There's no explanation in the game why Mario travels with it, but I like how the game has a lot of vehicles. Note that when using the Super Gameboy (SNES) or emulators you can tweak the colors to make the game a bit more readable, but this also ruins effects like the hidden falling blocks on 1-3. Each world actually has a different cloud, but the original game used identical graphics for each one afaik. It becomes more difficult after the first completion, which is why my Mario's not present on the second screenshot here.
Title screen after having clocked the game twice. Anyways, here are some screenshots from various almost-final versions. I say almost because with too much white/alpha on a foreground character, the background will show through too much and it looks a bit wonky. Since the game uses a white background, I almost have 4 colors per sprite. Then I decided to redo the graphics for the entire game, so I spent a few days doing that. Then I realized I could actually put the sprites in the game since the 2 bitplane tiles are pretty easy to read and write. Perhaps it was made to look that way because the original Gameboy screen had an early, low contrast LCD, probably with a bit of fade to any moving pixels.Īnyways, after having played the game for a bit I suddenly got the urge to see if I could do something with the sprites in Photoshop. There's a certain appeal to the simple readable graphics though.
It's one of the early Gameboy games, and it sort of shows. I decided to check out Super Mario Land for research purposes while working on my Marne Bros project.