super mario bros. judgement world gives us a mario who feels such guilt over pleasure and privilege that any scoring action - collecting a coin, hitting a question block, or jumping on an enemy - causes the game to immediately end in mario’s damnation. reward objects like coins become deadly obstacles. super mario bros. speedy version gives you approximately sixteen-and-a-half seconds to complete each stage. and super mario bros. speed expiation combines the two.
(you may need to visit the author’s website to download these. thanks to leon for pointing them out.)
videos of hacks can be frustrating because the exciting thing about these hacks is that they can actually be played in the same way that nintendo’s super mario bros. is played. watching a video of hack, there’s always that sense of doubt: maybe this game isn’t playable, maybe it’s just this video. i couldn’t find patches for the following hacks; if you know of them, if they exist, let me know.
you can get the ghist of super luigi bros. from watching the video: it’s a surprisingly poignant portrayal of what it’s like to be player two, the constant knowledge that everywhere you set foot, someone’s been there before. similiar in theme (mario’s adventure as seen through the eyes of one of its casualties), this short movie of the life of a goomba is just a video, not a hack, but is relevant anyway. and this maybe mario hack, maybe transformers hack has something to say about luigi’s role too.
also, since we’re talking about videos, this footage of an unreleased nes game (which james harvey pointed out to me), despite being concieved as a piece of animation, clearly points to the same trends that inform masocore games.
and zarathustra showed me something really neat: the new fceux emulator, with lua scripting. would you like some more videos? this means that scripters can essentially add new rules to emulated nes games, like making super mario drag and drop, replacing mario’s controller input with mouse drawing, and turning any game into pop’n music. these are exciting times.
6 comments
You are going to learn lua.
i’ve been fiddling with a script for super mario bros., actually. lua is really straightforward; what’s tricky are the functions specific to the emulator, and i wish the scripts included with the emulator made for simpler example code.
If you do get it worked out you should think of doing something for the next Klik Of the Month. It would be totally sweet.
Thank you for this, it brought so many cool things to my attention!
if you need help ask me, I think I have grasped the basics. The emulator specific instructions can only do a few things: read from rom and ram, write to ram, draw to a interface layer above the screen, and read keyboard and mouse input.
is interesting that just the past few days i thought about something the judgement world mario deal with. i’ve just found out that the block in SMB are supossed to be mushroom people turned into block by bowser. so you should feel bad or sorry or something when you go around breaking the blocks just to get some coins, don’t you? that or mario just cares about the princess and don’t give a shit about the mushrooms.
great post, thanks anna.
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