More useless video game trivia.

#1

Luigi's first appearance was actually in the Game & Watch version of Mario Bros., which was released four months before the arcade version.

#2

VC releases of Zelda II used a solid red background for the death screen rather than the flashing colors of the NES death screen. You can probably blame Porygon for that.

mushroom · #3

^they made a similar change to the Static-E attack in Super Mario RPG

#4

^Oh, interesting, that I didn't know. What's the new animation like?

mushroom · #5

I think they just made it darker

#6

You're right, I just did some researched and they made it a deeper blue. They also smoothed out the animation for Flame Wall and made it just red instead of red, yellow, and orange. Wish I could find some footage of these things, but I couldn't find a visual comparison.

Static E:
SNES
VC (sound is desynched but the visual is there)
Flame Wall:
SNES
VC

#7

[MEDIA=youtube]KRZydV8VCL4[/MEDIA]

Bryan Cranston was in a commercial for the Atari 2600 game Megaforce.

#8

I found out a few days ago that the ice slide in SM64 has a secret tunnel. Legitimately didn't know it existed.

Edit: oh, and you can see Yoshi at the top of the castle at the end of the credits.

#9

Metal Slug characters Marco Rossi and Fiolina Germi get their names from a 1976 anime called 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother.

#10

I'm not sure if this is 100% true, but it's interesting and makes some sense. The original concept for Sonic Adventure 2 had Sonic, Knuckles and Eggman as the only playable characters. Tails, Shadow and Rouge were added later during development, which is why they have less stages and upgrades than their counterparts. Shadow was also called Terios and was the final boss. Here's the game's first trailer, back in 2000.

#11

If you play a leaders game in Civilization III on certain days, the leader models for all players might change. Off the top of my head, Elvis' birthday results in them all being Elvis and Christmas Day results in Santa Claus.

There's also a ton of Easter Eggs involving only one civ. Two of the most notable are Montezuma having a dartboard with Hernan Cortez's face on it in the Modern Era and the Viking city of Thunderfall actually being the name of a mod on Civ's main fan site. I think I mentioned the insulting advisor messages here before. ("you have the IQ of a carrot")

#12

According to Metroid character designer Hiroji Kiyotake, the name of the Metroid homeworld SR-388 comes from the Yamaha SR 400 series of motorcycle engine, which despite the name only went up to 388cc at the time.

#13

The Atomic Health sound in Duke Nukem 3D is just the teleport sound sped up.

#14

F-Zero X for the Nintendo 64 was the first 3D racing game to run at 60 FPS.

I REALLY HATE POKEMON! · #15

[QUOTE="Valigarmander, post: 1600426, member: 30663"]F-Zero X for the Nintendo 64 was the first racing game to run at 60 FPS.[/QUOTE]

For some reason that didn't sound right to me and I did some digging. Seems "Out Run" on Sega Saturn ('96) runs at 60 fps (though not by default, must be activated). That's the earliest (home video game console) racing game to run at 60 fps as far as I could tell.

#16

3D racing game*

#17

Not a racing game or 3D, but one of the reasons that Yoshi's Island looks as good as it does (besides its very focused art direction) is that it runs at 60fps as well.

#18

During the development of Mario Kart 64, the developers found that processing limitations prevented the game from running smoothly if all racers were onscreen at the same time. To help clear up overcrowded tracks, they came up with the Spiny Shell item.

#19

The Masked Ghoul enemy from Super Mario Land 2 is called "J Son" in Japanese.

I REALLY HATE POKEMON! · #20

We don't see a lot of the enemies from that game anymore. That sucks.