(Small) Complaint about Super Mario Bros. Wii

[Robotazy]

Actually, Mario dyed his Moustache Blue the night before while drunk.

They had to make do with what they had.

[LASER BEAR ASSAULT UNIT]

at this topic.

[the Octopus]

Originally Posted by Metal Mario

SMB 2 was made in the days when you couldn't color Mario the way you wanted, so you had to make his mustache blue. New SMB Wii, on the other hand, exists in this modern age in which the ideal colors can be applied to the tiniest detail.

There were ways around that. Nintendo being lazy isn't a decent defense - they obviously didn't care to make the spots red. Don't try to test me on the limitations of the NES, I'm very aware of them and this is a non-issue.

Specifically, sprite data on the NES is broken into fragments to save ROM space, since there was very little to work with. Those fragments are recompiled by the program. If the programmers had wanted to, they could have written the game to display the head using a separate palette from the 3 colors present. This could've easily been done by making use of the same palette available to the Shy Guys and similar enemies with no tradeoff in performance or available sprite palettes. One of the games pictured above, Bionic Commando, made use of that same technique the same year of release. Another one, Punch Out!, was released the year before SMB2, by Nintendo themselves. The technique is not dependent on any manner of extra hardware or unusual programming logic, it simply takes advantage of the graphic information being fragmented in a logical way.

[Dark Seraphim]

I may be wrong, but in most NES games where there was black, at least early on, wasn't black either rendered only in small games with only a few frames (like Punch-Out) or was just an absence of color altogether, basically clear to the generic black screen all the pixels were put on? Since SMB was already preveiously rendered without black when it was that Arabian game, it would be much too hard to render a while new color just for the character designs, and probabaly making them translucent woudn't work because there would be holes in Mario's face, so they rendered it to the next closest color, blue.

Although I could very well be wrong.

[heh]

toad owns, **** the haters

[the Octopus]

Originally Posted by Dark Seraphim

I may be wrong, but in most NES games where there was black, at least early on, wasn't black either rendered only in small games with only a few frames (like Punch-Out) or was just an absence of color altogether, basically clear to the generic black screen all the pixels were put on? Since SMB was already preveiously rendered without black when it was that Arabian game, it would be much too hard to render a while new color just for the character designs, and probabaly making them translucent woudn't work because there would be holes in Mario's face, so they rendered it to the next closest color, blue.

Although I could very well be wrong.

Sorry, but no dice. Every NES game is very easily capable of using the color black, although developers usually used colors for active sprite's outlines or shading, for the sake of contrast against backgrounds that use black.

To use the black color, they simply had to use the hex address for the palette's black color rather than whatever other color they might've used. Anyway, we're talking about the red, not black, although there's really no difference.

I could very easily do a minor romhack, myself, to change Toad's color scheme, although it would honestly be a waste of time.

[heh]

toa0wned

[the Octopus]

btw, after playing SMB2 again, SD and I observed that the game itself employs the sprite section defined palette-switching that I described earlier.

IE, have a look at Mario's sprite:



How many colors do you count? It's actually five. A single 2-bit palette only allows for 4 colors total, one of which must be assigned to be a transparent color (lest all sprites be square shaped), with 3 usable colors. So Mario should have 3 colors, which are used up by the red, blue, and his skintone. His eyes, though, are white and black. They use a seperate palette. The same palette that the shyguys and the tweeter both use, in the above screen. They're outlined in black, I'll mention, since DS seemed to think that was an issue.

[CaptHayfever]

Did you mean on one sprite (5 on Mario) or in the entire screen (8)?

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

[Valigarmander]

Miyamoto on Wario Fart Attacks

With New Super Mario Bros. Wii safely in stores and racking up all kinds of critical praise in Japan, Shigeru Miyamoto was more than happy to sit down with Famitsu magazine this week to discuss some of the details behind his latest game's design.

Some of the highlights:

- Why did Nintendo decide to have two Toad characters accompany Mario and Luigi in multiplayer? "Mario and Luigi are the same as always, of course, and suggestions for the other two characters included Wario and Waluigi, Toad, and Princess Peach," Miyamoto said. "The thing is that with Wario he'd need to have a fart attack, Peach would have to be able to fly with her skirt, and so on. With this game we wanted every character to play the same way."

- The game pauses for just a moment in multiplayer whenever anyone on your team loses a life. "We had a lot of debate about that," Miyamoto recalled. "There were points in the project where there was no delay at all, but that wound up encouraging players to concentrate on themselves instead of the team. If there's that little stutter, that makes everyone say to each other 'Oh, nice, you screwed up!', and that's what I wanted to see."

- When you do die in multiplayer, you're resurrected inside a bubble that someone else has to pop for you. "From a technical perspective, you need to be able to respawn in a safe place," said Miyamoto. "Only the player himself is in the best position to say whether a particular location is safe or not. That's why we give you that bubble and let you control your return time to some extent. Of course, you need someone else to pop the bubble for you, so part of the fun of multiplayer is to be mean and keep him encased in there."

- Why no Wi-fi support, then? "The biggest reason is that it's more fun to play with real-life people and communicate with them directly rather than over a network," Miyamoto responded. "Net play also places a lot of limits on what we can do, and instead of working around those limits throughout the project, we decided to concentrate on the group play experience."

Hmm, I can see what he's getting at.

Oh well, here's hoping for New Super Mario Bros. 2 Wii.

[Dizzy]

- Why did Nintendo decide to have two Toad characters accompany Mario and Luigi in multiplayer? "Mario and Luigi are the same as always, of course, and suggestions for the other two characters included Wario and Waluigi, Toad, and Princess Peach," Miyamoto said. "The thing is that with Wario he'd need to have a fart attack, Peach would have to be able to fly with her skirt, and so on. With this game we wanted every character to play the same way."

Wario needs no fart attack. Peach needs no flight.

I still don't understand why Y+B toads couldn't be Wario and Waluigi, or Peach and Toad. They could still play the same way Mario and Luigi can.

[Luigiman7]

^ But that's what people expect. It's in their character.