[GerbilSoft]

Welcome to The Mario Center! In this subsite, you can compete in various games in the Super Mario Bros. series. Currently, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2 (aka "The Lost Levels"), and Super Mario World are available for competition. We will be adding more games later this week.

EDIT: Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES and SNES versions), Wario Land 3 and 4, and New Super Mario Bros. are open for business.

[X-5]

cool, back when I was 15 before I found this site I played speedran individual levels in mario games(SMB1 and 3) and maxed a few of the easy levels, this should be fun!

[P.P.A.]

Holy crap. Time to connect my SNES again for some SMW action. (Is the PAL version allowed?) Also hoping for Yoshi's Story score attacking. :3

[Stefan]

Is the Pal version different?

[P.P.A.]

Runs at 50hz. Also I keep getting like 363 on Yoshi's Island 2.

[KnucklesSonic8]

Happy for you guys. I mean, it's great to see this FINALLY up but at the same time, it discourages me from having the hope that my sub-site will go up.

I will be participating frequently, you can be assured of that. ;)
Also, rules should discuss VC Games.

[Stefan]

Rules do discuss vc games. :o

[andrewg]

Hey, glad to hear about this new section. I'll see if I can get anyone to come to this website for competition.

[suriipasu]

I suppose I'll contribute some times/scores once the SMB DX and Wario Land 3 / 4 tables are online, though I no longer have my old save files, so they'll be far from my best. =(

[KnucklesSonic8]

Sorry Stefan. I just assumed they didn't mainly as Rolken hasn't included them despite me constantly saying so. Quel surprise. Ca c'est ordinaire pour moi. <_<

Anyway, will you guys be adding Mario VS Donkey Kong soon. I can't wait to post my stats for that.

[aim_krazy]

Hey everyone. =)

Just curious: how do you post stats for Super Mario World? I need to record my performance on tape, right?
(NOTE: I had more questions here, but I deleted them after I read the Competition Rules. xD)

PS: Will "Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island" be included here someday?

[Rick_242]

Hey everyone. =)

Just curious: how do you post stats for Super Mario World? I need to record my performance on tape, right?

To post stats for Super Mario World you click on "Statistics" which is located to the left underneath "Submissions"

You don't need to tape all your runs but, you could if you want to. Usually people will request a taped run if they find it suspicious and believe the time is fake.

Yoshi's Island I'm unsure about, you'll have to ask one of the admins for TMC (The Mario Center) about it.

[Maru Kiba]

Why can't Mario Advance 4 be on here? The only few things different are the graphics and it has been rendered to handle the GBA. Since the Nintendo is 16-Bit, SUper Nintendo is 32-bits and the GBA about 64-bits for the highest bit game (I don't know that one)
But I stand if SMA4 is allowed finally.

[yoshifan]

Been a while since the last post here, but I figured some of the issues presented here may not have been addressed yet, so I'll address them to the best of my ability.

Yoshi's Island: the only thing we could track are the item-percentages for each level, and they each max out at 100 points.  That fact alone isn't a problem, but unfortunately I think there are other reasons why they shouldn't be ranked.  First, the maximum scores are relatively easy to achieve compared to other "maxable" stats in other games.  I don't mean that this is an easy game to complete, but I mean it's an easy game to compete in - they're two different definitions of difficulty.  And on that note, I think competition in a game should go beyond its definition of completion.
On the other hand, the newer Yoshi's Island DS would be a good addition: it has mini-games and a time attack mode that don't have any of the problems that the percentages do.  We haven't added it yet because time attack times go into the negatives, and we haven't yet found a good way to represent negative times on a chart.  It should be possible to resolve this sooner or later, though.

Super Mario Advance 4: actually, I've confirmed that there are some slight differences between levels in the SNES and GBA versions.  For example, 1-4 has some wider platforms in the GBA version, and I think I remember very slight changes in 1-6 and 1-Fortress too.  I've only checked the first 3 worlds for differences like these, but it's likely that we'll only see very slight differences that will have a minimal effect on fairness.  Super Mario World probably has bigger SNES/GBA differences, and we ended up merging SNES and GBA stats in that game.  So it's likely that SNES and GBA will be ranked together for Super Mario Bros. 3, as well.  At any rate, I'll organize some of the specific level differences so we can really determine whether it's fair to rank them together.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong: the only thing that makes me hesitate on adding this is that high-level competition is already very well-established in sites like Cyberscore and VGR.  Maybe it's just me, though, since I did compete in that game for a while... if you guys find it new and exciting, then there's no problem. >_>

[elecmouse101]

If you add Mario Vs Donkey Kong you have to add March of the Minies.

Oh and just a suggestion, how about coin attacking? Maybe not for the 2Ds but for the 3Ds thet record your top coins for every mission (SM64/DS, Sunshine, Galaxy).

[Stefan]

http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb3_snes2sma.shtml

[yoshifan]

Wow, nice find, this list of differences looks really thorough.  It should be enough to rely on this list alone.

I guess there are more differences than I thought, and a few of them do seem likely to give the upper hand to one version (mainly the GBA one).  I'm particularly thinking of 2-3, 7-Piranha-1, 7-7, and 7-8.  Still, it's probably okay to rank SNES and GBA together, if we did it with Super Mario World.  There really isn't enough difference to rank them separately, and both versions should be popular enough that we ought to allow both in some chart or another.

If anyone noticed this part about BOOM-BOOM and was wondering if it made the GBA disadvantaged: I noticed that the timer doesn't run as the wall is forming, so SNES and GBA are most likely the same there.


elecmouse: Yeah, we were also considering coin charts in those 3-D games.  In SM64, SM64DS, and Sunshine, we should look over the infinite-coin tricks so that we might choose to disallow them or not.  In Galaxy, I recall we were trying to decide whether to have one coin chart per level, one chart per star, or something in between.  Besides those issues, I don't think there's a problem with adding them.

[yoshifan]

So, actually, I had a change of heart about the SMB3 differences, as to whether or not SNES and GBA could be ranked together.  After all, even the numerous small differences can make for annoying version gaps in the rankings, if the competition gets pretty solid down the line.  Even if we can't see this sub-site getting incredibly popular, I think it's safer if our ranking system won't break down in the event of tight competition.

Also, after looking at The Mushroom Kingdom's impressive list of SMB3 differences, it makes one wonder whether we missed a bunch of subtle SNES/GBA changes in Super Mario World.  Many of the SMB3 changes that we missed were changes to adapt the levels to the smaller GBA screen.  SMW would probably face similar difficulties going from SNES to GBA.

There are lists of SMW changes out there, but none that I know of are nearly as thorough as TMK's SMB3 changes list.  So I personally played the two versions of SMW alternatingly to look for differences.


Here's a document with a decent list of level differences in the first 3 worlds of SMW.  I also listed some general differences in there, as well as some points copied from The Original L5's Changes FAQ at GameFAQs.  There's probably a bit of redundancy between my points and the FAQ's points, but anyway:

http://www.vortiginous.com/yoshifan/SMW_differences_v1.rtf

So far, Stefan and I think the SMW differences are probably similar in magnitude to the SMB3 differences.  Unfortunately, that may mean Mario World's SNES and GBA versions shouldn't be in the same charts after all (and they currently are).  Still, now's as good a time as ever to think about what we should really do about these version differences.


As it stands, it looks like we have three options for each of SMB3 and SMW:
- Rank SNES and GBA in the same charts
- Rank SNES and GBA separately
- Rank only SNES and not GBA

The third option's rationale is that the versions are too different to be ranked together, but a bunch of slightly different sets of rankings isn't very appealing - it would be a shame to see skilled players competing on separate versions, with times that may or may not be comparable.  Thus, we might consider "forcing" everyone to play on one version or the other.  This is actually possible because the SNES versions are accessible to nearly everyone - with the help of, well, emulators.