Mario Paint: Pro Edition: The Journey.

Well, this ended up being a slightly less productive month than I would’ve thought. Who would’ve known that a speedrunning marathon, a convention, and wanting to get out and enjoy the vibes of the season would’ve distracted me from work? Next month will probably be more of the same as I get a few more pool swims, summer walks, and, most importantly, two big conventions out of my way. The next part of my convention coverage is partway done; writing up about Garden State Anime Fest took me a bit more time than I would have liked, but I still wanted to get something out for the month of July. So, with that said, I’m digging up an old idea of mine from 2019. 

I assume a game like Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo needs no introduction. Given its history as a major release for the console back in 1992, it has a long legacy of young players being inspired by it and desiring to become artists, animators, or music composers in later years. I didn’t get a hold of Mario Paint until roughly 2004 when I got a used Super Nintendo and, sometime later, the cartridge for the game and the mouse that originally came with it. None of my creations were exceptionally noteworthy, given that at the time I was more of a budding traditional artist and had not really drawn much on computers (outside of PC painting programs designed for young kids like Kid Pix, which is very comparable to Mario Paint’s own presentation). Nonetheless, I still got a lot of play out of Mario Paint in my childhood.

Fast-forward to a few years later and as artists nostalgic for Mario Paint poured onto Youtube, they would begin uploading art, animations, and music made in the almost 20-year-old game that looked genuinely impressive. From entire web series to recreations of a cartoon show’s opening (you probably know which one I’m referring to) to entire remixes of video game songs inside its own music-creation tool, Mario Paint still found ways to impress even after the SNES stopped being commercially produced and sold in stores. Nintendo themselves would make games referencing or including homages to Mario Paint, and just recently re-released the game onto the SNES Online app on the Switch and Switch 2—serving as the perfect showcase for the Switch 2 Joycon controller’s mouse functionality. In fact, that very re-release 30 or so years later was what made this a last-minute idea for July’s blog entry, as it reignited an idea of mine that I had considered making, only to abandon when other, bigger projects began piling up at my doorsteps.

In 2019, I began a modding effort of sorts named “Mario Paint: Pro Edition” This would have used the retro game modding tool YY-CHR to modify the game’s graphics, extending the colored palette of dithered and textured colors at the cost of removing stamps. The specific colors chosen for the “dithered” set were hand-picked by using Photoshop to merge a full set of combos of the 15 colors together in Mario Paint’s palette, then inserting the most distinct color combos back into the graphic banks of the game. Surprisingly, early tests showed it is indeed possible to make pictures using these edited colors/textures/stamps/etc, as they’ll all be drawn or pasted onto the canvas as the pre-existing graphics do.

To the left is how the edited color palette currently stands. It’s still limited to Mario Paint’s 15-color palette, though the greater number of dithered color combos would theoretically help in picking out shades that you would otherwise need to use the Stamp Maker to get. The fill tool would be understandably difficult to use with all these dithered colors, so the pens and spray brush tool would be essential use with them. As for the textures, I included several already existing patterns from the original game alongside many others that I thought would be interesting for different surfaces. A few of the patterns are either not finished or have a good chance of being swapped with something more useful in the context of an artist’s application, should I ever go and add more to this with the desire of finishing this and making it into a full release.

The “Pro Edition” would include a fine brush for smaller details (with the removal of one of the other brush sizes... possibly the medium size?) but would keep most other functionality identical to the original game. I have thought about other features or edits from the original game, such as combining the two Mario Paint mods currently on Romhacking.Net and editing the color palette into something like a modern-day pixel art color palette. Most of these features and more are out of my possibility since it would require even deeper dives into the game’s coding and/or sacrifices to other parts of the game to free up space should the ROM not be expandable. And well, I don’t think there’s a desire to dig in and really expand the full capabilities of Mario Paint like what people have done with Super Mario World for decades. Maybe time will prove me wrong, but when modern paint programs like Clip Studio Paint and Aseprite can essentially replicate Mario Paint’s features and offer much more when it comes to basic drawing and animation, there’s very little incentive to revisit Mario Paint outside of nostalgia or the novelty of playing one of the first art games for a video game console.

And that’s all I got for this time. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next month for (hopefully) Part 2 of my convention coverages for the year. 

Super MAYhem 17: Mario Doom Patch Release 2

Yup, it's time to DOOM with Mario and the gang once more. I'm going to keep this one briefer than last time since I already gave you the full run-down back in August last year (and I have a lot of projects/blogposts I need to get back to), but to recap:

This is the Super MAYhem 17 Super Mario Doom patch, a custom build of Valigarmander's Super Mario Doom mod from 2012 designed specifically for use with the the Super MAYhem 17 megawad. Since both mods were Mario themed (one for levels, the other for everything else), the natural instinct was to combine the two together in such a way that it works in various different source ports (for context, the original Super Mario Doom only works in Zandronum and [G]ZDoom). The result is a patch inspired by doomkid's "vanilla conversion" of Super Mario Doom, converting all sprites to use MAYhem 17's a custom palette to give them slightly more color options, removing any assets that would conflict with those of MAYhem 17's, and making small presentation improvements.

When I originally released the patch back in August of last year, it wasn't perfect and I had plans to update it sometime down the line. Later that year and even into this year, I started working on a newer version of the Super MAYhem 17 Mario Doom patch that adds several new changes and fixes. The focus was to polish up the Super Mario Doom content and make it feel better intertwined with Super MAYhem 17. And while there is still plenty left that could be done, including fixing a crash bug when closing out of the game on GZDoom and allowing the game to work in maybe one or two more source ports, this is a good state to call the patch "finished, for now" as I want to shift focus to other, bigger projects. If you’re curious, the attached readme goes into more detail on what has been added and some ideas for what I’m planning for a theoretical Release 3.

You can grab release 2 of the Super MAYhem 17 Mario Doom patch here.

As usual, you'll need a copy of Doom II to serve as the base for this mod/patch. If you don't own Doom II, you can also use Freedoom: Phase 2 as the base.

As with before, the patch is designed to work alongside Super MAYhem 2017 and must be loaded after Mayhem 17's wad file (and its own “update1” patch) to add in the Mario enemies, weapons, and sounds. Super Mayhem 17 is not included with the download and can be found here. If you’re new to playing Doom mods, I recommend the Doom Launcher to make organizing and launching into Doom mods (especially multiple mods at once) easier.

The state of Super Mario Bros. Special in 2023

While I’ve had a great ordeal of interests over the years, some of which have come and gone, one video-gaming interest I’ve always had strong opinions of is the 2D side-scrolling platformer. And since I’ve been looking for more content to fill this blog up during my quest for productivity, I decided to revisit an entry I made *checks notes* 12 years ago?!

Yeah, we’re talking about this little number again. Released only in Japan by Hudson Soft for two home computers of the early 80’s, the NEC PC-88 and the Sharp X1, Super Mario Bros. Special was one of two offshoots of the original Super Mario Bros and was published only a short time after what would be called The Lost Levels outside Japan. And unlike Lost Levels, which would be exported outside of Japan in various formats and became the “Game B (Hard Mode)” of the Game and Watch Super Mario Bros unit created to celebrate Mario’s 35th Anniversary, Special remained pretty much entirely unknown to the rest of the world and was stunk in legal limbo due to the awkward circumstances of its release (being on two obscure Japanese-only computers and Nintendo only licensing the game instead of taking part in its creation).

When Special was first discovered and gained traction in the regions that originally didn’t get the game towards the back half of the 2000’s thanks to the internet, it would gather a very divided opinion, a fate that also fell over the Lost Levels but for different reasons. The PC-88 version was lambasted on first impressions for its very garish and limited color palette, leaning heavily on red and orange tiles against a harsh blue backdrop for outdoor and castle levels. The Sharp X1 version, by contrast, was able to make use of a greater range of color and had something of a warmer reception but it still felt like a step down from the NES original even with some enemies using more colors than they could on the NES. Both versions would also gain criticism for their poor controls and physics, inconsistent speeds, and the lack of proper scrolling. Whenever these color choices, in particular those of the the PC-88 version, were done for compatibility or performance, they were a far cry from the original color scheme of Super Mario Bros.

Players that were willing to hop in and brave the less than desirable aesthetics came across a very unique experience unlike SMB1 or The Lost Levels. With more creative uses of SMB1’s assets, new secret items to discover, and a few more surprises in the level designs, Hudson Soft would create a very unique and often overlooked take on Nintendo's flagship title of 1985. That said, many design choices and limitations would drag down the overall experience, especially compared to the timeless status of the original game it was based on, implying the game may have been rushed to some extent:

• Despite the “Bros” moniker, there is no option to play as Luigi, either through two player mode or a character select.
• As noted above, the PC-88 version only uses 4 colors total, half of the 8 colors the system can display at a time (not including dithering effects) and looks too garish for its own good, even if I do un-ironically prefer it to the more colorful Sharp X1 version. It relies too heavily on reds and oranges, even if the sprites and tiles would be capable of using olive, a color much closer to the many greens and browns in SMB1’s palette.
• The Japanese computers the game released on were not capable of the same kind of smooth scrolling you could get on the Famicom or NES. A form of scrolling is possible on both machines, but it’s a very choppy tile by tile scrolling. Maybe it would have been preferable to the screen flip-scrolling but it would still not be the ideal and smooth scroll type you would want in a side scrolling platformer (at least one designed with the NES in mind).
• Some of the levels in the later half of the game look or play too close to levels from vanilla SMB1 and don’t go as crazy with the reduced limitations of the layouts and set pieces of the format as they could have. 5-4 is a loose translation of SMB1 2-4 and 5-4, 6-1 is mostly copied from SMB1’s version of the same level, as is 6-2, and 7-1 hits similar beats as SMB1’s version aside from the unique bonus rooms and the end-level staircase. Compare this to the likes of the first two castles which have bonus rooms set underground and in the overworld, 3-1 featuring underwater tiles in an overworld level, and 4-2 having two entrances to its underground section and an Easter egg if one jumps the flagpole.
• The new powerups are very well-hidden with almost no hints to their locations and are very seldom-used with only one or two appearances per powerup. Except for the hammer and clock, they are not placed in spots where they would be useful.
• For years, the PC-88 version was plagued with being run on a “bad dump” that blanked out the screen as it loads in the next part of the current level, making it harder to anticipate oncoming terrain. This bad dump also resulted in the infamous “IPL Switch” that locked you out of the final level.
• The fourth world in particular was victim to some oversights that would result in soft locks: 4-2 had a nonfunctional Warp Zone, and 4-3 had platforms mandatory to progress that would not load in due to the game being overloaded on platforms on the current screen and— perhaps even more infamously, a bonus room with a broken exit.

In the years since I made my initial post on Super Mario Bros. Special, more people would discover the game and expose it to an even wider audience, though it pretty much remained relevant only to bigger Mario/SMB1 fans, emulation communities, and collectors and enthusiasts of rarer consoles and home computers. With the circumstances around its release preventing Nintendo from bringing it back on current-generation hardware, it remained an oddity that those outside of Japan would only get to experience through emulation. It wouldn’t be until 2022, 12 years after I first heard of and played Special, that I had the experience of playing the game on one of the two computers it originally released for.

Yup, your eyes do not deceive you; what you see in front of your very eyes is in fact a real, working Sharp X1 at last year’s Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. And the game was still as sluggish to play on real hardware as it is on emulators. The overly blurry CRT monitor does miraculously make the graphics and colors look nicer overall, but it didn’t make me want to rush out and buy a whole Sharp X1 computer and a copy of the game when I can get a similar experience on emulators without having to invest a stupidly huge amount of money. Especially when the game and its associated machine were never released in the US to begin with. When the setup returned a year later at LIRetro 2023, the monitor had to be swapped out, resulting in a darker and muddier screen than before (with the only positive being that it completely masks any dithering on screen, almost). Ironically, a homebrew port of SMB1 on the Commodore 64 (video here), which was also being demoed at the same event on real hardware, was capable of fully replicating the feel and speed of the original NES game with only minimal slowdown and none of the chop-style scrolling that plagued both the PC-88 and Sharp X1 versions of Special.

Since discovering Super Mario Bros. Special for the first time in around 2010 or so, I randomly decided to remake the entire thing in Mario Builder, a very old Super Mario Maker precursor of sorts, in order to make the levels of Special playable in a better engine. Unfortunately, Mario Builder was filled with minor and major glitches and a large plethora of nonexistent QoL features to make making levels and full games easier, causing me to abandon the “Restoration Project” after only one level, World 1-1, was made. It was probably not worth it anyways in the long run since Mario Builder's physics were kind of messy and it was not possible to change the game's assets to resemble NES SMB1, meaning had the project gotten made, there would be an extreme artstyle clash with 16-bit SMB3 graphics in 8-Bit SMB1 levels, and the Bowser encounters would have just been the Koopalings on the Bowser Bridge in the first seven worlds followed by Bowser himself destroying himself by smashing the bridge.

Before my original decision to remake Special in the Restoration Project, and part of what inspired me to start it in the first place, was a level hack of the original Super Mario Bros. in 2008 that converts the levels to match Special’s layouts, leading to what would start a trend of modern remakes or remasters across the 2010’s and even into the 2020’s, as we’ll see later. The 2008 NES mod, by Frantik and Levi “Karatorian” Aho, was stock SMB1 programing and level design limitations, leading to many of the unique attributes of Special’s levels that wouldn’t be possible on the NES/FDS being excluded and the broken warps in World 4 being kept intact, but it would be the first time the levels would be playable outside their original platforms, even if they weren’t presented in the same way.

In 2012, Stabyourself’s Mari0, the SMB1 fan game that gives you a portal gun, was released, and one of the earliest map pack projects following up from a port of Lost Levels was a full conversion of Special. It was a collaborative effort, with eight users chosen to convert one of the eight worlds each and send them in to be checked for authenticity and accuracy, with yours truly being one of the project’s leaders. The final result was a very close remake of the levels of SMB Special, but with some small changes to take into account the heavier gravity of jumps, lack of Special’s enemies/items, and other limitations of Mari0’s level design formats. Unlike most of the projects that would aim to recreate Special, the Mari0 conversion allowed one to experience both the PC-88 and Sharp X1 versions, compared to most of these recreations that would take the X1 version’s graphics and visuals over the PC-88 version thanks to its better-utilized and versatile color palette.

The following year, all of Super Mario Bros. Special would be added to Exploding Rabbit’s Super Mario Bros. Crossover starting from Version 3.0, alongside the Lost Levels. This version was based on the Sharp X1 version and included matching Sharp X1 skins for every featured character, including Luigi, finally letting one play as Mario’s brother with his Lost Levels physics in the Super Mario Bros. Special levels proper. As part of the new difficulty system, Easy and Hard versions of Super Mario Bros. Special’s levels were created, featuring new and imaginative takes on Special’s levels to ease up on some difficult aspects of the original or provided a “What If” if Hudson Soft decided to make Special as hard as many people describe The Lost Levels.

By 2015, Nintendo would launch its own Mario level editor with Super Mario Maker, and in no time flat, Special’s levels would be recreated for it by a dedicated user named Forteblast. While it’s not without its own inaccuracies to the source material given the whole point of the editor is to be accessible to anyone interested in designing Mario levels, it does a pretty good job, even if it has to get creative with replicating the new enemies, like placing a Spiny on a Koopa Paratroopa to mimic the Fighter Fly, or placing a Spiny upside-down in a tiny alcove in the ceiling to replicate the icicles. When Super Mario Maker 2 launched, it too got a few Special ports, although from my understanding and from what I’ve seen online they don’t match the first game’s ports and weren’t created by Forteblast.

To my absolute shock, Frantik, one of the creators behind the NES port from 2008, would return to give the NES port a full overhaul in 2021. Dubbed the “35th Anniversary Edition”, this version set out to give the NES a truer-to-the-text conversion of the Sharp X1 version, resulting in a more accurate port with all the original Special-exclusive enemies and items intact, (almost) all of the unique level design elements not seen in the original game or Lost Levels preserved, and the ability to switch the game’s palette between a custom recreation of the Sharp X1’s color palette (which is what you see on the left) and the original NES color palette. The full credit scroll ending of Special is even included, now completely proofread and error-free with accurate translations of the Japanese enemy names. The only feature I would consider missing from this new version of Special on NES would be Luigi, either as a second player option or an alternate choice with different physics. Sure it’s accurate to the original not to feature him, but it would have been appreciated to have him featured in some form as a neat extra, especially since you could play as Luigi in SMB’s Crossover’s conversion of Special, as well as in Lost Levels, the true sequel to SMB1 (at least in Japan).

And that’s where SMB Special stands today. Despite the best efforts of the team at Hudson to create a SMB1-like experience for home computers (a trait that would continue well into the 90’s on MS-DOS computers), Special never really took off and mostly remained a curiosity at best, killing Hudson’s brief partnership with Nintendo to bring their NES and arcade hits to Japanese computers. The PC-88 and Sharp X1 continued on without any presence of Nintendo, getting successors in the form of the PC-98 and Sharp X68000 respectively. Hudson would jump ship to home consoles once the PC Engine launched in Japan, leaving the PC scene behind aside from a few odd releases until they would get bought out and absorbed into Konami at the beginning of the 2010’s. Nowadays, and with no word or possibility of an official re-release, people would keep Special alive through gameplay footage on Youtube and by porting the game’s levels into games/engines that are more adept at handling the fast-paced platforming of Nintendo’s original Super Mario Bros, allowing those new to discovering Special and its history to experience the definitive version of Hudson Soft’s take on the Super Mario Bros. formula.

If you want to see a more in-depth look at Super Mario Bros. Special, I strongly recommend this Basement Dwellers video, since it encouraged me to go and finish up this blogpost and provided a lot of interesting and useful information regarding the game and why many of its design choices were made.

Super MAYhem 17: Super Mario Doom Patch

Heads up, this game is kinda on the violent side, being a mod of Doom and all, so please keep that in mind before you continue reading.

Also I promise Doom will not become a super-recurring topic of this blog, it's just hard to put down for long because of the infinite replay value the dozens and dozens of mods provide.

Anyways, now that I have your attention, what do I have in store for everyone today? Well, if you’ve been following me for quite some time on various sites over the years, you might have clued in that I’ve always been a pretty big Mario fan (especially in the 2000’s and early 2010’s) considering the name of this very blog. However, I cannot say the same for id’s legendary Doom franchise, which I got into somewhat late, in 2015 to be exact, from a combination of a friend in the Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch gifting me a copy out of the blue and… a custom mod from late 2012 that replaced all the characters and enemies with Mario equivalents, fittingly titled “Super Mario Doom”. Doomguy of course became the famous man in red with an arsenal of Mario and Nintendo-themed weaponry, the Zombiemen became different ranks of Koopa Troops, Demons became Chain Chomps, and the mighty Bowser himself would replace the dreaded Cyberdemon. Five years later, another Mario-themed mod would surface, doing the opposite of Super Mario Doom: place Doomguy and pals (as in, the demons you) into Mario’s world to turn the Mushroom Kingdom into a literal hell-hole. This mod was known as Super MAYhem 2017, and it included 28 new Mario-themed maps to shoot through.

But what if you were to mix the two mods together to make it a complete Mario experience from head to bottom, with some modifications to make it work in older versions and source ports of Doom? Well, in 2020, modder Doomkid would port Super Mario Doom into the Vanilla Doom format with the original Doom color palette, allowing it to be used on a greater range of source ports from old to new. It was from there that I, out of sheer curiosity, decided to test the vanilla edition of Super Mario Doom with Super MAYhem 2017. It worked great, but I did notice that some of the converted assets didn’t look their best when thrown directly into Super MAYhem 2017 since it used a slightly different palette and a custom final boss with its own set of sprites. And thus, during a brief break that I was taking in November/December, I recreated the Vanilla Edition of Super Mario Doom using sprites from the original Super Mario Doom mod but converted to Super MAYhem 2017’s palette and with some small touches and cleanups here and there.

The result is what you see here: a custom version of Vanilla Super Mario Doom made specifically (and only for) Super MAYhem 2017. At the moment, it’s mostly just color changes and restorations while maintaining vanilla Doom compatibility. I do have plans to make further changes, but for now I have my hands full in too many pies to be finding room to slot this project in, especially when I'm still mostly alien to Doom modding.

Anyways, you can grab the download for the initial version here. All relevant information is tucked away in the attached readme file, including the links and associated credits mentioned above. 

Devil Fruits in other universes

As if One Piece was the only series with them roaming about.

Videogame Helicopter Suit logic

Am I seriously the only one that saw this connection?

Nintendo Bell Logic

PIERCE THE HEAVENS WITH YOUR DRILL, MAMAF***ER

WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK HE IS

No I am not posting these directly onto deviantART. Facejobs don't count as real art.

SMB1 Snow

I guess you can say this is somewhat fitting, considering Christmas coming within the next two days from when I'm typing this.

Here is a faithful reconstruction of the "Super Mario Bros. Snow Editon" featured as a challenge in NES Remix. I'm hoping this gets dumped and distributed online like what eventually happened with Donkey Kong Classic and Mario Bros. Classic. 

Anyways happy holidays.

SMBC; with a touch of Special.

Yesterday the most recent version of Super Mario Bros Crossover, version 3.0, was released to the masses; the biggest update to the game thus far, adding in the entirety of Super Mario Bros. Special as well as Easy and Hard variations of it and vanilla SMB, quadrupling the number of maps in the game. Considering how much of a sucker I am for Special, I decided to list off some notes regarding the design choices.

*As expected, the game is built to run with SMB1/2J physics, not the choppy and crappy ones from the home computers.
*The Sharp X1 version's skin is the only available version of the two; the PC88 skin is completely absent even if just about all the needed resources for it exist on the Exploding Rabbit forums and the Spriters Resource. Restricted colors or not, I consider the PC88 version the most well-known incarnation of Super Mario Bros. Special.
*The levels are not 100% authentic recreations of the original's, however unlike the NES romhack, the level recreations are much closer and capture all the original charm, since SMBC does not run on the limits of how tiles in SMB1/2J could be placed. And the differences in the level design present are very minimal compared to those of the NES romhack, such as reversing the direction of an underground elevator platform, adding an extra 1UP into a castle level, and making a previously-invisible block now visible.
*Levels now take advantage of the extra map hight in SMB1/2J, 13 tiles high as opposed to 12.
*The unintentional traps of 4-2 and 4-3's major secrets have been ridden of. 4-2's supposed "Warp Zone" which was non-functional in the original, now leads to a secret room that wasn't in the original (or the Mari0 recreation from last year) with many coins spelling out "Exploding Rabbit" and a secret item that completely stocks up your character of all his/her weapons/upgrades, resembling the ER logo. As for 4-3's bonus room, it now exits to the proper pipe under the staircase of mushrooms.

You can play the game directly from this link. Or on its Exploding Rabbit page.

ATTACK ON KOOPA

TITAN SPOTTED IN MUSHROOM KINGDOM, REQUESTING IMMEDIATE BACKUP, PLUMBERS ARE GOING IN!

Mari-Hole, thinking with Port-Holes

Ah, Classic Mario, Why do you never stop appearing on this blog?

Hey everyone. We're (well, I'm) back with our first post for April of this year, and I'm trying out the new Blogger post writer (or whatever you want to call it). It looks decent enough, but what I'm not really happy with was that they took off some of the old font colors for the user interference. But that's fine, i can live with it.

Now for me personally, March has been one hell of a year. And I'm not saying that to be anywhere positive, it has been nothing but a literal hell. Between the death of famous flash animator Edd Gould of Eddsworld, the removal of the Scott Pilgrim Avatar Creator, the possibly of Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel meeting it's untimely demise and being released in an incomplete form, and (not important) the drop of my once large fanbase (even to the point where my recent shite goes un-noticed). C'mon, do I really need to bring out fanservice?


And before you ask, no, that short sentence about my diminishing fanbase or it's viewers is not intended to be an attack, It's just making a point. Maybe if some people gave a honest crud about my art even if I prefer to self-teach myself and only listen to certain criticism from the people that I want following me, then I wouldn't have to take drastic measures.


Sadly it's true. I want to somehow find a way I can impress big-(not huge) time artists with my art. And to try and avoid any further damage, I desire these artists to remain anonymous in this post to try not to stir up trouble to the people reading and get a (possible) bad reputation, as if half of these artists don't already dislike me somewhat just for saying stuff I should never have said, even if said "knowledge" about the existence of fanservice and the presence of many people that envy it (like myself) is solely an opinion.


Why I changed it from me assuming it to be a fact is because let me ask you this; ever heard of the slogan "Sex Sells?" Well that can sort of apply here.


To put it simple, I'm not here to make myself or anyone else look like a dolt. I just haven't been having as much pleasure as I once had, sometimes making me ever regret starting a deviantART account.

Enough with that. Otherwise, school has also been really getting to me over the past few weeks, and it doesn't help that my English class has been demanded to read a novel titled We All Fall Down, and after reading 80 or so pages of it, I potentially don't have any interest in it whatsoever. And I know that everyone has their own opinions, and me personally, it tries way too hard to open up to readers that it ends up falling flat. There are too many branching storylines (two or three at once is okay, but five or six is just insane, however I've heard it does get better later on) and genres (begins as a mystery story, and opens up to many others, mostly murder and to a lesser extent slice-of-life), but the main seal on the bottle is that the characters are uninteresting thanks to the novel building up most of, if not all of them as smokers, drinkers, drug addicts, and murders, with little positive emotions and reasons for us to care about and sympathize with them. Even with my own series, the characters do end up performing bad tasks later on in their lives, but even before then the protagonists do positive things and give viewers a reason to like them. By the time We All Fall Down gives the characters good emotions, it's too late. And it doesn't help that they call one of the characters "The Avenger" rather than try to come up with a less inspiring name. Of course being 100% original isn't required, but it will help tremendously and make him somewhat a likable character until he murders a member of his family later on. Maybe.

Alright, that's all the pointless ramble. Onto the better news.

Once again, I go bull-istic over anything that has to do with 1985 classic Super Mario Bros because it's such a great game and a lot of interesting hacks and mods have been made for it over the course of multiple years. This one however combines the original game with a new twist: Valve's Portal series.

Mari0 is the talented effort of Maurice Guégan of StabYourself to cross Mario with the world of Portal.  Well it's more along the lines of "Mario with a Portal Gun" but it does have a graphic set that alludes to the Portal games, and even contains a level set that features test chambers, where the goal is to get from Part A to Part B without touching a red laser, falling offscreen, or (in some chambers) running out of time. There's next to no Mario enemies in these test chamber levels, but that is not always true.


Mari0's current release contains two official level sets, one that is a recreation of the original Super Mario Bros, but with the addition of a Portal Gun to enjoy the game further by doing pointless actions with the portal gun, and if you're lucky to have controllers and/or gamepads, you can invite up to three friends to kick bum in the Mushroom Kingdom. Then you have the Portal levels, the puzzle-orientated part of the game, where you use your Portal Gun to solve test chambers, with companion cubes and gel *squee!*.


The controls are a little complicated thanks to aiming and using the Portal Gun, and will take some time to adjust to, but when you do, it's awesome. With a physical controller, you might have better luck maneuvering Mario, but I've yet to try it out as I do not wish to connect any gamepads or controllers to my Windows 7 computer. It's also on Mac but Windows is more of a gaming system than a Mac; Macs are more of "art" computers, which was why I got one in the first place. You know how they say "I went Mac and I never went back"? Well not true with me. Do macs by default play Rosenkreuzstilette? Or run other millions of applications designed by (a) Windows user(s) for Windows users? Heck no.


Back on topic, Mari0 does have a lot of customization which allows you to change the color pallette of Mario and his two portal colors (the later feature being exclusive to multiplayer, in solo your portals are the default blue and orange). And for you inner game designers, there's also a full-fledged level editor to make the Mario level of your dreams, with PORTALS! *cough* It also allows you to import custom tilesets (level graphics) and music, though the methods of doing so are much more complex than Mario Builder, in which you have to put the .png or .mp3 files in the folder of your mappack, then re-title then accordingly. But that's not all; there's a few special rules for importing tilesets, so you can't just pop in a tileset and be good to go, you have to add another line and column to each tile and add in additional pixels based on the properties of each desired tile. It's that complex, but it will make you feel good inside in the end.


Now if you'll excuse me, I have to set other things straight, with science.