Mario 3: Around the World (Mario 3: Вокруг света) is an unlicensed Mario game for the Sega Genesis from Russia. While it does have a great soundtrack composed of songs stolen from other places, the game is most well known for its graphic Continue and Game Over screens, which are also stolen. In fact, just about all of the sprite and art work in this bootleg is stolen from other places.
The game is not fun to play in real time. Your inputs appear to take a frame longer than it should for them to be registered, even longer when lag sets in. There is no acceleration for Mario's vertical movement whatsoever; he will always rise and fall at the same speed regardless of how hard he jumps. And once he reaches the peak of his jump according to how long you hold the jump button for, his vertical speed changes direction on a dime. Because of this, Mario doesn't actually jump in an arc; it's more like a pyramid. This is the main reason why it doesn't play like any actual Mario games.
Powerups include your standard Super Mushroom and Fire Flower, only they're more uncommon and harder to find. The Fire Flower powerup differs from how its usually portrayed by having the fireball slowly come out at small angle pointing towards the ground and not bouncing when it hits the ground. Enemies have weird hitboxes; to kill them, you have to jump directly on top of them. Any more to the left or right and you will get hurt instead. Warp pipes are rare and one or two of them are not actually shortcuts. Something like P-Speed appears to be a thing in that you reach your maximum midair horizontal speed after running on the ground in one direction for some time. Jump without doing that and you'll move more slowly in the air than if you were to run on the ground. You'll lose this "P-speed" if you change direction or hit a wall at any point.
The game can be pretty laggy. Most of the lag comes from having to spawn objects such as coins when they appear on the screen. Some of the lag can be caused by your own actions. Shooting fireballs will always cause lag when they're shot out, so jumping is used when fireballs aren't necessary and their time on-screen is minimized. Moving Koopa Shells also cause lag, so Koopas are jumped on so that they won't spin when stomped.
The RNG not only affects the music that plays in each level, but it also affects the positions of the falling spiked poles in some of the pyramid levels when they spawn onscreen. I get lucky in one level with those poles thanks to some inadvertent RNG manipulation from me.
Memory Addresses Used
| Address | Parameters | Meaning
|
|---|
| FFA060 | 2 bytes, unsigned, big endian | X Pixel Coordinate
|
| FF035A | 2 bytes, unsigned, big endian | Y Pixel Coordinate
|
| FF5B5B | 1 byte, unsigned | Horizontal speed in pixels per frame.
|
Special Thanks
- To Noxxa, for linking me to the forum thread that had a video of their test run, which served as a good comparison to make towards.
- To WST, for their Gens Lua script that I ported to BizHawk.
Samsara: I guess canonically this takes place between Sunshine and Galaxy, but I'll be the judge of that.
Samsara: I think my favorite thing about TASes of bootleg games is how playable they make the games look, and after messing around with the game a little bit in real time, this TAS is absolutely not an exception to that statement. Very well done. Accepting!
