Super Mario World retrospective: Mario's journey from 8 to 16 bits | Super NES Works
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- Опубликовано: 20 июл 2024
- The second part of this rather overlong examination of the Super NES's key launch title looks at the importance of the mighty Cape power-up, and how Super Mario World embodies the concept of "Nintendo-esque." Look for the final part in this retrospective next week! (I hope.)
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For me, Mario peaked with SMB3, & the rest have been dessert. SMW still a beautiful palette of sights & sounds. I've always loved SMB3's edginess most of all - it's not designed to be cute, with Bowser's war ships, & difficult less forgiving baddies & levels scattered about. I know Miyamoto always wanted a Yoshi type pal to play with, & yet Racoon suit for me is peak Mario inventiveness.
someone should use your videos in a video game history class. I can't believe you don't have more subscribers. I found your channel when Colin Moriarty said on a show that you know more about video games than anyone he knows, and I have been following this channel for over a year now. excellent stuff!
The castle music is a masterpiece. Scared me stiff as a kid and still gives me goosebumps now
Oddly enough for me it was the Game Over music. It’s so gloomy for a Mario tune. In previous games, it had more of a goofy “Wah wah wah…” tone to it. In World it almost sounded like Mario funeral music
the stage which doesn't appear as red, but has two exits - donut plains ghost house, taking one to the top secret area
In a world of hundreds of actually pretty great romhacks of Mario World I must recommend one in particular: '*100 Rooms of enemies*'. I love it because there are no labyrinthian level designs, no ultra-hardcore, impossible-to-beat-without-save-states Kaizo Mario-esque scenarios - just room after room of esquisitely placed and chosen enemies that need despatching before you're automatically whisked off to the next room. It's a really excellent piece of work.
The game is a masterpiece and one that my friends and I in school couldn't wait to own.This game (and system) eventually stopped me playing on my Amiga..that was also a big deal in itself. .well was to me.
I recently ran into the Nintendo-esque concept when looking at Nuts & Milk on the Famicom and MSX. From a straight up puzzle game to a platformer is a pretty big identity change. But clearly something that's been working to keep that Nintendo flavor for generations.
The water in SMW is actually not using hardware transparency. It uses a simple see through pixel mesh trick to simulate transparency. Such effects could in theory have been made on Famicom style hardware as well. But the lack of a background layer minimized the utility of such an effect.
I realized too late (like, as I was finishing the video behind deadline) that the water was the wrong example. But as you say, it wouldn't have been a convincing illusion on NES, and there's no shortage of actual transparencies in the game.
It's still notable, though, because it basically uses an entire scrolling layer. You COULD have an effect like that on NES, but it would either not have the nice wave effect (because it's a mid-scanline pallette change like was notably used Sonic games, so you can really only do it once without lagging everything) or you'd have to keep the background fixed.
The amount of tile-pushing you'd have to do on NES to get an effect like that would make it nearly infeasible.
I mean, if you had the right coprocessor in your cart you could do about anything -- with decent tile management you absolutely could have an effect like that, but the problem would be you'd basically have to redraw any tiles on the screen covered by waves EVERY FRAME. Which isn't impossible -- it's a pattern that repeats itself every 12 pixels or so, and changing simple patterns like that is, to go to Sonic again, how the grey peaks in the background of Hill Top scrolled at a different rate from the orange cliifs despite them all being on a single plane (and within the same scanline).
Yeah, I was gonna say. 'talks about transparency in water effects while showing transparent water created using dithering'. XD
Still, I recall a really REALLY old video that explained why that was, but I've since lost track of it. (don't know if it even still exists.)
I do know SNES transparency has some notable limitations, since you have effectively 5 layers (4 backgrounds + sprites) which you can set through the 'main' or 'sub' screen, and then set transparency. (strictly speaking it's not transparency, but blending; eg the logic is to take the colour values of each pixel in the main and sub screens then perform one of the following operations: A+B, A-B, A+B/2, A-B/2. A+B/2 is the one that approximates transparency.)
There is one quirk that if you set sprites through 'sub' ALL of them are transparent, while if you set them through 'main' only part of them are. (that's probably intentional though, because otherwise the Super Mario Ghost houses, amongst other things, would have been impossible.)
One obvious implication of transparency as a blending operation between two special purpose hardware 'screens', is that you can blend at most 2 things together as a set.
eg. Sprites on the background, two background layers against the other two (or three - though that's only valid for mode 0), a single layer against another, etc.
Thus if there's a second effect in any of the water stages that already relies on the blending system, it would explain why there is dithered water in place.
(the video I saw on the subject explained something to this effect pretty well, but I forgot the details, hence why I wanted to re-watch it, only to realise I couldn't find it anymore.)
@@THEmuteKi Yeah, that's very true about co-processors or expansions in cartridges.
I mean, hypothetically, with the right design you could (to use a worn out joke) get a SNES to 'play' crysis.
That's something of a stretch of the definition of 'play', since what you'd have at that point is a computer running crysis feeding it's output through the SNES graphics hardware, but it's still technically possible.
More realistically, in 2018 you can get a SNES to play multi-gigabyte games with something like an ARM chip running at least at 100 mhz (if not a lot more), and with such a processor having megabytes of RAM to itself, without getting too far out of the bounds of what the SNES cartridge bus can power, and what can fit in a cartridge.
And that kind of hardware gets you in the ballpark of running quake (in software rendering)
Not that you'd want to, even if you could, because you're still stuck with the DMA limit of the SNES if you draw graphics externally.
(2.68 megabytes a second, but only if the display is off. Otherwise you can only transfer during H and V blank. Which is roughly ~6 kb a frame for NTSC and ~12 kb a frame for PAL - yes, PAL has a MASSIVE advantage in these contexts. You can gain more DMA time per frame by reducing the resolution, especially the vertical resolution. For example, the SuperFX is intentionally designed to render at 128, 164 or 192 line resolution only. Lowering the vertical resolution gives you more DMA time and less to transfer per frame. Lowering the horizontal resolution doesn't gain you so much in terms of DMA time, but still reduces how much needs to be transferred.)
Because of the DMA limit, no matter what hardware you cram in a SNES cartridge, you're limited in the maximum framerate and/or resolution you can make use of. (you also have colour limitations, which are a bit more complicated to describe in practice)
Interestingly enough though, if you use Mode 7, and reduce the vertical resolution to 192 pixels, then draw at 256x64, with a 3x vertical stretch (which from what I've calculated is perhaps the most efficient way of using mode 7 for 'full screen', even if it means more horizontal than vertical detail), this requires 16,384 bytes transferred per frame.
On an NTSC machine, you get about 178 bytes per line of Vblank, with 262 lines including blanking, meaning at 192 lines you get 12,460 bytes a frame. Which isn't enough to pull this off. (so you'd have to drop the vertical resolution even more. No more than 169 lines in fact)
On a PAL machine however, a single frame is 312 lines (with the blanking included), and due to minor quirks you get 180 bytes a line, so at 192 visible lines you'd have 21,600 bytes a frame, so more than enough to run this at the full 50 fps. (you actually need 92 blanking lines, so could go up to 220 lines and this would still work.)
As an aside, remember those black bars on the PAL snes? This is because the default output resolution is 256x240, but the visible portion of most PAL televisions equates to closer to 267 lines. (288 officially, but overscan often reduces it below that.)
The black bars then, are because of the maximum vertical resolution being too low.
But, because the pixels aren't square (25:18 aspect in fact, on a PAL system 6:7 on NTSC), the image is wider than the resolution would suggest.
More interestingly, at this pixel Aspect, a 16:9 image equates to a resolution of 256x200 - so for homebrew pulling weird tricks like I just described (vastly overpowered co-processor), a PAL machine can do that and have the games be designed to run in 16:9 without extra distortion. (though the display has to be able to 'zoom' a 4:3 image. In other words, crop the top and bottom.)
It's weird to think about what you can push this kind of hardware into doing...
Seems like in many cases, cartridge based systems can more or less be coaxed into coming at least in the same ballpark as the generation that followed them.
The NES of course is different. Since the graphics chip's memory bus is directly on the cartridge port, what you can do with it isn't limited by DMA, so you can actually get a lot more crazy.
Except you still have to contend with the 64 colour limitations, and the way colour is applied in 16x16 blocks, so there you run into vastly different problems. (SNES by contrast can trivially replicate colour behaviour similar to VGA cards on PC, and with effort even slightly beyond that.)
Retro Game Mechanics Explained had a series on the SNES video hardware though I'm not sure they went into that specific level of depth. I'm actually trying to figure out a good summary of how the SNES hardware works, and due to all the weird specific quirks of the individual modes (since the video chip is so flexible but of course has a throughput limit you'd expect from something in the 90s) all have significant limits to their flexibility.
I've played this game a billion times but you're still blowing my mind here with things I didn't know.
This is still my best mario game, such good memories.
Ghost houses don't indicate whether or not they have multiple exits. Three of them have two exits, the other two have only one (Vanilla and Chocolate).
This is the first game I can remember. I remember visiting a cousin when I was 5 or something. I was remember knowing who Mario was but not more than that. My cousin was a badass at the game. Somehow managing to play as Luigi and beating Bowser's castle in less than a minute!
I don't know if she's still gaming today... But when she had twins I gave them baby Mario and baby Luigi plushies as presents :D. Unfortunately their names weren't Rio and Louie... Somehow she was born in 1985, same year ProtonJon and Vinny of Vinesauce..!
2:25 Funny thing. I don't actually remember paying too much attention to the enhanced graphics in Super Mario World. Like the first boss fight against Iggy? I wasn't all "oh my gosh, look at that platform rotate, that's so cool". It was just a neat little boss fight with a lava hazard.
That said, my first encounter with the Big Boo was definately something I had to show off to my family.
I was 10 years old when the SNES was released, and prior to that I had a C64 and an NES. Being so used to gaming on those two inferior machines and kind of understanding their limitations, just about everything on the SNES impressed me to no end. My parents didn't quite see the point of acquiring yet another game device, so I was stuck with borrowing/renting SNES stuff until the infancy of ZSNES and SNES9x.
Ive played hundreds of hours worth of SMW since it first released and I never noticed the extra track that plays when you're riding Yoshi!
SMW is 2d side-scroll platforming at it's best. I'm a game developer and I use it as a model of how to build platformers.
Played it then. Played it several times. Playing it now.
AS A KID IN 1991....THE FINAL BOSS USE TO SCARE ME- IT WAS TRULY INTIMIDATING- I WAS 6YRS OLD
I loved this game so much as a kid! It made me want the SNES soooo bad!
Not only does the cape not show up until the second world, but the first cape you encounter is attached to a completely new enemy who will zip right past you if you're not expecting him. (Of course, there are easier-to-obtain capes later in the level.)
Actually the main challenge for the SNES was trying to undo the damage Sega did by swooping in and stealing some of the gaming audience with Sonic the HEdgehog during the summer.
One of the best games ever created for sure.
Greatest game ever made.
Damn Jeremy, your videos are immensely fun to watch, gives me those nostalgia feels. Just started contributing to you, and Retronauts Patreon.
Wow, thanks!
excellent video as always!
I remember thinking Super Mario World's graphics looked a little bland when it came out, especially compared to Sonic. Over time I've grown to appreciate a lot of the little details in them. There are parts were they have a very crayon look to them. Not to the extent of say Yoshi's Island, but I can see how one lead to the other
To be perfectly honest I've been studying how Super Mario World uses graphics and it stands out that while there are definitely a lot of touches that depend on the SNES's enhanced colour palette, a lot of it is borderline within the realms of what was possible already on the NES.
I've heard suggestion that the game started development on the NES and was then ported over and enhanced afterwards, and there's certainly visual evidence in places to suggest this.
A lot of background art for instance that, while slightly more colourful in patches, comes awfully close to using just 2-3 colours, just like the NES, with the only real 'enhancement' being that these colours are things the NES couldn't display.
(after all the NES has 56-64 colours to choose from, the SNES 32,000 give or take.)
@@KuraIthys A link to the past is the same I believe
Lovvvvveeee this!! Want a new Mario World video weekly! lol
my god, I can't believe this stretched into 3 parts
You and me both.
Best. Game. Ever.
This is some quality ass content, my dude
Thumbs up for some Faxanadu Love :)
The water is not transparent in Super Mario World; it uses a checkerboard pattern to fake the transparency.
See earlier comment thread.
Didn't realize this was addressed earlier.
That's why I referred you to the earlier comment thread!
Awesome game choice dude :) I subbed your channel i shall check out more of your stuff in the future
Wait, flashing red dots mean there are additional exits?! Now you tell me...
It's a classic SNES game. 😀👍🎮
Water was not transperent. They you dithering
Jeremy Parish is my god
Anyone know the title of “part one” of this episode?
ruclips.net/video/esqc2t7XLG4/видео.html
Hahaha, three parts? Dang.
Sorry, but what in that cape explanation makes it impossible to implement on the NES?
The NES could only handle smooth scrolling in a single direction without help from special chips. Later NES games faked it pretty well, but the speed and dynamism of the Cape would have made for a messy game.
I see.
You didn't really point that out in the video, though, which is why I got confused.
You're right, my mistake. It's something I have covered extensively in other videos and didn't think to explain it here.
Something to add for the third video?