A Walk On A Rainbow

For the entirety of its existence, the Mario series has been extremely averse to using password save systems, despite these being very common in the 1980s and 1990s. The Mario games that could not provide the player with a battery save instead had no save system at all, and relied on secrets to let players skip ahead on repeat playthroughs (like the Warp Zones in the Super Mario Bros. games).

Interestingly, there have been only five games in the extended Mario franchise that used passwords to let the players continue where they left off, and three of them were originally never intended to be Mario games to begin with, and instead retooled as such during development. The remaining two are licensed edutainment games produced by an American studio with very little oversight by Nintendo.

/* Did one of those "top video games" things I saw on my dash recently. Whenever I do one of these lists, I limit myself to one entry per franchise to prevent myself from going overboard with something like Pokémon or Dragon Quest. There's no particular order in the ones that I have chosen.

In Tetris Attack, the scrolling stops whenever the player makes a match. If it did not stop and additional blocks could be generated in the middle of a combo, the combo could theoretically be prolonged indefinitely.

However, due to it always being restricted to a single screen, there is a maximum multiplier that can be achieved, which is x13. Further combos are not awarded any higher multiplier. The footage shows a near-perfect clear of an entire screen while getting the maximum combo.

This results in so many points being awarded that performing just four of these combos is enough to max out the score to 99,999.

Title card for an episode of Satella-Q, a 1995 quiz show broadcast over the Satellaview add-on for the Super Famicom in Japan. Note the slightly edited official artwork, whereby Mario, Toad and Luigi appear to be flustered.

Well, the world is garbage but at the very least I can make a podcast about pretty night music and gay moon music and put a fucking fairy on the cover art. (BTW, it’s Seren/Selene from Panel de Pon, in case you’re wondering.) Anyway, I think this doesn’t suck. Your input readily accepted.

Check out the tracklist here.