So as I teased yesterday, I’ve been playing quite a bit of this Super Mario Bros. Crossover dealie. Check this out:
Essentially what this evil genius, this Jay Pavlina guy, has done is shoehorned a bunch of old classic Nintendo characters into the original Super Mario Bros. You can play as Mario if you want, or you can get wacky with Mega Man, Samus, Link, Simon Belmont, Ryu Hyabusa or Contra Guy.
This is not a new idea. Sticking video game characters into games they don’t fit into is a time-honored fangame tradition, harkening back to the days when people first started plugging sprites into romhacks. But this is the first time I’ve seen it pulled off with such… panache. The game boasts that each character controls exactly like in their original games. This isn’t strictly true; even Mario himself feels a little “off” in this game versus playing on an actual NES. (I say this as a man who still has an actual NES hooked up.) But he really did get damn close. So close, I daresay, as to really make no difference to the average player.
But he didn’t stop there. It’s one thing to plug Belmont into a Mario game. It’s another to make Belmont control like Belmont. The next step is to make Belmont actually fun to play. Some of these old characters have… how should I put it? Eccentricities that make them infuriating to pilot nowadays. Samus can’t duck to shoot short critters, for example, and Belmont always jumps a fixed distance. In places like this where strict adherence to the classic movesets would be detrimental to fun, the game makes concessions. Samus can duck in this game. And Belmont can double-jump. And even these little tweaks aren’t really against the rules; Samus did learn to duck eventually, after all, and they haven’t made a Castlevania game without a double-jump for ten years. So when extra moves are required, the upgrades each character gets are still stylistically appropriate.
The developer has some videos up on his site where he gives commentary about some characters, giving some insight into his thought process. I really love how his main goal is to maximize fun wherever possible. Link, for example, does have a side-scrolling game on the NES… but it’s not one most people remember fondly. Solution? Put the original Link in the game and give him a moveset that makes sense. Purists may scoff, because that’s what they do, but this Link is way more fun than the other Link would have been. On the flip side you have Contra Guy, whose moveset is accurate but completely breaks SMB wide-the-hell-open. Solution? Leave it alone. Yes, the Spread Gun annihilates everything, makes the game a cakewalk and places Contra Guy on a throne high above every other character. So what? Playing as him is a blast.
And really, who the crap wants SMB to be hard anymore?
It doesn’t even stop there, though. Just to prove that this dude really and truly 100% does absolutely know his shit, check this out:
In vanilla SMB there is no way you could break any of these bricks; Mario can only break bricks by bopping them with his head from underneath. Virtually every other character in the game does have some method of doing this, though. If things had just been left alone you could create situations like this where you cause paths to be completely unavailable to you. The developer identified those problem areas, though, and took measures to fix them. Hence, this coin block in front of the pipe.
This is the kind of attention to detail I like to see. I get giddy about stuff like this.
Super Mario Bros. Crossover is still in development. There are some bugfixes and (of course) new characters coming down the pipeline, and I can’t wait to see what it does next. It’s tempting to just list every Nintendo character I love and gush about how so totally sweet it would be to have them in the game, but I’m going to resist the temptation. This guy knows what he’s doing and I’m confident his awesome fangame is only going to get more and more fun as time goes on.
But… well… while I have you: Luigi from SMB2j, Scrooge McDuck and the dude from Clash at Demonhead. I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.
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I wouldn’t mind seeing Kirby or Kid Icarus, personally!
You know, I really wish that I was born 5 years earlier sometimes. At my young age I couldn’t quite hold a controller to play the original SMB, and that pains me to this very day. The earliest games I can remember playing are Mega Man 3 and The Legend of Zelda, in its awesome gold cartridge, but if I had been able to develop the necessary motor skills for these games I would’ve been so much better at them. As it was, all I knew what to do was wander around the world map and sometimes stumble upon the level two sword, but not know where to begin to acquire it.
Which is why SMB crossover doesn’t connect with me. I don’t know any of these characters, aside from Mega Man, because I never had a chance to play their games, or if I did, I wouldn’t know how to play them.
However, I always respect hard work on games, and when it comes to how much time and effort was spent balancing and adding fun to the game, I feel the creator(s) deserve for their work to be tried by everyone, so I’ll give this game another chance.
I know how you feel. I never played Ninja Gaiden as a kid, so now when I try to play Ninja Gaiden my brain is like “FFFFFFFF” and then it explodernates.
I find Samus’s lack of an unmorph jump… disturbing.
That, and Batman needs to be added before I consider putting this into my canon of Free Flash Games.
I want the Descendant of Erdrick! He can do nothing except move to the left or right extremely slowly and make “uh uh uh” noises when he bumps into walls. Dynamic!