Topic: 2006/11: Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES) - Various

[JonLeung]

Super Mario Bros. 3
For this month's "Maps of the Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to our Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES) maps.

To celebrate the launch of Nintendo's highly anticipated Wii this month, why not take a look at Nintendo's best-selling game of all time? (That is, excluding game pack-ins.) It is also the best-selling console game of all time, stars Nintendo's biggest franchise character (Mario!) at the peak of his popularity, was featured in the film The Wizard, and will likely be a big hit on the Wii's Virtual Console. Yes, this is definitely worth your 500 Virtual Console Points.

This game Introduces Bowser's seven children, the Koopalings, who wreak havoc in the seven Worlds of the Mushroom Kingdom. The Super Mario Bros. travel across these many lands, using new animal suits that grant them special abilities, to defeat the Koopalings and save the kings, and then take on Bowser's Dark Land to save Princess (Peach) Toadstool.

Much less linear than the previous Super Mario Bros. games, the Worlds have multiple paths, allowing a player to take alternate routes each time they play it through. But there was enough variety in the stages that you would want to play through just about every stage anyway! There were new enemies introduced here that would become Mario series mainstays, there would be new obstacles and challenges, and new abilities to overcome them with, such as flying and transformation, which would also define the series.

Surprised that such a historically important game lacked a proper map treatment on this site, especially considering the popularity of all things Nintendo here, I, JonLeung, suggested that Super Mario Bros. 3 should be the first Atlas Project, and the feature project to relaunch VGMaps.com with at the beginning of 2006. The fine details of putting together a crew of game cartographers to tackle Super Mario Bros. 3 will be chronicled in a future Atlas Projects page here on the site, but needless to say it was a group project that turned out very well, and complements a game that deserves no less.

So to recognize the team effort in making these maps, KingKuros's, Zeric's, JonLeung's, Revned's, J.J. Maxx's, and mephea's Super Mario Bros. 3 maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps of the Month for November 2006.

[Ryan Ferneau]

It's great, except I still think you should have put both Bowser rooms in.

[JonLeung]

Yeah, but then I'd probably get more questions about why I put two in.  



There was a stage or two with extra exits for some reason, we chose to leave those out.



Man, this was a good project.  I should've done more than I had.  Zeric, KingKuros, and Revned did great work too.



If only we could find another game that at least three or four people would actually want to do together. *coughSecretOfManacoughKirbySuperStarcough*

[Will]

If there is another game three more people want to work on, I would like it if two or three more GBA mappers could assist me with Megaman Battle Network. I'm getting slow on the Waterworks Network and the game is taking much more time than I anticipated. The only glitch in this teamwork is that because no one seems to be familiar with the game anymore than me, they would not know where to start unless I directed them to, but their assistance would be brilliant and who knows, with their help, the game will be finished in a month or two and by that time it maybe next in line for Maps of the Month. Is anyone willing to help me in Battle Network?

[Ryan Ferneau]

JonLeung Said:

Yeah, but then I'd probably get more questions about why I put two in.  



There was a stage or two with extra exits for some reason, we chose to leave those out.



Man, this was a good project.  I should've done more than I had.  Zeric, KingKuros, and Revned did great work too.



If only we could find another game that at least three or four people would actually want to do together. *coughSecretOfManacoughKirbySuperStarcough*

Then type an explanation onto the map itself!  Surely there's room?

[JonLeung]

My aversion to unnecessary text on a map would probably prevent me from doing so, especially since the rest of the game didn't need any other textual explanations.  A fair bit of text would be distracting.  Even the shortest or most concise explanation would seem odd, maybe more so.  In that case I would prefer to put in the second room.



Maybe I should.  You're about the third or fourth person to mention this.  



I know I did a palette check on this set of maps but I don't think I knew as much about palettes as I ought to have at the time.  I wonder if I still have the original palette file.  I was thinking about rounding the palette values to multiples of 4 or 8 and reapplying them.



BTW, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the fastest-selling Nintendo game now (at least in its first week), I don't know if it can dethrone Super Mario Bros. 3 for overall sales in its lifespan, but it probably has the best chance of any game.

[Revned]

I guess I'd probably add the second room, but I wouldn't add any text. It's really not necessary.

[JonLeung]

I guess the thing is that the second room is practically identical to the first room.  And unless you do that trick where you fly over the ceiling to stop Bowser's fireballs (I discovered this trick on my own ) there really isn't any difference.



I'd be less hesitant if Bowser, being the final boss, wasn't in the room.

[Ryan Ferneau]

No, there's a big difference.  Each room has a different set of blocks.  One has a narrower line of breakable blocks at the bottom, making the battle more difficult.  This is important information to know if you're deciding which path to take through the castle.  This has nothing to do with passing through walls.

[Rew]

(Whoa, blast from the past!)



Yes, I second these suggestions for the second Bowswer room (haha, no pun intended)--and text free as well. Besides, SMB3 is enough of a classic that anyone who *doesn't* know there are two Bowser rooms in that fortress has probably never even played Mario before (at least not during the 2D era).



---

"So this is what it's like..."

- Spark Mandrill

[marioman]

It's funny.  I never noticed that the brick layout differed depending on which path you take through the castle.  I guess I am usually so focused on breaking the bricks that I do not pay attention to what they look like.

[avengah]

Missing 1-up block in 7-6! Just above the first horizontal pipe, there is a single ? block containing a coin. Just to the right of this is a hidden block containing a 1-up. Sorry this is so late, but I've only just noticed it. Most of the secrets and hidden blocks are present in almost all the maps, so it's a shame this slipped through; but better late than never!

[JonLeung]

Atlas Videos's Super Mario Bros. 3 (Warpless Tool-Assisted Speedrun) reached ONE MILLION VIEWS as of today!  NESAtlas should be very proud.

The world population reached 8 billion people today, so that means on average, 1 in 8000 people watched this speedrun that included maps that we made in it!