#the lost levels

[pokerninja2]

Some know him as Blue Bowser, others know him as Bowser's Brother, but all you'll know is pain if you step in the ring with this guy! Bulrog may look a lot like Bowser, but he's got a degree of swagger his tyrant brother just can't match - just look at that combover!

fun fact: Bulrog's name comes from two sources!

first, the Korean food dish "bulgogi", which Miyamoto thought "Koopa" was actually named after

second, this bizarre mistranslation of Bowser's name from one of those how to draw books

combining "bulgogi" and "Kerog" gets "Bulrog"!

[lore-of-the-mushroom-kingdom]

Fake Bowsers

So something people will forget about at times is the fact in several games the Bowsers you fight aren't the real bowser.

In Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels many of the Bowser's you fight are minions transformed into Fake Bowsers by magic. We see this done again in Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario 3D Land, and Super Mario Run as well.

[katlimeart]

Made in 2024

If you’ve seen this anywhere else, I posted it back on my deviantArt when it was made.

[kaasiand]

GUYS GUESS WHO JUST OBTAINED PEAK

[tropeifier]

Originally posted online on July 30, 2022.

Nintendo characters are sometimes literal "Smash Bros". Bonus points to anyone who recognizes the painting.

[everygame]

Super Mario Bros. 2 / The Lost Levels

Developed/Published by: Nintendo EAD / Nintendo Released: 3/05/1986 Completed: 14/05/2023 Completion: Beat it by using warp zones (1-2 to 4-1, 5-2 to 8) and abusing saves at the most miserable parts. At least I'm honest! Version Played: Switch Online Trophies / Achievements: n/a 

How many times have I played the original Super Mario Bros. in my life? It must be thousands, from the real thing, pirate carts, emulation as early as Nesticle… of all video games it is probably the platonic form of the video game, the first screen the most indelible image, beating out Pac-Man or anything modern.

It is the Mona Lisa to art, or Dancing Queen to pop. Something we all know, something you respect, something that, probably, you never need to look at or hear again.

I do think that’s how I feel about the original Super Mario Bros. A masterpiece that I don’t really want to touch. In fact, even though I’ve never played The Lost Levels, I’ve played Super Mario Bros. so much that I approached this almost without curiosity, and after playing it for a while and slamming into its absurd difficulty spikes, I put it down for a long long time.

Because I just found it boring. The story goes that when developing VS. Super Mario Bros., Nintendo’s unusual (US-only!) arcade remix of the NES original, Miyamoto and his team had such fun making the levels more difficult that they thought it would be even more fun if they made an entire game of extremely hard levels–and with Nintendo all-in on the Famicom Disk System, a new Mario game wouldn’t even have to be a huge production. They could just slam it out on disk, quickly.

The thing is… as a level designer, I’m keenly aware that making extremely difficult levels is… well, it’s fun! But it’s fun because it’s easy. You just have to do a couple of things. You make everything that the player has to do require them get it perfect or at the absolute limit of their player character’s abilities. So the platform is as far as it can be for them to land on it at full speed. And then the other thing you do is that you trick the player as much as possible. You know that they need to jump there to make it across, so why not put a block in their way so they’ll bump their head and not make it! Funny!

It’s one of the first thing a level designer does, and I have been as guilty of it as anyone. It’s why games like Limbo are bad, because they’re tuned exactly this way. The player doesn’t play. They just do exactly, exactly what the designer is demanding that they do, with the frustration that what they’re being asked to do is either obscure, difficult, or both.

The funny thing about The Lost Levels, though, is that despite its fierce reputation, the game isn’t made up of only these moments. In fact, when you play the Lost Levels, you become aware of what it is that you’re good at in a Mario game and which parts of the design or controls you’ve never got a hook on. Because while I wouldn’t claim the levels have any meaningful overarching design concept, they generally just… play like a Super Mario Bros. level, until you get to a difficulty spike or a lie.

Playing the Lost Levels, I realized: I’m actually not bad at getting past Hammer Bros.; I guess I’ve internalized how to do it. I can get past fire bars!

But a springboard? Fuck me. It’ll kill me 99 times out of a hundred. I just can’t hit the button at the right time, and maybe I never will. From about the second level of this I’m fucked.

The cleverness, then, of the designers at the time was to work out which of these things were going to fuck the most players. What ways of playing Super Mario Bros. people hadn’t internalised. So it’s not just jumping to hit things at Mario’s limit, sometimes you’re having to awkwardly jump to platforms below you, or hit blocks just right so you don’t immediately suicide and can then get on top of them later.

It’d probably be fine if you didn’t have to generally play through the entire fucking level just to get back to the bit you fucked up! Unlike the classic argument for this (“you’re getting better at the game each time you have to run to the bit you got stuck on!”) here you’re already good at Super Mario Bros. so used to it, generally, that you’re bored of it. And then you do a bit that uses a muscle you’ve maybe never used.

This is probably fun to some people, and I’m sure it was fun to a room full of Nintendo game designers in 1986, but it’s not for me. I mean they really are taking the piss at some points (like 8-2, where the exit is actually completely hidden without a bit of luck or foreknowledge.) 

Some people–many people–are still happy when Dancing Queen comes on the radio. It’s possible you’re one of the people for whom more Mario is always a good thing, who consider the slippy inertia and brown graphics as good as a warm bath. If you are, this is largely more Mario, just sort of unfair in a way that is only rarely interesting.

Will I ever play it again? The Lost Levels, originally Super Mario Bros. 2 “for Super Players” truly was for the super player in that if you could finish it without using warps you got an extra world–where you only got one life. And if you beat the game eight times, you got four extra worlds. I will have a noodle on the SNES port of this one day but I just don’t feel like I need to see any of those extras…

Final Thought: The Lost Levels stands out to me as a situation where an American video game executive actually was correct, which even as I type it I can’t really believe it. Howard Phillips, Nintendo’s product analyst, gave such poor feedback to this that it was decided that it shouldn’t be released in the US.

I don’t think Phillips was thinking this way, but The Lost Levels represents a moment for the Mario franchise where it could have faced stagnation and irrelevance. Nintendo of Japan was thinking in the past. Think of Lode Runner, a series that really doesn’t come up in conversation at all, but in the early 80s was a phenomenon. Sequels and remixes were released endlessly, in a flood, doing nothing but creating more and more difficult and obscure games that you couldn’t even begin to play unless you were a Lode Runner master. I myself remember trying to get past the first level of Hyper Lode Runner on the Game Boy as a kid and never managing it.

It would be possible to hypothesise, actually, that in being forced to remix Doki Doki Panic into Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3 as a true evolution of the platform game as a whole was begat.

Not that I’m saying that’s what happened or anything. Just interesting to think about.

Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[devileaterjaek]

Super Mario Bros 2 (AKA The Lost Levels)

[kochei0]

I turn to Ares.

Thanks to Tyler Miles Lockett who allowed me to draw inspiration from his ARES piece for page 2! Look at his etsy page it's SICK

⚔️ If you want to read some queer retelling of arturian legends have a look at my webtoon

[mortifiedandawesome]

Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (Remix Album)

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[pokerninja2]

There's been a breach! In trying to build a stadium in the Minus World, it seems that other worlds have are starting to cross over! This Mario brother lookalike randomly showed up one day - he may look odd, but Mario and friends decided he was cool and can stay. We call him Oyoop.

[lore-of-the-mushroom-kingdom]

The Special Worlds

In Super Mario 3d Land after you rescue Princess Peach, Luigi is kidnapped and taken to the Special Worlds.

I believe this may be the Lost Levels from Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels.

It could also be the Parallel World from Paper Mario: Color Splash.

[katlimeart]

[mylittleredgirl]

okay tumblr’s exclusion from the twitter social media ban list is hilarious but genuinely we do not belong on there. if a real human person asks “where can i find you on social media” and your choice is a swift death or revealing your tumblr, most of us would simply expire. half of y’all change urls every week like you’re in witness protection. just imagine for one second attaching your wholeass government name to your latest two am clownposting and tell me that didn’t send a cold chill down your spine. the only place i ever want to see the words “connect with me on tumblr!” is on the ao3 profile of an author i’m actively stalking. anyone in the world can follow me except anyone i personally know. antisocial media.

[davidcartoon]

Mario gets a poison mushroom from SMB2 (Japan), markers.

[omegasteve777]

I only added the evilest things in this update: The King of Evil, green thing that stabs you, evil fucked up mushroom, snarky cat, and Chikorita. This is the evilest update until the next evilest update...