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Argh I managed to cut off 40 pixels (about one cube of platform) on the left side of the screen. ; /
The enemies--and sometimes Mario's run cycle--will look really weird if you play this video at 30 fps rather than 60, because of how they were made to save on sprites by alternating drawing chunks of their bodies every frame. : P They're also a lot skinnier than in the arcade version, which came out just a couple months before this version (or anyway the 1983 Famicom version, of which this 1986 NES version is pretty much a copy).
Game B didn't feel all that much more difficult than Game A. Oh! That really good article about all the Famicom/NES/FDS versions of Mario Bros. https://themushroomkingdom.net/mb-arcade_nes_ports.shtml covers this: "In Game A, enemy movement speed is somewhat slower than the arcade version on its standard settings, while Game B increases enemy movement speed and frequency of fireballs."
Probably mostly played the unreleased Atarisoft C64 version (see entry 1548) 2-player back in the day, come to think of it. Really great as a 2-player game. = D I even played it with my dad!
After recording I went and looked up some stuff I should'a looked up before recording ; ) :
That Atarisoft C64 version of Mario Bros. ( https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/mario-bros/ ) is dated 1984! So two years before the US NES version. And it was probably based on the arcade: the fireballs are the larger arcade size. The enemies are slower so yeah it's easy to get to the top at the start and knock off the first critters at the topmost platform. The critters are their full arcade wide size and don't flicker. The coins actually do flicker a bit and have no interior detail; and the sound FX aren't quite as nice as the NES SFX. Overall though it looks and plays really good and I might'a been playing that Mario a year before any of my friends who DID end up getting an NES before me were able to play any kind of Mario.
It's really amusing to me to know now that my dad had picked us up all these bootleg games for the C64--probably from wherever he got the machine, but I don't know. He was not at all into bootlegging software, or playing games really, so it's just kind of funny to me. ^ _^
That unreleased version was developed for Atarisoft by Gregg A. Tavares, who went to college in Utah, lived in Philly and Baltimore ( https://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_gregg_tavares.html ) and speaks with an American accent ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmDBVSCHhio ), so is at least probably not from the UK, and that version would almost certainly have been made for NTSC machines rather than PAL.
Mega Man 2 came out Christmas Eve(!) 1988, and I know I didn't get it at launch so I would'a been getting it some time in 1989. We'd had an NES for a bit before that so we probably got our NES in '88.
Arcade Mario Bros. really only had noticeably more colors used in the fireballs and the pipes; Mario and the critters are still flat NES color style, so I was wrong about that. The sound in the arcade though, at least as heard these days through MAME, is NOT very good, at least not compared to the SFX in the NES version, which are absolutely fabulous.
And the arcade version doesn't have air control--that was actually an ADDED feature in the seasonings version and the 1993 PAL version, and it's a doozy! |
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