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yamamanama81 days until the vernal equinox
Sintax is a Taiwanese unlicenced game company that relocated to the People's Republic of China at some point.
This game is not to be confused with the Mystery of Time and Space, which is a Flash escape-the-room game that I associate with deepwinter and playing on the school computers and which even has a Christmas-themed room. You can play that with Ruffle.
I’m not going to call it that every time. Let’s just call it Janky Kong 5.
We get some sort of plot.
The Donkey Kong sprites were ripped from Donkey Kong Land for the regular Gameboy and look offputtingly monochrome here.
We get a world map.
HEY! This is just Super Mario Bros!
I mean, it’s Mario with Donkey Kong Land assets and a nonsensical plot and extremely stiff controls and the ratchet scrolling is even worse than it used to be. The camera shifts with your position and will occasionally lock into place and you have no choice but to go forward.
When I was a kid, I had this CD-ROM with a whole bunch of shareware and freeware games that ranged from godawful to actually pretty good. And one of the games on it was MyDude (called Amazing Dudes on the title screen for reasons known only to the creator and by 2022, probably not even to the creator), which was the result of someone making the first world from Super Mario Bros. in his own engine, and it does a fairly good job recreating those levels even though nothing really works as it is supposed to and despite the fact that the music has been replaced with the backbeat of the NPC song, they actually sampled the game over music from the original. And that’s what I think this was, only a bit more ambitious.
And the powerup mushroom, which is now a leg of beef, is in the proper place instead of in the middle block.
You can run, it’s just really really janky about it. Diddy runs normally but Donkey, well, he turns into the Tasmanian Devil. Except his tornado animation doesn’t actually hurt enemies.
The one up is visible in this version. It just sits there. Good thing you get it if you go anywhere near it.
The bonus room uses a unique Egypt-themed background.
The fireballs, or ice balls or plasma balls or whatever those are supposed to be, work slightly different. Instead of bouncing around the screen or bouncing on the floor, they go forward a few block lengths and fade away into nothingness.
Whatever they are, I’m going to call them hadoukens.
The flag is now a bell. You can still get points based on your height but it’s a lot harder here.
You don't even fall. You just appear next to the wall.
Here I got a screenshot of the Hadouken.
They really made me turn back into Diddy for that.
The hit detection on these guys is jankeriffic. And standing next to a pipe won’t help you. They’re like the red piranha plants from SMB2J. Except even worse: they’ll pop up when you’re standing on top of the pipe.
There's no coin block down here.
The Warp Zone is still around but I won't be using it.
I have no idea what games these backgrounds were lifted from.
These guys are the equivalent of Koopa Paratroopas, except instead of flying up and down or side to side in the case of one that we aren't going to see in this game, they fly in a sine wave like Mega Man's Bullet Bills.
The paratroopas don’t seem to distinguish between red and green. If there’s a different replacement for the red paratroopa, I didn’t notice it.
The castle is just in the woods here.
The fire bars can only point in eight directions. They don't really rotate.
Podoboos have a really big hitbox.
What is a monkey? A starved ape according to this game. But enough talk. Have at you!
Just like Super Mario Bros, your princess is another castle.
There are no instances of coin heaven in this game.
Don’t even worry about bananas. It’s like Mario. There aren’t enough in the game to make collecting every one of them worth the effort. It's even more so with the stiff controls.
They replaced the springboard here, which is probably for the best.
The jellyfish just swim around in circles, removing any semblance of challenge from the water levels.
While the fish just swim forward.
Flying Cheep-Cheeps are no longer fish. They look like some sort of bug.
All of the music in this game was taken from Pokemon Pinball.
Without hadoukens, you might have to take the hit from Dracula.
On the other hand, it only takes one hadouken to kill Dracula. He doesn't turn into another enemy when he falls off the screen in this version.
Hammer Brothers are either Jason Vorhees or the bandits from Yoshi's Island.
There is no extra life trick at the end of this level.
I don't know. I just wanted to showcase the backgrounds. Maybe someone can identify them.
Either I’m remembering incorrectly or they took out all of the balance lifts.
I think all of the fire bars move in the same direction.
I noticed around this time that the text is the same thing every world.
New Jank City
Lakitu drops bombs that you can’t jump on.
In this version, you can’t see Lakitu when you’re on the ground because of the screen crunch, because that’s the thing we wanted from Super Mario Bros. Deluxe. Not SMB2J (or part of it anyway, with SMB graphics). Not the Boo Racing. Not even the printer. That.
Even in SMB Deluxe, you can see Lakitu at all times and don’t get blindsided by Spiny Eggs. You can adjust the camera but you can’t adjust it if you’re not standing still WHILE ON THE FUCKING GROUND LEVEL.
That volcano will never be important.
Buzzy Beetle is not immune to your plasma ball. There's a part of the level where you can do the unlimited life trick.
The maze castle disables ratchet scrolling.
The wrong paths don’t loop on themselves, they just end in a barrier, but the game is nice enough to let you walk back instead of waiting for the time to run out.
There are only five worlds in this game.
Oh, and you have to jump on the armadillos to kick them. You can’t just walk into them or else you are the one to take damage. And they don’t even hurt enemies.
The blue gem is the equivalent of the Starman. Except it doesn't hurt enemies, you can just run through them.
Interestingly, Super Mario Bros' World 5 is the last time a new enemy is introduced.
I don't think these springs are nearly as janky as they were in the original.
In the original Mario, starting with level 5-3, we start seeing repeats of previous levels. This game handles it almost exactly as you’d expect. That is to say, if you expected them to replace them with later levels from Super Mario Bros instead of the repeats, you're setting your expectations too high.
Except it does turn into Stardust Speedway. I mean Stardust Slow-Way. 5-3 had bullet bills that spawned off screen. This level doesn’t.
The fire bar at the beginning of this world is the standard length.
The end is even more incoherent.
There are multiple sprite hacks of this game. Digimon Sapphire removes the Warp Zone, uses Bub from Bubble Bobble as Small Mario and Agumon from Digimon as Big Mario and Fire Mario, and the title screen has Croc from the Game Boy Color game.
Harry Boy and the Chamber of Secrets replaces small Mario with a frog.
Super Marrio Sunshine just replaces the title. Also, they somehow introduced a new bug in which touching the flagpole anywhere but the very bottom will cause an instant Game Over.
The location of the one up is slightly off in every other version.
That is an unsettling Game Over screen, or would be, if it weren't for the word CONTINUE.
burning question: why have no Mario games, official or unofficial, brought back the Superball, anyway?
Sintax is a Taiwanese unlicenced game company that relocated to the People's Republic of China at some point.
This game is not to be confused with the Mystery of Time and Space, which is a Flash escape-the-room game that I associate with deepwinter and playing on the school computers and which even has a Christmas-themed room. You can play that with Ruffle.
I’m not going to call it that every time. Let’s just call it Janky Kong 5.
We get some sort of plot.
The Donkey Kong sprites were ripped from Donkey Kong Land for the regular Gameboy and look offputtingly monochrome here.
We get a world map.
HEY! This is just Super Mario Bros!
I mean, it’s Mario with Donkey Kong Land assets and a nonsensical plot and extremely stiff controls and the ratchet scrolling is even worse than it used to be. The camera shifts with your position and will occasionally lock into place and you have no choice but to go forward.
When I was a kid, I had this CD-ROM with a whole bunch of shareware and freeware games that ranged from godawful to actually pretty good. And one of the games on it was MyDude (called Amazing Dudes on the title screen for reasons known only to the creator and by 2022, probably not even to the creator), which was the result of someone making the first world from Super Mario Bros. in his own engine, and it does a fairly good job recreating those levels even though nothing really works as it is supposed to and despite the fact that the music has been replaced with the backbeat of the NPC song, they actually sampled the game over music from the original. And that’s what I think this was, only a bit more ambitious.
And the powerup mushroom, which is now a leg of beef, is in the proper place instead of in the middle block.
You can run, it’s just really really janky about it. Diddy runs normally but Donkey, well, he turns into the Tasmanian Devil. Except his tornado animation doesn’t actually hurt enemies.
The one up is visible in this version. It just sits there. Good thing you get it if you go anywhere near it.
The bonus room uses a unique Egypt-themed background.
The fireballs, or ice balls or plasma balls or whatever those are supposed to be, work slightly different. Instead of bouncing around the screen or bouncing on the floor, they go forward a few block lengths and fade away into nothingness.
Whatever they are, I’m going to call them hadoukens.
The flag is now a bell. You can still get points based on your height but it’s a lot harder here.
You don't even fall. You just appear next to the wall.
Here I got a screenshot of the Hadouken.
They really made me turn back into Diddy for that.
The hit detection on these guys is jankeriffic. And standing next to a pipe won’t help you. They’re like the red piranha plants from SMB2J. Except even worse: they’ll pop up when you’re standing on top of the pipe.
There's no coin block down here.
The Warp Zone is still around but I won't be using it.
I have no idea what games these backgrounds were lifted from.
These guys are the equivalent of Koopa Paratroopas, except instead of flying up and down or side to side in the case of one that we aren't going to see in this game, they fly in a sine wave like Mega Man's Bullet Bills.
The paratroopas don’t seem to distinguish between red and green. If there’s a different replacement for the red paratroopa, I didn’t notice it.
The castle is just in the woods here.
The fire bars can only point in eight directions. They don't really rotate.
Podoboos have a really big hitbox.
What is a monkey? A starved ape according to this game. But enough talk. Have at you!
Just like Super Mario Bros, your princess is another castle.
There are no instances of coin heaven in this game.
Don’t even worry about bananas. It’s like Mario. There aren’t enough in the game to make collecting every one of them worth the effort. It's even more so with the stiff controls.
They replaced the springboard here, which is probably for the best.
The jellyfish just swim around in circles, removing any semblance of challenge from the water levels.
While the fish just swim forward.
Flying Cheep-Cheeps are no longer fish. They look like some sort of bug.
All of the music in this game was taken from Pokemon Pinball.
Without hadoukens, you might have to take the hit from Dracula.
On the other hand, it only takes one hadouken to kill Dracula. He doesn't turn into another enemy when he falls off the screen in this version.
Hammer Brothers are either Jason Vorhees or the bandits from Yoshi's Island.
There is no extra life trick at the end of this level.
I don't know. I just wanted to showcase the backgrounds. Maybe someone can identify them.
Either I’m remembering incorrectly or they took out all of the balance lifts.
I think all of the fire bars move in the same direction.
I noticed around this time that the text is the same thing every world.
New Jank City
Lakitu drops bombs that you can’t jump on.
In this version, you can’t see Lakitu when you’re on the ground because of the screen crunch, because that’s the thing we wanted from Super Mario Bros. Deluxe. Not SMB2J (or part of it anyway, with SMB graphics). Not the Boo Racing. Not even the printer. That.
Even in SMB Deluxe, you can see Lakitu at all times and don’t get blindsided by Spiny Eggs. You can adjust the camera but you can’t adjust it if you’re not standing still WHILE ON THE FUCKING GROUND LEVEL.
That volcano will never be important.
Buzzy Beetle is not immune to your plasma ball. There's a part of the level where you can do the unlimited life trick.
The maze castle disables ratchet scrolling.
The wrong paths don’t loop on themselves, they just end in a barrier, but the game is nice enough to let you walk back instead of waiting for the time to run out.
There are only five worlds in this game.
Oh, and you have to jump on the armadillos to kick them. You can’t just walk into them or else you are the one to take damage. And they don’t even hurt enemies.
The blue gem is the equivalent of the Starman. Except it doesn't hurt enemies, you can just run through them.
Interestingly, Super Mario Bros' World 5 is the last time a new enemy is introduced.
I don't think these springs are nearly as janky as they were in the original.
In the original Mario, starting with level 5-3, we start seeing repeats of previous levels. This game handles it almost exactly as you’d expect. That is to say, if you expected them to replace them with later levels from Super Mario Bros instead of the repeats, you're setting your expectations too high.
Except it does turn into Stardust Speedway. I mean Stardust Slow-Way. 5-3 had bullet bills that spawned off screen. This level doesn’t.
The fire bar at the beginning of this world is the standard length.
The end is even more incoherent.
There are multiple sprite hacks of this game. Digimon Sapphire removes the Warp Zone, uses Bub from Bubble Bobble as Small Mario and Agumon from Digimon as Big Mario and Fire Mario, and the title screen has Croc from the Game Boy Color game.
Harry Boy and the Chamber of Secrets replaces small Mario with a frog.
Super Marrio Sunshine just replaces the title. Also, they somehow introduced a new bug in which touching the flagpole anywhere but the very bottom will cause an instant Game Over.
The location of the one up is slightly off in every other version.
That is an unsettling Game Over screen, or would be, if it weren't for the word CONTINUE.
burning question: why have no Mario games, official or unofficial, brought back the Superball, anyway?
