The Princess is a Lie....You Monster.

September 1, 2011 8:18 PM

Mari0 is a Super Mario Bros and Portal mashup currently under development. Previously, the same developer made Not Tetris; a faithful reimagining of the original game, but with the addition of realistic physics and geometry.
posted by schmod (21 comments total)

The IM indicator sounds mixed into that video are really distracting.
posted by delmoi at 8:21 PM on September 1, 2011

That is the single coolest thing I have ever seen.
posted by theredpen at 8:23 PM on September 1, 2011 [3 favorites]

Much Less angering than Portal Tetris.
posted by Uppity Pigeon #2 at 8:43 PM on September 1, 2011 [10 favorites]

Not really related much but I had to put this somewhere.
posted by shakespeherian at 8:44 PM on September 1, 2011 [3 favorites]

Honestly I find most of the "re-imagined" games to be bad imitations that fail at really capturing what that game is about. Portal seems to be one of the games I'get seen this done a lot with and every time I just end up thinking "that's not Portal, not even close", but I'll have to admit this was done right.
posted by P.o.B. at 9:29 PM on September 1, 2011

Perfect.
posted by davejay at 9:47 PM on September 1, 2011

Hello?

Excuse me!

I don't blame you.
posted by The Whelk at 9:55 PM on September 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

I literally just drooled on my keyboard from slackjaw.
posted by chemoboy at 11:07 PM on September 1, 2011

Yawn....

Oooooooohhhhhhhhhh......
posted by Chekhovian at 1:05 AM on September 2, 2011 [1 favorite]

See! I told you you can jump the flag at the end! My cousin's best friend's next door neighbor did it once.
posted by Brodiggitty at 5:29 AM on September 2, 2011

Ooh this is really really great.
posted by odinsdream at 6:17 AM on September 2, 2011

I couldn't find it on a quick browse of his site... is this being done in LUA?
posted by codacorolla at 6:56 AM on September 2, 2011

I hope they make a version where Mario can't jump very high. As is the portal mechanic is kinda superfluous. It might be more fun if you had to negotiate your way through the world with just the portal gun. I doubt this would convert flawlessly on all levels but you could probably make some small tweaks and get it to work.
posted by dosterm at 8:25 AM on September 2, 2011 [1 favorite]

I know, a Mario who can't jump is like rain on your wedding day, but still.
posted by dosterm at 8:28 AM on September 2, 2011

Any mefite out there able to comment on whether such a mechanic would have been achievable on the original NES hardware? Seems like it very well could have been, but I might be misunderstanding something.
posted by odinsdream at 9:26 AM on September 2, 2011

Not exactly what you're talking about, but I thought this was clever for a SMW hack. (warning, the absolute worst narrator ever)

There's an emulator called FCEUX and a scripting language called LUA which can be combined to do some pretty crazy stuff in the vanilla engine. It looks like this is a custom engine that the guy is working with, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was the original engine with LUA scripting over top.

There was a pretty cool post about it a few years back.
posted by codacorolla at 9:49 AM on September 2, 2011

I couldn't find it on a quick browse of his site... is this being done in LUA?

Yeah, their fact sheet says it is done in the Löve engine.

It's amazing they can do something this awesome and not even index their arrays properly .
posted by Gary at 10:47 AM on September 2, 2011

Any mefite out there able to comment on whether such a mechanic would have been achievable on the original NES hardware? Seems like it very well could have been, but I might be misunderstanding something.

The portals themselves all line up nicely along tile lines. However, drawing half a sprite in one place and half a sprite in another would be a problem. I don't think the NES had anything in terms of sprite masking. So you would need to cheat and make the portal "glow" large to cover up the fact you are drawing things in two places at once.

Mario also didn't have any physics to deal with things going sideways, so that would complicate things quite a bit in terms of how to deal with collisions. It also requires a lot of extra graphic memory since I don't believe you could rotate sprites on the NES. They also couldn't rotate smoothly if you wanted a goomba to get back on his feet after falling on his side.

The rest comes down to if there's enough processor speed to deal with checking if everything is in two places at once. Dealing with a vine going through a portal (especially a sideways one) would be a headache, but you could probably design levels around that. Same goes for the spinning fire lines and fireballs in the castles.

The original Super Mario also didn't allow you to backtrack, so that move at :38s wouldn't be possible. But you could backtrack in later NES Mario games, so that was a limitation of the game, not the hardware.
posted by Gary at 11:44 AM on September 2, 2011 [1 favorite]

I don't think the NES had anything in terms of sprite masking.

I think it did have some support for this, for when Mario went down a pipe. But it might only be vertical masking.
posted by zixyer at 2:32 PM on September 2, 2011

You're right, the portals could act like the pipes do, of course. It's not masking like I was thinking but you can set sprite priority to draw below the background.
posted by Gary at 2:43 PM on September 2, 2011

This is amazing.
posted by purephase at 8:57 PM on September 2, 2011