Submission #7175: EZGames69's NES Mario's Time Machine! in 07:26.51

THAT'S RIGHT THIS GAME IS BACK!

So.....Yeah. As some of you might remember I submitted a TAS for this game back in 2017 (along with the SNES game prior to it). I had made it because of some discussion about educational games being accepted on the site. It was decided at the time that games like this one wouldn't qualify for publication because of the educational portion of the game taking up most of the goals of the game. However, more recently the rules regarding that have changed, meaning games such as this may actually be acceptable after all. Since this one wasnt as hard to redo as the SNES game, I figured I'd improve this one as my TASing skills have significantly improved since 2017.

Now as for the game itself, uhhh. hmmmmm. yeahhhhhhh. ughhhhhhhhhhhhh. YEEEAARUUUUURRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.

This is oviously not right. The game was not made by Nintendo despite being a Mario game on a Nintendo console. This was around the time when Nintendo licensed the Mario IP to companies like The Software Toolworks (or SoftTool for short, although I’m more of a hardtool myself for long), most famous for the game "The Software Toolworks Presents Star Wars Chess", which the company name took up more space then the actual game title itself:

You thought I was joking.

Anyways, these games were obviously trying to make themselfs look like Super Mario World as much as they could, but not only does that make these games look like bootlegs or romhacks it also just doesnt make it feel like a Mario game at all. It also fails at being a decent educational game since you have to know exactly what each item you get is, and what date it belongs to without having any sort of reference to any of it.

The Majority of the time you are in Bowser's castle you have to play a very watered down version of the original Mario Bros arcade game. Once you defeat the last Koopa it will drop an item which Mario has to take with him in his time machine and return it to the place that it belongs to. There's a frame perfect trick I do where I can make the koopa at the top drop down as I hit the floor, which saves a bit of time having to jump up to get the item.

As for the game's controls they are not SMW. for one every jump is at a fixed height, meaning you might see me awkwardly jumping too high near the end of some stages, but this is only because enemy placements or just how platforming works is so awkward due to fix jump heights.

Either way there is not much to this game at all. It was garbage when it was first released and it's garbage now even when you have access to guides on the internet these days. Even the final boss, bowser. BIG, GIANT, CHUNGUS, BOWSER. Does NOT damage you in this game, in fact nothing damages you in this game, you can't die. although to be fair I dont think Mario should actually die in a game that's cleary attempted to be for babies to learn stuff about history, yet would have to know enough about history in order to go to each location that is not explained at all in THIS GAME THAT IS DESIGNED TO TEACH KIDS ABOUT HISTORY BUT DOENST ACTUALLY TEACH KIDS ABOUT HISTORY AND IS JUST A LAZY ATTEMPT TO CASH IN ON THE FACT THAT THEY CAN SLAP MARIO'S FACE ON THE COVER OF THE GAME AND MAKE MONEY SO THEY CAN MAKE MORE STAR WARS CHESS GAMES. WHY DID YOU MAKE THIS GAME THE SOFTWARE TOOL WORKS????? WHY COULDNT WE HAVE AN AWESOME GAME WHERE MARIO WORLD TAKES PLACE IN DIFFERENT TIME PERIODS AND DIDNT HAVE ANY EDUCATIONAL ASPECT TO IT, WHY DID YOU JUST STICK TO MAKING BAD GAMES THAT DIDNT HAVE RECOGNIZABLE CHARACTERS THAT WOULD TRICK PEOPLE INTO BUYING EDUCATION?

WHY DID YOU AND YOUR 600 EMPLOYEES HAVE TO MAKE SUCH TRASH??? HOW DO YOU EMPLOY 600 PEOPLE AND NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM COULD MAKE THIS GAME GOOD??

Anyways hope you all have a lovely day. FREE MATH BLASTER.

fsvgm777: Replaced movie file with a 23 frame improvement.

feos: I tried blindly TASing this myself, and by having entered the time machine pipe in the first "Mario Bros room", I can definitely say this is not trivial. Accelerating, decelerating, having to turn around, routing out enemy kills: all in all I was 50 frames slower. If it was trivial to optimize, I'd see the game for the first time and just from basic poking around I'd be optimal and match this movie.

The previous judgment assessed whether actual gameplay or education was prevalent, but we don't have to measure priorities anymore. All we need now is checking if optimal TASing is challenging or not. While there are rooms that look quite primitive, movement in the Mario Bros section is complicated enough to have a meaningful speedrun competition (even with self).

Optimization looks good, but there's little to expect from this game in terms of viewer enjoyment, because it still does look incredibly primitive. Accepting to Vault.

fsvgm777: Processing.