go through, like, all these different phases. That's super clever. Yeah. Yeah, so you mentioned earlier also that the game is reminiscent of Super Mario World in a lot of ways. And I think the way that for me stands out the most is the way it uses the world map. And it is this kind of dynamic changing world map.

It's very much like Super Mario World, except here it's not so linear. Like from the very beginning, once you complete the first world, you can pretty much go. to any other world and start poking around. You can go to the pumpkin zone, the macro zone, the Mario zone, the turtle zone. I love the entrance to that because you're just like walking along the map and all of a sudden there's this giant turtle up to the side and its neck pops out and it goes and it's Mario. And the space zone is you go to the hippo that blows bubbles out its nose. Then you have to get in the bubble and finish the stage by getting to the top door, not the

bottom door. And then if you go to the top door, it goes to you go to the space zone. But then if you complete the space zone or leave it, you have to play that hippo level again to get back into the space area. It is, I mean, the non-linearity of it is like, is there another Mario game that even does that? No, I mean, Mario World is probably the closest, and it's semi-linear.

Like, there are times you can take shortcuts or alternate routes, but it's not like this. But even then, it's like the shortcuts or alternate routes is like it's gated off by, to even get those shortcuts, you have to be really good at playing the games. so you're probably okay with skipping to another level. And even then you know, it's like, oh, I'm skipping ahead to harder levels. In this case, it's like, go wherever you want.

There's also one random level. It's like just on the world map itself. There's just like an extra level. You can go in there and beat it and nothing happens. And nobody has ever figured. I mean, there is nothing to it. Like nobody's ever figured out like what the deal is with that. A lot of the game, if I recall, is a lot of it can be just picking up coins to gamble with to earn lives.

So a lot of it is just like getting lots of coins to pull the slot machine. I got 999 coins. I went to the slot machine and did the 999 coins one. And there's like there's some prizes that are like, you could get a 99 up. I got a five up. I was like, those bastards. But yeah, they really did take a lot of creativity with the different zones. We want to talk about these like pumpkin zone.

Yeah. Yeah. Like I do like how you see enemies maybe only for one stage. So this zone has the Goombahs with the Jason. masks, and I think there are axes in their heads, maybe. I could be imagining that part. It's like a Halloween theme. Yeah, yeah. But there are just so many enemies you will see once in their very,

they have very cool designs, almost like a bonk's revenge style, just like grotesque, like a gag manga style enemies. Yeah. And like so many one-off things, like when you're in the space zone, like Chris mentioned earlier, Mario is in a space suit for the only time in the game. Like they do so many like unique art assets, which was fun to see after

the very limited assets of the first Mario Land. Do you guys have any particular favorite stages or areas? I love going into the giant robot Mario That's very fun I mean it's an old observation But I do love the fact that the if you go to his lower abdomen The level is full of balls

It's oh man Oh I forgot about that It's being a Super Bowl Yeah But where you are in those world And I love the world maps in this game Like where you are Is reflected in the stages of themselves

So I think that's very cool too Yes Yeah and the space I guess I like the space zone Because I mean first of all it's only there's a secret level, but in general, it's only two levels. And one of them, it's low gravity, right? And then in the next one, it's not zero gravity, but you can float in the air. You can jump in the air, which you can.

That's the only stage you can do that, and I think. And then, you know, it's different than the first one where you just jump a little bit higher. And then it ends with, of course, the boss fight with Tatanga, which is actually a really good boss fight. And then when you get the secret level, it's like an asteroid or a comet comes and smacks the moon in the face, and the moon goes from smiling. Yeah. Yes. Like really,

really cute. None of it makes any sense whatsoever. It's like, where the hell is Mario at this point? Like, it's not even, it's not even thematically. It's just like on this weird island

where like there's a hippo and a turtle and also Mario's castle is there. Yeah. How does Mario have a castle? Yeah. Whoever said Mario owned. Well, also, did he build the Mario's own,

you know, this self-indulgent robotic monument to himself? Right, right. Or did it just, did somebody just happen to build it a few steps away from Mario's castle? Probably, I mean, I think we're to assume that Mario built it.

Yeah, I mean, the whole premise originally with Wario is that Mario was kind of a dick to him. Yeah. And he was like the cool guy who always had the success. So it kind of follows from that storyline that Mario was basically like, hey, check it out. I saved the princess from Bowser a lot. So I made a giant monument to me next to my castle. Yeah. The official story is that while Mario was in the doing it Mario Land One Adventures,

Mario took over his private island and brainwashed all the citizens. So Mario was just killing all of his former citizens of his kingdom, his private kingdom, I guess. Same concept of when you can't break the bricks in the original Mario. They're supposed to be imprisoned. If I were a mushroom kingdom citizen,

I would have wanted to have been transformed into a horsehair plant because they wouldn't break like... I'd be a cloud. I'm just on the background layer. Yeah, so any other thoughts on Super Mario? to six golden coin. That feather is not okay.

No? We can't do the feather anymore. I'm sorry. The turban? Yeah. No, it's not a turban. It's just a, it's a single feather. A native American feather.

Oh, what am I misremembering? Is there a turban in the game? No, no, there's no turban. But maybe I'm getting this completely. When he gets a fire flower, Fire Mario has a feather, just a feather on his hat to basically signify that. Oh, he's fire Mario because they can't just pallet swap them. But it looks a certain way.

Yeah, I think this is not me being like a, cute or smart ass or whatever. I think Kirby got rid of that idea where the fire, the sort of Native American headdress was sort of the fire signifier in video games. And it's happening here. And we've moved on past that as a people. How did that connection even come about in the first place? I really don't know.

I honestly don't understand why fire is associated with native indigenous people of North America. But that's just what the iconography is. I never thought about it as a kid. Like, oh, yeah, he's got a feather. But I guess it's just something you could stick on his head because you can't change the colors. of the game. Right. And it would have looked weird for him to have had a fireflower on us. Yeah, yeah. But the bunny ears are very, very cute. And I like the idea of a carer power-up.

But the one thing this game is lacking is that it has no unique power-ups. They're just a version of things you already do in other games. Yeah. Yeah, I guess the rabbit ears are kind of like the tail. Yeah. And even then you don't, you can't build up like a P-meter to fly. The rabbit ears just for floating downwards and extending jumps. Yeah. But the idea of the hats did carry over into the first Wario-land game. That is true, yeah. And Wario Land on Virtual Boy. Those are the two games where Wario powers up by changing his hats.

The hats are very cool in that game. And I like it best in Virtual Boy Wario Land because they're compound hats. You can get like the wings and the dragon and fly and breathe fire. Yeah, that rules. Yes. Good stuff. So this was kind of the trial run for the Superior Wario Land games. And it's interesting and weird and fun a little bit off, but they would rectify

all of that with Wario Land, and we'll address that in some other episode. But for now, I think we need to take a quick pause and then jump into the rehash era. Hey, Benito. I've been reading the Bible lately, and nobody ever told me how many talking dogs in wizard battles were in this thing. Well, Chris, you know what I always say. If you can understand Star Wars, you can understand the Bible. Apocrypal's. Part of the Greenlit

podcast network. Come on in. What can I get you? Sure I've heard of hair. of the Dogcast. They're that podcast about video games and beer. From the latest gaming headlines to diving deep into the games of yesterday to sampling and reviewing craft beer from all over the world, hair of the dogcast is here for the gamer and beer lover and all

of us. Available weekly on the Greenlit podcast network. Hey folks, it's Asif Khan, CEO at Editor-in-Chief over at shack news dot com. Give a listen to our 9 to 5 Elon podcast about Tesla and electric vehicles and all sorts of cool stuff over there

on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Thank you. So Super Mario Land 2 happened in 1992, and that was the last Mario platformer for a long time, more or less. But Bob, I think something is killing you. Something is bubbling up from deep inside. It's not that important. I love the music for this game. It's all based around one melody, like Mario World style, and it's all by Totaka.

And it's very, very good. It's very, very catchy. I like it more than the first game's music but I really like the first game's music so it's just him doing even better and the soundtrack sounds a lot richer and fuller I think like they understood how to do more with the Game Boy at this point musically

so a very very good soundtrack I like it a lot So yeah as I was saying Mario kind of checked out Wario took over the Mario Land series it eventually just warped into Wario Land Mario kind of put in an appearance in 1994 in the Donkey Kong remake

expansion, but that wasn't really a traditional Mario-style game. It was very old-school puzzle platformer. Mario wouldn't actually be in an all-new portable platform game until 2006's New Super Mario Bros. But in between here and there, there were five Mario games that were all remakes of previous Mario games, and these weren't just ports. There was a lot going on in these games. So the first of these was in 1999, and that was Super Mario Brothers Deluxe for Game Boy Color. Did you guys

own this one? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I will tell you. Oh. Really? So, yeah, I didn't feel any need to, like, replay Super Mario Bros. One on my Game Boy Color. Like, I had a Game Boy Color, and I had a couple of games for it, but I didn't really feel

any need to play it. And my friends... But did you feel they need to play Super Mario Writers' The Lost Mom had, well, no, because I had played that on, well, on emulators at that point if I really needed to. I think that, I mean, yeah, New Super Mario, or not New Super Mario, but it's, like, Super Mario Brothers Deluxe was a post, you know, emulators release, a post-nestical release. So I could play Super Mario Bros. on my computer if I wanted to. I play Mario All-Stars. I did not feel the need to go and spend, like, 30, 40 bucks or whatever it was, just to have, like, Mario 1 and 2. And then, as I was going to say, my friend's mom had it.

So I actually played it all through on her copy. But on Nesicle, could you play it with reduced resolution that made it much harder? Yeah. Yeah. So let me say this about Super Mario Brothers Deluxe because, again, I played some of that coming in here. It stinks. It's not a good. No, it's not.

I would not tell somebody to play this version of this game if they want to, if they want to play Super Mario Brothers, it's very compromised. I was a big amelator like Chris. an emulation style guy, and even with that under my belt, stealing left and rights. A criminal, yes, I was stealing. I was a grand larceny was my game. But, yeah, I bought this just for the sheer novelty of like, wow, like this can work on this small screen. And I had immediate buyer's remorse, but I think the box art was too attractive. There's something about this box art that I love.

It's good. It's good, it's good box art. Yeah, it's really good. Brand new art. Ray, do you have a counterpoint to this? Oh, not only do I have a counterpoint. Right, I have like a whole counter story. Hell yeah, let's go for it.

Okay, first of all. I knew you were here for a reason. First of all, I bought two copies, one to keep sealed, which I still have. Wow. But this, okay, I digress. Super Mario Brothers one was just very special to me at that time because it was like, this game came out basically 10 years after I started video games, you know, playing video games with an NES and all that.

So obviously Super Mario Brothers was like the really first key game I started playing. So you have that just stacked on top. with the fact like Bob mentioned this is the novelty of it and having it portable was really interesting to me and it was kind of like one of those things where it's like yeah I expected them to do this and by God they actually did it because you know the Game Boy Color was getting so many other NES ports from various sources and also like the DX upgrades and things so to finally get like you know a full NES game so to speak on Game Boy Collar was very cool to me and I could deal with the resolutions change however I am not

going to like defend it to the death or anything because obviously it is inferior to the original home version and I wouldn't say oh you have to play it um in fact I think in the case of a lot of what we're going to be talking about like you kind of had to be there but this is my story I was there but I mean that's that's that's basically the entirety of this episode is you had to be there like game boy game boy color these even game boy advance like I would tell people you know try Mario land try those two games because those are different. Right.

I mean, they're different, but, you know, there are a lot of compromises to go hand in hand with trying to have console-style experiences on these handhelds. And I don't know that people who didn't play these handheld systems

back when they were new, and that's all you could play on the go. Like, I don't think they can necessarily appreciate the fact that, hey, this was as good as it got. Like, Switch was not a thing that we could conceive of in 1999. The fact that your home console

could you just take it off the charger and play it on the go? Like, no, that didn't happen. We had the nomad. We had the nomad. We had the PC engine GT or whatever, you know, the Turbo Express. Yeah, spend $1,000. But those weren't dedicated handheld systems. Those were handhelds that could play console games.

Like, no one designed games around the Nomad. Different set of compromises. No one designed games for the Turbo Express. Like, that just didn't happen. taking a console game and making it work on Game Boy Color, you know, a system with a slower chip, basically, a slower processor than the NES and much lower resolution, things had to happen, things had to be cut.

And what I really like about Super Mario Brothers Deluxe, it's not that fun to play in a lot of ways because it is compromised. But what I like about it, what I like about it is all the things they did to add to this game to say like, hey, we get it. this is not as good as playing Super Mario Brothers on NES or playing Super Mario All-Stars, which was probably still in stores at this time. Yeah.

If you looked in the right places, there's like, you know, a couple of copies left at Kmart or whatever. So they said, let's add a lot of other stuff. One, you've got Super Mario Brothers to the loss levels. It's called Super Mario for Super Players here. That's unlockable when you score 300,000 points in Super Mario Brothers, which is kind of a challenge in this version of the game. But there's all kinds of extra stuff. just loaded with extras, like fun, frivolous, goofy extras.

And also some, like, meaningful extras. I do appreciate that there is a world map. And so you are kind of encouraged to not just warp your way through the game, but actually go through it and it keeps track of what levels you beat. So it does get you to explore the entirety of Super Mario Brothers instead of just warping your way past all the goals of the levels. Yeah, it makes it look more cohesive, like in line with the sequels. It's like, oh, yeah, this was a actual world that Mario was traveling through.

right, right, yeah. He went to the water and came out of the water. But there's all kinds of extra stuff, and I think to really understand what they were doing with this game, you need to look at the Game and Watch gallery games, because those were taking Game and Watch handhelds, like very simple, primitive, black and white

handholds, and saying, let's remake these on Game Boy, Game Boy Color. So in addition to, you know, like, very, very faithfully recreating these old 1980s LCD handhelds, they said let's also include, you know, rearrange modes with new graphics and new gameplay mechanics, and then we'll throw in a gallery

of all kinds of things you can unlock when you hit certain objectives and there's milestones. They basically said what we're putting here is not necessarily the most compelling thing you could own of its own merits, but look at all the stuff that surrounds it. And I really wish that we saw more retro remakes and compilations with this kind of care and just this extensive, exhaustive degree of extras added to it because no one does this anymore. And all the extra stuff in this

really sells the package. You may not like playing Super Mario Brothers to the loss levels quite as much when you can only see like a third of the screen information. It's hard as balls. But there's so much cool extra stuff that you just, I do recommend this game to everyone.

Just like look how much love they put into this. Something this game has is achievement. It has a bunch of achievements for doing different things in the game. Yeah. No, I was, I mean, I thought, like, I kind of wasted $30 when $30 was hard to come by in 1999. But I did, like, stupid, goofy things like their world map, the animation you would get when you, like, defeated Bowser. Like, there was, like, a new destroying the castle animation thingy, but also, like, all of the... Yeah, just like Super Mario World. Yeah, exactly.

But, like, achievements, things like that, they wanted to add more to a very basic old, like a 15-year-old experience at that point. They tried to dress it up as much as they could without altering the game any more than they had to make it work. Yeah, on the Game Boy. I mean, like I alluded to, like Digital Eclipse was porting 1942 and Ghost and Goblins of the Game Boy color. And they made them play, you know, a little bit better, but they were bare bones otherwise. Yeah, I mean, they were basically, like they said, hey, why don't we take the Micronix game and put that on Game Boy, just like it was. And, yeah, not a lot of fun. I did not enjoy spending money on those.

You also had, like, Crystallis, which I think came later than this. I think it was 2000. Yeah. That was Nintendo, do we know. That was Nintendo. Well, NST, yeah. Yeah, the Bionic Commando style remake? There was an all-new game.

Yeah. But they were, they're like, hey, we have a color portable system now. Let's go back and mine that old comment. Space Marauder was Burai Fighter. There were a lot of these games that took, you know, an NES game and were like, hey, deja vu. And DejaVu, and DejaVu, too. That was great. Like, here was an unreleased NES game, like a lost levels kind of experience.

And they put it on Game Boy Color. but none of it came close to doing what they did with Super Mario Brothers Deluxe. It is a real act of affection, I think, for this original game. And yet, you know, the problem is the fundamentals of the experience, like, it just didn't work with the screen resolution of the game white color. They really needed to redraw the graphics, redraw the sprites a little bit. You know, Bori Fighter, when it became Space Marauder, they re, well, actually, when it became Borei Fighter deluxe on. Game Boy, like they scaled down the graphics a little bit, just like they did with ducktails on Game Boy.

It made it more playable than if they had just like said, here you go, slap some any of sprites in there, and good luck. They really need to do that here. I wish they had done that. But let's talk about all the crazy extra stuff in this game. Yeah. So they did add some new animation and graphics here, like water and lava in the background is now animated.

They added much more difficulty thanks to the visual cropping, making. the challenging athletic levels. Good luck with World 8 in Super Warrior Brothers. That's much more difficult now, but oh well. The one really tragic compromise, I think, is that they cut out the world's, the bonus worlds and Super Bowlier Brothers to the lost levels. Right.

Once you beat the game, World, what is it, like, ABC, Y, through D. Yeah. Oh, really? Nine ABC and E. They're in the ROM, but they're dummied out. You can't play them. It's a shame.

But here's what they added. A save feature, at any point on the world map, you can just save your game and it saves your lives and everything. It's a great recording feature. There's a world map, as you mentioned before. There are red coins and Yoshi eggs in each stage, things for you to find. In the challenge mode, right? Yes. Yeah, okay.

There's a multiplayer mode where you can link up with another player and race to complete levels to see who gets the best time. There's a single player version of that called You versus Boo, which people, I, We had some people write in about this episode, and a lot of people called out you versus boo is one of their favorite Mario things because it is a race through each Mario stage against a boo. And once you beat that boo, another boo appears that's a different color. And you have to beat it, and it makes better time. And then I think the ultimate boo, like the hardest boo is actually just, it's a ghost like copying your previous play data. So you have to outrace yourself after you've basically mastered all. the other boo races.

So you can really go as deep into that as you want. There are Game Boy printer images that you can print out because Game Boy printer was a thing. If you beat the game, you can actually redesign the title screen. There's like an editor that you unlock.

Princess Peach is like, here you go, you can design any title screen. There's also a calendar in the game. I don't know why, but there it is. It's a calendar. You can save 15 dates on it. Yes, it still goes up to 2020. They just assume you're going to be playing this game every day, you know, checking in.

Yeah, it was before Animal Crossing. Here you go. Right. And I think finally, there's a fortune teller, which is just like a goofy little extra thing. If you go in, it'll tell you what your luck for the day is. But if you go into the fortune teller and you get a very lucky reading and then you start a new game, you start with five lives instead of three. Right, right. It's just a stupid little hidden extra, but it's a little Easter egg.

Oh, but not finally. It also has a music player. Oh, that's right. Wow. And also they, so Luigi is accurate colors. I'm looking at sprites. I think they did fix the peach sprite. They made the peach sprite improved for this 8-bit version.

So she'll look like a human being now. Luigi has different physics here, too. Did he use the Mario 2 peach sprite or was it totally different? Oh, it's a new sprite entirely. Yeah. It's like sort of better proportions. I don't know if I can see this. Yeah, no.

I mean, it's based on the original, but it's just like, you know, has legs. There's a second pass happening. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. So basically, I recognize that this game is not the optimal way to play Super Mario Brothers, but I love what they did for this package. Like, compare that to Super Mario All-Stars for Wii, and it's night and day.

Like, hey, let's just dump a ROM on Wii versus, hey, let's just totally load this thing down with goofy little extras and fun bonuses to compensate for the fact that, yeah, it's kind of compromised. So who made its Nintendo? It was not Tosei, right? No, it was developed internally. That's interesting. They gave Tosei Links Awakening, but they didn't not want to farm this out then? Links Awakening, DX.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. So far as I'm aware, this was not... Yeah, it's at R&D2 when I looked it up. Yeah. Like, if it was outsourced, no one has been able to track that down. Like, all the Mario remakes for Game Boy, Game Boy, Game Boy, Man. And this is like, it's post-emulation, but not really post-emulation, because, like, it hadn't

emulation had not really become a huge mass phenomenon yet. So, you know, this was the only very, if you wanted to play Super Mario Brothers legally, you know, you could either, you know, set up the old NES or you could buy this. And that was pretty much it. Like, it was pre-virtual console. It was pre any other release of the game. So it was very popular. Right. And this game is also, I think, why we never got a Super Mario Advance version of Super Mario Brothers 1.

Yeah. Because the remake already exists. This covered it. Yes. It's Mario Advance Zero. Yeah. Yep. And I think Nintendo realized, hey, the screen cropping kind of sucked.

because you go to Game Boy Advance, which has a higher resolution than Game Boy in Game Boy Color, and the launch game for that system is Super Mario Advance, which is a remake of Super Mario Brothers 2, and they add a new title screen animation where there's like a grayed out border, and then the active screen space, like bright screen space,

is the resolution of Game Boy and Game Boy Color, and you have the four characters for the game walk in, and they're like in silhouette when they're outside the border. That's right. And then they walk into the center screen where it's bright and then they start pulling up the logo. And then the screen kind of expands and gives you the full resolution.

And they're basically saying like, hey, check it out. You don't have the cropping anymore. You've got full graphics now. Which is a lie. This game was still cropped. But it was close enough. But it was closer. Yeah, yeah.

Well, so for Super Mario Advance, there are a lot of places where, like, they didn't redesign any level designs. They didn't rearrange any of the level designs. They didn't rearrange any of that. the level designs. So you do get, like, parts where, you know, a single room area will have to scroll back and forth.

With the later advanced games, they changed that. So they just took the single screen rooms and made them actually one single screen. But it's a bigger deal with the bonus element for every single Mario advanced game, which is Mario Brothers, which is like, why don't we start by talking about that? That's a great version of Mario Brothers. It is. It also included it with Superstar Saka as well. It was like a very, very polished version of that game.

I think this version of Mario Brothers is unfairly scorned because it was included with five different games. People were like, I'm sick of this. This is stupid who cares about Mario Brothers. But as a version of Mario Brothers, it's damn good. Well, the idea was that, you know, if you met a friend and they had Superstar Saga, but you had Super Mario Advance, you could both still play Mario Brothers together. That's correct. Yeah.

Ray, I know you're a big fan of Mario Brothers. Do you have... Okay. Who told you? I am. Okay, Bob, do you want to talk about this version? What makes it so great? I haven't actually played this version in a while,

but it was just easily accessible, and it just felt like they had changed some of the physics a bit to be a little more close to the Mario controls that we know. Like the jumps were a little less ice climbersy than the original game. Yeah, I think they totally redid the physics of the jump. And I think this is based on the Kayetakita, Mario Brothers version of Mario Brothers. that was released on Famicom Disc System in the 80s

and then released in Europe only on cartridge as Mario Brothers Classic. But that was like a, like visually, it was a closer version of the game to the arcade. Right. But it also, like, made the physics a lot friendlier. So Mario and Luigi and Red Mario and Purple Luigi or whoever the characters are,

they have the ability to bend the arc of their jump in midair. I remember the music was also good. There's music. Yes. So this version of the game does not fit on a single screen, but you can scroll up and down using the shoulder buttons on the Game Boy Advance. So it kind of ratchet up and down. And it gets kind of hectic in fast-moving sections.

You know, once you get past like level 10 or so, there's a lot of enemies coming on the screen, and you have to kind of be aware, like, hey, what's above me, what's below me? So you're kind of constantly, like, altering the screen directions. It's different when you're playing multiplayer because you have, you know, kind of everyone's sort of doing their own thing. But when you're playing solo, it's pretty hectic. All right.

Well, then let's talk about Super Mario Advance, Super Mario Brothers 2 slash USA. So I was living in Japan. I think when it was announced. Like, I think I, so, I mean, I wasn't like reading Nintendo Power when it was announced. And there wasn't really that much to read about on the internet. So I was reading Famitsu. And the impression that I came away with was that this was a sequel to Super Mario Bros. too, because all they

showed in the screenshots were the new elements. They showed screenshots of Robo Berto. Robo Berto was a big one. Peach pulling up gigantic turnips. They were showing all of the things that were different and I mean literally, I bought the

Game Boy Advance the day it came out and I bought the game the day it came out and I popped the game in and I started playing it and it kind of dawned on me only as I was playing the game that this was actually just Super Mario USA, Mario 2. with enhancements, I really thought that it was going to be a full-on sequel. You know, now that you mentioned that, I had that same perception, too.

Maybe that's why I never bothered to play this game until just recently. Oh, okay. They really led with all of the things that were different. I mean, you know, it's so weird to, like, oh, here's a meca burdo. It's like, to me, that was very strange the idea that they were going to, it didn't dawn on me that they would, like, take the game and, like, change it that much by putting a brand new boss character into it. Like, that wasn't really something that was done very often.

Like, there were no remakes of games in the year 2000. So it's just kind of like, yeah, I didn't, I just figured it was just a new game. Yeah, I imported a Game Boy Advance very early, like, right after it came out in Japan and this with it. Yep. And started playing and said, uh, no. So then I played Circle to Moon a lot. Yeah, that's what I did. And then I got to a point where I couldn't see the projectiles on the screen and said,

I played the hell out. I think Crazy Racers. I still played this all the way through. I still really enjoyed it because, I mean, you know, it's Mario 2. It's great. So, I mean, I had, I was, you know, that initial little bit of disappointment that I was like, oh, no, wait. I mean, I still love this game, so I'll play it. I only finished it for the first time and really only played past like World 2-1 for the first time about a month ago.

Yeah, I'm glad to watch your video because I bought this at launch in America with the Game Boy Advance and Castlevania. And I played about half of it, but I was like, I get it. It was just sort of fun to see these level of graphics on, or this level of graphics on a portable thing at the time. And I got rid of it really quickly, but I had no idea what was in the game beyond what I knew until I saw your video. Yeah. And the back of the box makes you think there's more going on because the back of the box has one screenshot from the Mario 2 version of the game, or Mario 2 portion of the game, and it's Mario holding up a giant turnip, which I don't think I actually saw.

Right. This all makes me think of the dorm room that I lived in in Japan, and we have. It was like this little efficiency sort of thing where it had a desk and then right over the desk there was a light mounted underneath the shelf in everybody's room. And I always think about that because it's like that was the year of the Game Boy Advance. It was the year of the Wonder Swan Color with Final Fantasy 1 and 2. And it was the year of me sitting at that desk using the hell out of that big bright light that I luckily had to be able to play both of those systems. Circle of the Moon. Yeah, like that was like I had to have like that light shining right down on that screen like in full brightness all the time. Yeah, Ray, what was your, what has been your experience?

I also imported the GPA with that and F0. So I basically only played those until like the U.S. launch when I actually got all the other games that everybody said to get like Castlevania and Choo Choo Rocket and stuff. So, I mean, I did enjoy it. I mean, I don't have much to add really. I don't hate it or anything. Certainly the voices. did not affect me or make me hated as much as some other people. Yeah, so I...

I'm a crystal! Geez, I think I just died. Yeah, I just recently published a video retrospective of this for Game Boy Works Advance and made comments about how frustrating the voices are. It was just one section about like... Very mildly. Like, the voices are not good, and they're really obtrusive and loud and distracting. but I titled the video

because I always put out like a goofy pun or something in my video titles. I called it blighted by voices. Which I was like, ah, it's a funny joke about the band guided by voices, but also making fun of the voices in this game. And people really have taken offense to that. Like, I didn't realize, it did not occur to me.

Who are these freaks? No, it didn't really occur to me that I've been making videos like about NES, Super NES, Game Boy, like these older systems. And it's like those are going to hit a different audience than people who were five or six when Game Boy Advance came out and were like, I've had a lot of people who were like, this is my first video game system. This was my first

game that I ever played. And I thought the voices were great. And I realized all of a sudden, like my videos are reaching a different audience that I'm used to. And I have to kind of recalibrate like the way I approach things. Because I'm kind of speaking to people who are more my age. Exactly. Exactly. You just dated this podcast. Thank you. Yeah, like it's been kind of a revelatory experience for me, like knowing that people will take great offense to the suggestion that Mario advances voices are bad. The phrase, just what I needed did not persist after this game, though.

I don't know why they landed on the Carr's song. Yeah. There were a couple of people who wrote letters, and all they did was just, like, include a link to a video for just what I need. That's a great song, great song. RIP RICO-Kasic. I don't need to hear that. He's in the fireball.

expression. It's just weird, like, out of all the things to land on, that is the thing that said the most in that game. Yeah. Anyway, so, so people will defend the voices, but you will notice that in the later Mario advanced games, the characters talk a lot less. Like, they are very, very chatty in this game. Like, every action you take is basically accompanied by a voice sample. And this game is a game where you take a lot of actions, such as digging into the sand to reach the bottom of a large shaft of sand and every time you do that say if you play toad because he's the fastest at digging

is like ow ow ow ow wow wow wow doesn't burdo have like a monologue whenever you see them oh yeah she's she's always like i'll remember this oh man i'm super hoarse from being sick she's like yeah i'll remember this um every boss has like a quip when you enter their room and when you defeat them i did want to hear what mouser sounded like for the first time i don't remember But, yes, everyone has a voice. I mean, it's the whole feeling, like, to me, this is, like, the first Mario game since, like, 64 that feels just kind of like half of a tech demo. You mentioned that screencropping animation at the beginning, too. It's like, oh, yeah, we're on a different system.

That's like a mini tech demo. And then all this voices, stuff, like, oh, yeah, check out what we can do. Yeah, there's just all kinds of, yeah, there's weird stuff in the game that just kind of shows up haphazardly. Like, the very first screen, you know, where you kind of fall and go to the. door, like at the bottom of that hill that you fall down, there's one little piece of ground that when you step on it, it goes, brer,

and there's like a creature underneath it or something. So it springs up. But that doesn't really happen anywhere else. There's one jar in the game where there's like this weird pulsing spike that keeps bouncing into, like shooting into the air. It's only in one room. It's like a

graphical glitch or something. It's just like there. There's just all kinds of stuff like that where it's just like what What's this doing? You go underground, there's like a ferris wheel under a pipe with like weird scaling technology. The ferris wheel is like pretty much every, like half the jars you go into have this kind of like Ferris wheel with like a shy guy or two shy guys on it. It's confusing to me.

Yeah. Like another another thing about this game is that they added a scoring system. That was not originally in Mario 2 or, you know, dokey dokey panic. It was just like, hey, play and get to the end and beat wart. But now there's a scoring system. And because of the addition of a scoring system, this adds all the other elements of scoring that you associate with Mario, which means if you kill multiple consecutive enemies,

you get 200, 400, 800 points, and then start getting one-ups. But the thing is, this game was not designed around that. So there are lots of opportunities to kill a shit ton of enemies and get like five up all at once, like throw a pow block or throw a giant turnip or something and it go brum, brum, brum, bump, and hit a string of enemies. like by the end of this game I had just a ridiculous

obscene number of lie this is the first game with like life creep I think in Mario's series like this happens all the time now but this was the first time I really noticed it. Yeah so they basically took a balanced game and completely broke the balance just by adding it as much as they possibly

good. Then they added you know a save feature so you can save which you could not do in the original. You had two continues in the American version. Yeah so that completely broke it entirely so why not just go all the way? I mean, yeah, so it does, it is a tech demo. Yeah, in addition to that, every stage now has a third mushroom. Oh, yeah.

There's another place you can go into subspace and find a mushroom. So you can get five life points instead of four if you know where to look. Right, right, right. But then, you know, there's all kinds of extra stuff. Like, once you beat the game, you can go back into stages and two of the mushrooms will be replaced by a Yoshi egg. You don't know which two mushrooms, but somewhere, like, the mushrooms have become Yoshi eggs. So then the third mushroom in the stage becomes. actually your only extra point of life

because the Yoshi eggs don't give you extra life. What do the Yoshi eggs give you? They just give you the satisfaction of finding a Yoshi egg and a little note on the map that says you found the Yoshi eggs on the stage. Oh, okay, okay. So there's no, there's no achievement for finding them, unlike in Mario Deluxe, but it is an extra thing you can do

post game. What a weird game, who just want to play it again. Yeah, so, and another interesting thing is that even though this looks like Super Mario All-Stars at first glance, the character sprites are not the ones from Super Mario All-Stars. They're all new character sprites. They've drawn all

new sprites. And I feel like a lot of the elements were taken from the BS Super Mario USA BS Challenge, or Super Challenge, or something. Oh, right. Yeah, okay. Like a, you know, guided by voice, guided by voices, a limited time thing for the

Satellaview accessory in Japan. Like, people know about the Zelda, I think, the BS Zelda games, where it was like someone was guiding you through the game. and you had, like, one hour to complete the stages. But they did that with Mario USA also, Mario 2. And you don't really hear about that as much. But it was the same sort of thing where you would, like, be sent to a specific stage,

and you would have, like, 15 minutes to beat it. And then you could go beat Toad or something. Yeah, they did that with all the All-Stars games. Yeah. All right. All the All-Stars games are game. Yeah, pretty much. They partitioned them out like that.

But, yeah, there's just, like, all kinds of really strange stuff in this. Of all the advanced games, it's the, until you get to the e-card stuff in Mario Advance 4, like this is the just the wildest like what is happening here kind of game they really they really kind of rained it in for the later games but this one is just like wow new portable hardware so much power

what can we do here and then I think they kind of step back and said what have we what have we done oh my God yeah because for the next game for the Super Mario World it was a lot it was it was a lot closer to just being Mario World with a few

extra it didn't really take away from the feeling of playing Mario World Yeah, Superio Advanced 2 was interesting because it came out also in 2001 in the U.S. So, it was interesting because it came out also in 2001 in Japan and very soon after in the U.S. So it was like eight months after the Japanese release, the original release of Superio Vance. Yeah. Yeah, like, and then the other games were spaced more like a year or two apart.

Yeah. But yeah, the only really big change in Super Mario Advance 2 from the original Super Mario World was that, well, first there's an intro cut scene where Mario and Luigi and Peach take a hot air balloon and land on dinosaur island. And Mario and Luigi find the cape. or the feather and get capes. And then they go flying around. Like total assholes, they just leave Peach behind. And then they come back and they're like, oh, wait, she's not here anymore as we were just farting around in the sky and not paying any attention to our friend.

Yeah, puts a new twist on the plot of that game. Yeah. So they really brought it into themselves. But the big change is that you can, it's a one-player game now. There's no two-player mode. So to play as Luigi, you just hit the R button when you're on the world map and you'll switch characters. And Luigi has totally different physics, including, like, his fireballs, instead of doing the usual bounce that they do, they bounce way high in the air with a more shallow arc. Yeah.

And you get the unique Luigi sprite from the Mario All-Stars version of Mario World. Well, no, it is different. It is different. Yeah, it is another redrawing. Interesting. But it's still a unique sprite, which was not the case in Mario World. There was a unique Luigi sprite in that game. Also, I'm looking at the list of changes on the wiki.

The couplings and bowser's all grew an extra finger for some reason. Did they have four originally? I think they had four originally. There's a lot of, like, if you look at the wiki for you. of these games, there's like dozens of duchess of, like, really tiny changes. They're super minute, but the substantial changes are things like you can save any time, not just after completing a Switch Palace or a Fortress. This game, unlike Mario Advance, when there's a single-screen room, like it is now single-screen on the Game Boy Advance screen.

They redrew a lot of stuff. Rearranged level layouts to kind of fit better. Dragon coins are present in all stages. I don't think they were in fortresses and ghost houses before, but now they are. and when you ride a different colored yoshi and eat berries as that yoshi it will poop different things instead of just a super mushroom

and the dragon coins have a purpose now right you get a special ending if you get them all before it was just like in the Mario world the original release it was like well here are five things to get in a stage to get a one up right and now it keeps track yeah and if you get all of them you get a special slightly different ending so there's a point

to collecting these things now yeah and the other big difference is that the graphics are way more washed out because the Game Boy Advance had a dim, dim screen. Super washed out world. And there are ROM hacks that you can apply and they will fix the color balance

on all these games. So if you were playing on an analog pocket or something, yeah, playing an animulator. But if you play on something like analog pocket or even a backlit GBA, then you're going to not be like, wow, everything seems to have been bleached.

That's a good idea. Someone left to Super Mario 2 and the sun too long. So Quick side note to that, though. There's also color remakes of Mario Land one and two, someone made. Oh, yeah, yeah. I need to try this one day. All right, so we'll kind of wrap up here with looking at Yoshi's Island, Supermaria Advance 3, which has barely changed. It feels like they got the game, they have the game right the first time.

And so what you see here, the changes in this version of the game, they're just like minor tweaks. It's just like they kind of rebalance some things, and we're like, oh, well, here is a point where you can. get stuck, or where maybe the stage went a little too long, so they added an extra checkpoint. But it's really, really minor. The biggest thing is that some of the cool super effects effects, they look kind of bad now. Like you touch fuzzy, get dizzy, not so great. I will say that for a while, like my hat is off to them for getting this to work, number one. And for a while, this is the only version of this game that was available to people outside the SNAS release.

It is so poorly done compared to the original. version. Like, I'm glad that the S&S Classic exists because when this is all you can get, it's fine, but if you play them, like, next to each other or one after the other, this is so inferior. And you don't really understand that until you actually play the original. Right, but it was years before you... I understand

that. Actually, can you even play Yoshi's Island portable? No, you can't... I think it's on Switch, isn't it? Is it on Switch? Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, it's on the Switch. So it took 15 years, 16 years. But finally, we have a proper version of Yoshi's Island to play on the go. But until then, you know, until that arrives,

this was the way to do it. Yeah, so the final game to talk about, oh, actually one big revolution that Yoshi's Island introduced was sleep mode. Oh, yeah. Put the game into a suspended animation, like a low power mode.

At any time, basically, you just pause and choose sleep mode, and then you could wake it up by hitting Select L and R at the same time. Yeah, that was a new thing Nintendo did for several other games. Yeah. The NES classics on GBA did that too. Oh, did they?

Okay, yeah. I think this came out before all of those. It was also in Superstar Saga, a few other games. But, you know, before the DS where you could just go and close the clamshell, that was not something you could easily do. And it made a big difference. Like, you know, not having to go through the boot-up cycle and see the bring, bling, and the title screens and everything, choose a level.

You could just stop and then resume. That was a big, big change. So great innovation there. Finally, Super Mario Advance 4, Super Mario Brothers 3, as Bob says, the most tortured and confused time. So sad. The precursor legacy. This one was pretty much the same as the Super Mario All-Stars version of Mario 3, but then it had the e-reader stuff, and that's wild.

So let's see. What are the changes here? Yeah, like they tweaked a little bit of Mario 3 to make it play a little more like Mario World, and they rebalanced a few things to accommodate for the changed resolution. Like, Lakitu actually flies a little lower, like one tile lower. Oh, sure. In levels, so he's not, like, scraping the top of the screen,

which actually makes it easier to jump on him and take over the cloud. But other than that, it's pretty much the same thing. But then there's the e-cards. Did you guys ever do anything with the e-cards? Yes. I still haven't, and I got to get that Wii U version of this game before time's up. I think I had like one pack of e-cards, so I played a couple of levels. So it's your moment to shine.

First of all, I was as hyped for this as Mario Deluxe. And then I got the Walmart edition, which came with extra E-cards. It was like 32 cards or something. No, it was like 16, I think. Do we need to explain the E-reader to children? It's like eight. Or listeners. Yeah, sure.

Bob, go have a quote for it. The E-Reater was a pre-digital Marketplace DLC, where you would buy this device for your Game Boy Advance. Instead of, you know, buying a pack of levels online, you would buy a pack of cards, and there would be random items or levels or things you would want for your game. And very few games actually supported this, but this is one of them. They actually released NES games as E-reader cards. You could buy video games on paper and swipe them through the E-Reed. Camibo cards where there's like RFID computership inside. It was ones and zeros, micro-printed on the paper of the card.

And it took like five cards to have Donkey Kong Jr. Pinball, like the most basic lowest. Yeah, let's be clear. Not the NAS games you don't want to play, but of course, urban champion. There was an urban champion, man. Oh, yes, I'm sorry. They got a 3DS remake. Yeah.

Esports. Yeah, but so like they used technology that was invented by Olympus for like these sort of almost microscopes. like the dot printing technology because you couldn't do it on the fun kind of micro dot. Right. You couldn't do it with like an ink chip printer. So he couldn't copy cards that way. It had to be done a special way.

But it was still cheap because it was still all on paper and ink. It wasn't like magnetic stripes or anything. But it meant you also had to swipe these cards in succession quite slowly for the little reader to be able to read them all in a stable manner. It was better probably for Animal Crossing, right? Like it was better for like Animal Crossing and then like, you know, getting new items or furniture or whatever. versus like the NES game application of it was cool.

Like, oh, this game exists on paper, but, like, it also sucks. Yeah, that's why most of the cards were just one card and not all NES games really did. Yeah, but the Mario 3e cards were cool because you scanned, I think you just scanned in the level, and then it's like, oh, okay, then the level was just in your game. Well, it wasn't just levels. There were also, like, weird items that you could get,

like things from Super Mario Brothers 2 that would appear in Mario 3. Well, we would now call consumables in the mobile space. You can just get an extra one up or two. or three. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Did you have any favorite levels here?

Oh, I don't know about favorites. I mean, I just like that whole concept. Because I talked about it before when we were talking about Mario Maker because it was kind of like a proto version of that. These are a bunch of wild levels that don't really adhere to anything in the main game. Yeah. And when they released it for Wii U for the Game Boy Advance virtual console on Wii, it just included all that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, I think the original version of the game could only save like 32 stages or 32 bonus items. Like, you couldn't scan and save every single Mario 3 card into that. Oh, okay. But I think the Wii U version is, like, loaded down next to. I don't know exactly how it.

It was that, as I understood it, it was just like they didn't even release them all, all the levels? I think that's correct. There were some that were Japan only. There were some that were Walmart exclusive. But then still some that didn't even come out. I don't know.

I know exactly. Probably because they were like, actually everyone hates the e-carts because they're crappy. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it kind of was like the best application of e-cards, but this thing did not take. Sorry, Animal Crossing. I think Mario levels are more exciting on Animal Crossing stuff.

Yeah, but as said, Mario Advance 4 on Wii U Virtual Console does include the E-reader cards. So that's currently still available. I highly recommend picking it up. It's not very expensive. It's like $8 or $9. And it's a pretty good version of Mario 3, plus it has some really weird exclusive stuff that you're not going to find any other way. Although I think people were making like recreating the e-reader levels

in Mario Maker to the best of their ability but it's still not going to have all the like wacky-ass stuff. I could just do that. I'm sure they did. Anyway, final thoughts on Mario's pre-his old portable games, not his new portable games. Well, I mean, certainly, you know, we see after it was this split,

this division of the Mario and Mario series where Wario became the one where, okay, we're actually going to make new, games in the Wario series for Game Boy Advance, etc. And then the Mario series very quickly ended the idea of we're going to make new original games and just went straight into remakes, which makes sense, certainly, but it was sort of disappointing that they did not create new Mario games for the portables past Mario Land too, because I would have, it would have been nice because everything was compromised after that, right? Because everything was some kind of a

compromised port of an older game, rather than creating something on the Game Boy. It's weird that Game Boy Advance didn't have an original Mario. If there was no original Mario game for the Game Boy Advance, you know, it would have been interesting to see what they had accomplished with that. But Game Boy Advance, like, Nintendo didn't do a whole lot of original games for the Game Boy Advance. It seems like they've looked very much at Game Boy Advance as, oh, just like the Game Boy Color was our chance to revisit the NES. Game Boy Advance is our chance to revisit the Super NES, and that's kind of what Nintendo and everybody

looked at in. And they were going to do that with D.S. The launch title for Nintendo DS was Super Mario 64. They were just like, oh, it's our chance to revisit in 64. Right. And they actually dropped that pretty, please now. Yeah, they dropped that pretty quickly, thankfully. I'm glad, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, in one hand, I kind of respect and understand that because, hey, there are all these great old games that are not available any longer. But now that's not really necessary because there's so many distribution methods to getting old games out there that you don't have to keep rehashing them. You can move ahead. head and then make old games available as they are. Bob? Ray? Oh, God, Rick.

All right. I was just, I was going to reiterate my point was that you kind of had to be there. Like, these are not exactly the versions of the games that will be in the museum installation. They'll probably be in the display case next to the real original Super Mario Brothers, but, you know, not the things that everybody's going to want to leap at with few exceptions, unless you really are interested in, like, the additional things to Mario Deluxe and so on and so forth. Like, those are worth looking at. But, yeah, it's not going to be...

Yeah, to go ahead and sit down with this. Yeah, experience it the way it was meant to be played. Like, no, you're not going to... Nobody's going to say that. I still want a sequel to Super Mario Brothers, too. I'm still mad. Oh, yeah. There's no Mario USA 2 out there.

No, I was with Chris in that I wish they would have made original games, and I was not really on board with these when they were new. But they're fun curiosities as, like, an archivist to know, like, what has been changed and what they were doing for the market at the time. And it's cool that, weirdly enough, the Wii-U is, like, a very... comprehensive emulation spot for Game Boy Advance where nothing else is. Like so much was collected there,

like the Castlevania games. I think all of these games are on Wii U virtual console. So yeah, that could be the last place that you'll ever see them again. I don't really think these will be on Switch anytime soon. Probably not. No. But you will see reviews of them on my YouTube channel.

Someday, probably. Anyway, yeah, thanks guys for taking a journey through this odd little niche of Mario history. I'm glad we've got it covered. our comprehensive coverage of Mario continues. We'll get them all one of these days. But for the moment, please let us know where we

can find you talking about things that are not necessarily Mario. Yes, I'm Chris Kohler. I am still Features Editor at Kotaku, which I will mostly just edit things, but occasionally just sort of emerge from my hole and write about retro games. Typically, that's what I get motivated to write about,

as you might imagine. And we can find you on Twitter. Oh, on Twitter at Koboon Heat. A-O-B-U-N-H-E-A-T. All right. Right. I'm on Twitter as R-D-B-A-A-A-A-A-A, mostly just now trying to find ways to not be broke. So I also set up a co-fi page or co-fi whatever they call it now. That's also R-D-B-A-A-A-A if you want to give me some money for some things.

I also made a game called Blasterrash at Blastrush.com. That's on mobile. Those are the big things, yeah. Hey, it's Bob Mackey. I'm on Twitter. It's Bob Serbo. I do other podcasts about old things, but they're old cartoons. So that's Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon.

You can find those wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons for more stuff that you can't get for free, including limited miniseries and all kinds of good stuff. Check it out at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. And here at Retronauts. Retronauts.com and iTunes and other places like that.

Every Monday and every other Friday, we release a podcast episode that you can listen to just like the one you're listening to now. And if you can't wait for those episodes to come out, well, good news, you can get them a week early by going to Patreon.com slash Retronauts. and you can subscribe for three bucks a month to get early episodes, early access, lots of cool stuff, bonuses, things like that. And that helps, you know, pay the bills, keep the lights on, help me fly out here to record podcasts with these guys and other people. And, yeah, that'd be great. You can also check out some YouTube video retrospectives that I put together on a few of the games we covered here, Mario Land and Mario Advance. on my YouTube page, just look for Jeremy Parrish. And yeah, I keep talking about games, old games, in video and podcast form.

I just won't stop. And neither will these guys, because these are just what we needed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.