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Classic Games (Games) It's funny.  Laugh. NES (Games) Nintendo Games

Nostalgic Elation — the Super Mario Crossover 67

eldavojohn writes "Sure, they're stepping all over proprietary rights and copyright, but something must be said about the amount of bliss-filled nostalgia inside Exploding Rabbit's Super Mario Crossover. If the plumbers never really did it for you, you can now kill those goombas as Link, Mega Man, Samus, Simon Belmont, or Contra's Bill. Goodbye jumping and spitting; hello slicing, whipping, and shooting. Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?"
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Nostalgic Elation — the Super Mario Crossover

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  • This is pretty nifty. I'll be on the lookout for a story here tomorrow about how the guy who made this was sued into oblivion. Really, this dude has to know that trouble is brewing.
    • by socz ( 1057222 )
      must hurry up and download the swf to preserve in "archive."
    • Re:Neat. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Lord Byron II ( 671689 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @04:39PM (#32049254)

      He's not in any trouble. He's one of the 4.3 billion [slashdot.org] people who lives in a country with "bad" IP laws.

      • It's cute that you still think that really matters ;p
        • And it’s sad that you got so little spine that you buy into the reality of the enemy.

          You are like that one person in every horror or war movie, that always screams “We’re all gonna die! We have no chance! We have already lost! They have won!”, where you just wish they would finally just fucking shoot that idiot so he shuts the fuck up!

          I bet in a fight you have already lost in your head, before the fight even starts.

    • It is pretty nifty but yeah, this guy is going down (unfortunately).

  • Cowboy Neal (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I want to play as Cowboy Neal

  • That ain't nothin' (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dishwasha ( 125561 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @04:40PM (#32049264)

    There's ton's of copyright infringing material all over the net. Check out Super Mario Bros Z [videogamelan.com] or a simple google search [google.com]. Most of them are well done, but I'm sure no-one asked Nintendo or Sega if it was okay.

    • by Hatta ( 162192 )

      This would have been far more impressive if it were a rom hack and not a flash game. Consider for instance Somari [wikipedia.org]. That "video game mashup" has been around since the mid 90s, and is much more impressive IMO.

      • by Dwedit ( 232252 )

        No it's not impressive. The physics of the game are terrible (for instance, you can not change direction once you start rolling) and the game is almost completely unplayable.

    • by Digital Vomit ( 891734 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @06:31PM (#32050766) Homepage Journal

      I'm sure no-one asked Nintendo or Sega if it was okay.

      And in a perfect world, it wouldn't be any of Nintendo or Sega's business.

      • by EdIII ( 1114411 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @10:00PM (#32052726)

        And in a perfect world, it wouldn't be any of Nintendo or Sega's business.

        I am not asking for perfect. Just reasonable copyright laws that are beneficial to society and allow the copyright holders to make a reasonable living providing us with art to enjoy, which includes video games Mr. Ebert.

        Super Mario Brothers is easily 20 years old. What this gentlemen did is pretty damn fantastic in my book and a wonderful example of what a creative person can do availing himself of preexisting content and combining them in interesting ways.

        To say it is in society's best interest to provide Nintendo and Sega the legal entitlements to prevent the creation of such art after two decades of profit earning opportunities is simply crazy.

        It simply cannot be in society's best interest, EVER, to lock up all the art, technology, content, etc. for decades, and centuries, and possibly forever. A civilization based upon that would crumble into a worthless pathetic division of the people who control the IP and the slaves who work for them.

        My suggestion of a maximum of 10 years for any copyright, and maintaining the current 20 years for patents (getting rid of software/business method patents) might be a bit too much for some, but for fuck's sake... do those cocksuckers over at Disney really need to keep their legal entitlements 70 years afterwards? 200 years afterwards?

        The fact you say, "in a perfect world" as if it is some unattainable dream like riding a purple Unicorn is saddening. No, it should be a dream, or a wish upon a star, but just a reasonable legal foundation for a society that this kind of art be allowed to flourish.

         

  • Meh. (Score:3, Funny)

    by 2names ( 531755 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @04:43PM (#32049310)
    It's neat, but I'd really like to see it ported to the PS3. *ducks*
  • Cute, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bieeanda ( 961632 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @04:46PM (#32049358)
    My favourite in this genre remains Rom Check Fail [farbs.org].
  • See also (Score:3, Informative)

    by lyinhart ( 1352173 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @04:51PM (#32049422)
    Mushroom Kingdom Fusion [wikipedia.org] is another interesting fan produced Mario cross-over title.
  • Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?

    Do I really hate my news articles served with ridiculous and unfounded speculation?

  • Video-game mashups (Score:5, Insightful)

    by twoallbeefpatties ( 615632 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @05:04PM (#32049680)
    Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?

    Uh... Super Smash Bros.?
    • No idea why you got modded Troll, dude.

      That was a perfectly reasonable example of a previous cross-franchise game.

      I suspect my post just below yours will be modded the same way. Pissing off the "Fan Art" crowd is like pissing off Republicans. Expect a similar response.

    • I thought "fan made" and "unauthorized" were in the definition of "mashup".
      • I thought "fan made" and "unauthorized" were in the definition of "mashup".

        I guess that would be fair, now that I think about what "mashup" usually means in musical terms.
    • Marvel vs Capcom, as another example. But really, these types of games tend to be really fun. It's a shame IP law has made them more or less impossible to do correctly without someone bitching about their rights being trampled over.
  • "Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?"

    I sure the fuck hope not. I am bored to death with the NEW stuff coming out(most of it is just rehashed old stuff), so much so that I have pretty much stopped gaming altogether.

    Give me something new and fresh, NOT the same shit served up on a different platter.

    Are developers really that starved for new ideas, or is this just another form of "Fan Art" of the 500k+ Sonic comics ilk?

    • by tepples ( 727027 )

      Are developers really that starved for new ideas

      Yes. The most recent genre launch was probably Parappa the Rapper in the mid-1990s, which kicked off the music game genre. Everything else is derivative; for example, Katamari Damacy is a reinterpretation of the arcade game Bubbles (1982) as a 3D platformer.

  • Dear Nintendo,

    Please do not take legal action against the person that made this. Instead, credit them for creativity, and make an iPhone app of this game. I'll buy it.

    -Zaphod

    • by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

      Dear Nintendo,

      please make it as a Nintendo DSi downloadable game. I will buy it.

      • Dear both of you,

        Nintendo couldn't do that if they wanted to (not alone anyway). They don't even own the rights to half the characters (Contra is Konomi, as is Simon Belmont. Mega Man is Capcom...)

  • Inaccuracies (Score:1, Informative)

    by hardburn ( 141468 )

    Good attempt, but there seems to be some things in the levels that aren't quite right. In 1-2, there is only one Goomba coming when you first enter (should be two directly side-by-side). Also, the first mushroom in that world, coming off the row of blocks, goes far enough to jump over the wall, instead of bouncing off it and coming back at you.

    And no way of getting into the -1 world (as Mario or otherwise). Just doesn't seem possible to get your head stuck that way.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by SCPRedMage ( 838040 )
      Only one goomba comes at you at the beginning of that level because it doesn't track enemy movement while they're off screen, which can cause... interesting scenarios.

      And are you really complaining that he didn't go out of his way to implement a BUG? World -1 is an interesting bug, sure, but it adds uh, let's see, JACK EFFING CRAP to the actual game.
    • by badboy_tw2002 ( 524611 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @05:47PM (#32050276)

      Yeah, I also noticed that you can play as other characters besides Mario & Luigi which were _definitely_ not in the original. Also, there seems to be some pixels out of place in the castle, I haven't finished counting the bricks but I'll let you know when I do.

    • You can also walk backwards and revisit previous parts of the level -- something that only became possible in later mario games.

      I'm not sure I miss that though.

    • by an unsound mind ( 1419599 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @07:06PM (#32051144)

      Also the hitboxes are pretty badly wrong. Including getting hit by the top few pixels of a piranha plant.

      I DEMAND PIXEL-PERFECT ACCURACY FROM FLASH GAMES IMITATING OLD GAMES.

  • That's the best thing I've seen all week.

  • by Belial6 ( 794905 )
    No.
  • if you're on Windows, check out ROM Check Fail [tigsource.com] ^^

  • ROM check fail: asking the inevitable question, "What if the ROM check... Failed?"

  • Here's a direct link to the game hosted on another site, if you want to play the game offline:

    Super Mario Crossover [onlineflashgames.org]

  • by Zouden ( 232738 ) on Friday April 30, 2010 @07:04PM (#32051116)

    And this is why Flash will always have a place on the web. There's so much attention these days on Flash as a video player (and how HTML5 will make it all obsolete) but Flash's real strength lies in the ability to produce things like this - there's no (good) alternative. The same goes for all the millions of animations out there (Newgrounds, Homestarrunner etc).

    • by tepples ( 727027 )
      This is a devil's advocate post. I want to know exactly why HTML5 isn't adequate so that I can write a web page explaining the situation to other people.

      Flash's real strength lies in the ability to produce things like this - there's no (good) alternative.

      Staunch anti-Flash posters will sing the praises of HTML5 for games.

      The same goes for all the millions of animations out there (Newgrounds, Homestarrunner etc).

      If you don't want to incur the order of magnitude bandwidth cost of converting these to H.264 and Theora, vector animations with synchronized sound like these can be converted to run using a JavaScript player that renders SVG or an HTML5 2D Canvas.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

        The short of it is that Adobe's tools for Flash creation are simply outstanding. HTML5/Canvas/JS is like Assembly compared to it. I doubt very seriously that Super Mario Crossover couldn't be implemented in them, but who would want to?

        • by tepples ( 727027 )

          The short of it is that Adobe's tools for Flash creation are simply outstanding. HTML5/Canvas/JS is like Assembly compared to it.

          In that case, the debate isn't Flash vs. HTML5 as much as Flash CS vs. Notepad. Adobe could easily make its tools output JSON for a JavaScript animation player instead of SWF.

          • by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

            Semantics.

            Flash (Easy to develop for)
            HTML5/Canvas/JS (Not so easy to develop for)

            Though I agree that if someone releases a tool to make the latter as easy to develop as the former, they'll probably hit it big. Adobe would be wise to be the first to do it.

      • Well, for starters, you can't play more than one sound at a time with HTML5. So either you'll have to lose the music or the sound effects. Second, I highly doubt you could produce something that smooth and responsive with Canvas and Javascript. Flash's pixel-level bitmap control make blitting operations much faster than pasting objects onto a Canvas. And AS3 is just a lot faster than Javascript due to the strict typing. Also, while you could probably build this game engine in JS, it wouldn't be pretty, as J

      • The guys over at 8BitRocket posted an evaluation of some of what it takes [8bitrocket.com] to write an equivalent game in AS3 and HTML5. You may find it informative.

        Staunch anti-Flash posters will sing the praises of HTML5 for games.

        I would guess that they haven't actually tried to program in both of them.

        If you can find an actual game developer who prefers HTML5 over Flash (based on their development experiences), then by all means please post a link. While they might exist, I've not yet met one, and I see far more who have tried HTML5... but ultimately stuck with Flash.

        • I read Steve Fulton's article that you linked. The gist is that nobody has yet written support libraries for Canvas-based game development.

          If you can find an actual game developer who prefers HTML5 over Flash (based on their development experiences)

          My cousin. He and others in his position have far more time than money, which is why they stick to Free or otherwise free tools. Imagine a high school student on summer break whose school isn't on the list of schools that get a discount on Flash CS5 [adobe.com]. These people are likely to be the people who write the support libraries that Canvas currently lacks.

          • I read Steve Fulton's article that you linked. The gist is that nobody has yet written support libraries for Canvas-based game development.

            On top of the fact that there aren't support libraries, it's also that the core API doesn't support basic functionality needed by game developers (such as playing two copies of the same sound simultaneously -- I.E. gunshots or explosions).

            My cousin. He and others in his position have far more time than money, which is why they stick to Free or otherwise free tools. Imagine a high school student on summer break whose school isn't on the list of schools that get a discount on Flash CS5 [adobe.com]. These people are likely to be the people who write the support libraries that Canvas currently lacks.

            Then he might be one of the people who is interested in the free and open-source compiler that Adobe released several years back. FlashDevelop [flashdevelop.org] is one of the best free tools for doing Flash development, though there are many many others [osflash.org].

            I developed several games in Flash b

  • "Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?" Hell no. Anyone who has ever downloaded ROMs even knows that a single archive of one game has tens of different hacked copies where the textures and/or bitmaps and sprites have been replaced/re-themed.

    Move along, nothing to see here.
    • by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

      This is more than retheming or replacing sprites. The other game characters move, act, and attack like their original game counterparts. Belmont whips and throws axes (and has terrible jumping controls.) Samus can roll into a ball, drop bombs, even double-jump with the bombs. The Contra guy is really the best, though. Feels just like you're playing Contra.

  • The best part for me was the ads displayed if the site detected you were running adblock. They were actually entertaining enough I reloaded the page a few times to see a few more of them. I didn't buy anything as they requested, though, since after all the site owners were calling me a dick for running adblock, but at least they were not so controlling that they tried to ban me from their site altogether.

    Overall, a pragmatic approach to the fact that many of us don't like the intrusive, gawdy ads that
  • Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?

    ROM Check Fail [indiegames.com] is another awesome little mash-up, well worth checking out

  • Does UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, B, A (SELECT - for 2player), START work? or do you hafta do that dang 1UP deal with the dudes on the stairs? :)

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