Retro Gaming Australia

Mario’s Super Picross is a member of a rather exclusive club: Mario games that Nintendo never localised. As you’d expect, it’s very close to Mario’s Picross on the Game Boy, but the lukewarm market response to that title meant Nintendo passed on releasing the sequels outside of Japan until the rise of the Nintendo DS.

Ever fancy playing a GoldenEye 007 deathmatch in Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64? Now you can, thanks to the efforts of Sogun Studio and GoldenEye Vault.

The crew behind the Peach’s Castle map were previously responsible for porting The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time‘s Kakariko Village to GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, which is included in this pack.

You can find the patch here. Follow the installation steps at the site and you’ll be blasting around the Mushroom Kingdom in no time.

Mario Party is a neat collection of mini-games with a party theme, a result of a collaboration between Nintendo and Hudson Soft. However, many of the mini-games required players to do 360 degree spins of the analogue stick as fast as they can. This has led to the game being known as the great analogue stick destroyer. Nintendo actually issued special gloves for people to use when playing the game due to the high number of complaints about blisters (I even have a small scar on my palm from Mario Party shenanigans). Future releases in the series toned down the analogue stick butchery.

Hot off the heels of Mike Mika’s Pauline hack for Donkey Kong, ROMHacking.net’s Kishi has released a similar effort for Super Mario Bros., which puts players in the shoes of Princess Peach, who has to rescue Mario from Bowser’s clutches.

While put together relatively quickly, Kishi’s hack, entitled Super Mario Bros: Peach Edition, is actually quite competent. Sprites have been redrawn too, so they’re not as ghastly as the original Peach sprite, and the animation is quite impressive for a quick project.

You can get the patch here.

The Super Mario Bros. film is an often maligned piece of media due to the dramatic shift the property made during the transfer from video game to movie. The film spent ages in development, going through numerous writers and directors, and the end result was dramatically different from what was originally planned.

What can I say about Super Mario Bros. 3 that hasn’t been said before? It’s pretty much the best game on the NES. Kuribo’s shoe for life.

Super Mario RPG was one of the most popular J-RPGs of the 16-bit era. Like many RPGs of that vintage, the game was not released in Australia or Europe, which aggravated many fans, since the game proved to not be compatible with most universal adaptors. It did eventually make it here through the Wii’s Virtual Console service.

Medicom are preparing the release of some new Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda figures this year. Rather than basing these new lines purely on modern interpretations of the characters, Medicom will also be releasing classic interpretations of Mario and Zelda based on the art featured in the manuals of the original NES releases.

Included in the range are the classic Link, Wind Waker Link, Tanooki Mario and SMB1 Mario.

Best of all, these figures are dirt cheap at just 730 yen from AmiAmi and will be available in January 2013.

One of video games’ greatest ongoing paternity issues has been settled. At least until Miyamoto changes his mind again.

In the latest issue of Game Informer, the magazine’s staff had the opportunity to ask Shigeru Miyamoto candid questions about the Super Mario Bros. series. One such question asked was regarding the relationship between the Koopalings and Bowser. They asked; “In Super Mario Bros. 3, the Koopalings were suppose to be Bowser’s children. But there’s also Bowser Jr. Are they all his kids, and are they all from different mothers? Is Bowser Jr. a Koopaling?”

Miyamoto’s response: “Our current story is that the seven Koopalings are not Bowser’s children. Bower’s only child is Bowser Jr. and we don’t know who the the mother is.”

First person to make an animated gif of Bowser dancing on The Maury Povich Show gets my eternal thanks.

Mario Kart: Super Circuit is an often overlooked entry into the series, but it was the first to feature “classic” tracks from previous games (in this case, Super Mario Kart) in addition to new tracks of its own. It was also the first Mario Kart game to not be developed by Nintendo EAD, with development duties handled by Intelligent Systems instead.