Saw nothing of this on TCRF, so I figured I'd do a bit of infodumping in here. Dunno if anyone else has found any of these things, but here goes.




These are leftovers from the original stage select in the arcade version of the game, seen here. Super Monkey Ball instead uses sprites for them.


On the other hand ... this is a lot more interesting. The arcade game never had a selectable Master difficulty, and in fact it only had one single master floor altogether. Super Monkey Ball added nine other Master floors, but yet you still couldn't start straight at the Master stages from the difficulty select; SMB2 was the first to allow you to do that. Whether they were planning on making Master an actual difficulty setting in the original arcade game, or if this is something they were planning on expanding on much more than they actually did in the process of bringing the game to the GC is hard to tell. 100 floors seems a bit absurd, though...

Interestingly, the announcer sound clip that plays when selecting Master difficulty in SMB2 exists in the original as well.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3518218/smb/lib30.png
Speaking of leftover things, and Master difficulty, the original Master floor's design remains intact. It's using the wrong theme, and lacks the 'sparkling floor' effect the arcade game had, however. I'd wish they'd kept that effect, but I suppose it wouldn't have looked so great in the much, much brighter theme they made for the Master stages.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3518218/smb/lib80.png
Another straight port from the arcade game before it got touchups. The circle the AV logo spins on is clearly visible (it's invisible in final versions of the floor), and the logo itself lacks the reflections that make it somewhat difficult to see where the floor ends.

There's a few other stages lying around that were taken straight from the arcade game with barely any/no touchups, but I haven't bothered taking screenshots of them (Dolphin does not play well with the stage select menu for whatever reason).

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3518218/smb/lib114.png
On the other hand, this sole floor is never seen at all in the game! Three slanted rings, the middle one twice as large as the others. There's also arrow decals just floating in the middle of the air, and the floor is bumpy all over.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3518218/smb/lib114-2.png
A little closer view to show the curvature of the floor, and so you can see just how bumpy that floor really is.

And a few other random tidbits, looking around the theme models...

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3518218/smb/SUN_GOAL_R.png
There's only one warp goal in the floors that use the Sunset theme (Advanced 6), and it's a green warp. This goal is never seen.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3518218/smb/ICE_GOAL_G.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3518218/smb/ICE_GOAL_R.png
Similarly, none of the floors using the Ice theme even have warps in the first place, leaving both of these random warp goals completely unused.

This is interesting, given that the Expert stages are identical to the arcade game's (which didn't have separate goals per theme, but just a general design colored blue/green/red for all of them). Why create warp goals for a theme when you know they'll never be used? Indeed, the desert theme, which also completely lacks warps, doesn't contain any green/red colored goals... maybe they had something else planned?

(Interestingly, there actually is a green warp in a Desert-themed level in SMBDX. It looked like they just took the original goal for that theme and took a paint tool to it, if I recall correctly.)

There's definitely more than this still hanging around, I just need to stop being lazy and take pictures. =p

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A couple more things before dentist+work.



Unused icons for items in Monkey Race. In the order I have here: Egg, Crystal, "gbanana" (Great/Golden banana?), "ragby" (Rugby ball, naturally), and Slime. Interestingly, the egg and crystal icons look very similar; and the egg icon has a different border than all the others. Perhaps the latter icon is just a later version of the former icon?



24x24 versions of these icons also exist.



These are the difficulty icons that appear in the bottom-left of the screen when playing the main game. To the best of my knowledge, the bottom two rows of icons are never used. The Master column of icons is most certainly never used -- in the arcade game, the Master floor displayed the EX icon followed by "Master" in yellow text; and in the GC game doesn't display an icon at all for the Master stages, only using "Master #" in yellow text.

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Well, if you're on a MP server, and you can reset the time to midnight before the Blood Moon ends, you can easily earn over 1 platinum coin an hour without having to do anything except type "midnight" in the console.

Even if you can't do that, the goldfish still turn into an item on death, even when spawned from a statue. They sell for 2 silver each, and you can set it up in such a way that you can go idle for an hour and come back with a full inventory of goldfish.

Of course, if you get a music box, all this gets thrown out of the window. Those broken things sell for 2 gold each, and they have what might be the easiest duplication glitch ever. =p

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Originally posted by Xenesis

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Just so you all know - News.com.au is Australia's equivalent of Fox news. ;

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Well, I suppose that explains "Call of Duty: World of Warfare" and "Does killing zombies in Resident Evil would count as a war crime? It would be a crime not to win, surely. Picture: Infinity Ward / Activision" (double whammy there, heh).

Lack of fact checking, as usual.

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Originally posted by Shadic

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It's the season.

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Just because it's the season doesn't mean you should force every single person to a single theme whether they like it or not.

Personally, I'd rather NOT be reminded it's the damn holidays everywhere I turn.

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I don't particularly care about the Wii getting ditched as long as there's a PC port that I can play along with.

I shouldn't need to restate my stance on S4E1 or its upcoming sequel, should I? =P

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Nuclear Dawn would've been much better if the game weren't unfairly stacked against the Empire all. the. time.

Since I got that from the Steam Holiday sales, and I don't really have any money right now anyway, I suppose I get to pass on yet another bundle.

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