Super Mario Bros. Special Level Power Hour

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Camwoodstock

Camwoodstock

The Seven Stars
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Camwoodstock
As of present, there's a pretty large gap in the information on Super Mario Bros. Special; namely, the levels of the back 75%-or-so-give-or-take-a-level of the game. World 3 has an article, but only 1 level in it has an article... And worlds 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 all lack articles altogether, alongside all the levels within them. This isn't too surprising, given how remote the platforms the game is for are (the PC-88 and Sharp X1), as well as the general Jank (Affectionate)™ of the whole game. However, it's high time someone does something about it, right?

Fortunately, images won't be that hard. mariouniverse.com has had maps for the x1 version for a good long while and our pre-existing articles have used (and cited!) these maps. We've already taken the liberty of downloading the missing levels' maps, and running them through PNGMonstrous. We can upload these trivially. The main issues would be getting screenshots of the levels themselves in action (especially high-quality ones, not ones taken from a video), and of course, actually writing the articles for them.

If you need a running total, just check here if we forgot to update this thread. Otherwise! (Strikethough means it doesn't exist, underline means stub.)
  • World 3: -1, -2, -3, -4
  • World 4: -1, -2, -3, -4
  • World 5: -1, -2, -3, -4
  • World 6: -1, -2, -3, -4
  • World 7: -1, -2, -3, -4
  • World 8: -1, -2, -3, -4
We plan to start with Worlds 3 and 4, so if you want to claim anything to help out with, uh, don't pick those. ;P
 
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World 3-1 has been created by AmossGuy.

Update: The same user has also created World 3-2.
 
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They also went ahead and de-stubbed World 3-3, which is very nice to see! We might try and make the remaining baseline World articles between our current excursion in Superstar Saga gear articles & the upcoming Game & Wario Cluck-a-pop prize proposal.
 
While we were at it, we added a List of levels table to the main SMBS article. We do have two questions in particular for possible improvements:
  • More pressing, we don't know what names to use for the enemies; either the contemporary English names, or the literal Japanese names provided for SMBS presently used on the article's enemy table. We erred on the former for now since the individual level articles use the former, but we could swap this out if need be (and, similarly, swap these out on the individual level articles.)
  • To a lesser extent, we're unsure of what to do for the level themes section, as SMBS plays a lot looser with level themes.
 
Camwoodstock said:
  • More pressing, we don't know what names to use for the enemies; either the contemporary English names, or the literal Japanese names provided for SMBS presently used on the article's enemy table. We erred on the former for now since the individual level articles use the former, but we could swap this out if need be (and, similarly, swap these out on the individual level articles.)
Click to expand...
In regards to this, Doc Von recently added the contemporary English names to the Enemies table outright and we have no idea how to handle that given this conundrum. What do?
 
Last night we created World 4-3, officially taking us to halfway overall and 1/3rd of the way through the targets in the original post! Images are still the largest hurdle for the current articles, so if you feel like trying to figure out a way to get decent images, be our guest!
 
We've been chipping away at World 5's levels the past few days; 5-1, 5-2, and 5-3 are all accounted for now. Once we're done, we'll probably jump right to World 7 just because. We like 7. So, if someone wants to tackle World 6 before then, we'd appreciate the help!
 
That's 5-4 accounted for, so all of World 5 has articles! Reminder that as of right now, the major blind-spot on these articles are the lack of images for their infoboxes; we're still holding out for a hero on this one, so if you can help out with that, be our guest to do so!
 
World 7 is donezo! And HOO BOY 7-4 in particular was a pain. Here's our plan for the remaining levels in Worlds 6 and 8:
  • If anybody would like to pitch in, we'll be leaving World 6 untouched for a moment and move on to 8-1, 8-2, and 8-3. We'll probably spend the next couple of days on this, so please say so sooner rather than later!
  • If World 6 is completely unclaimed or untouched by the time we're done with 8-3, we'll circle back and tackle those ones ourselves.
  • We're saving 8-4 for last, and to be entirely clear here: we fully intend to tackle 8-4 ourselves, please don't touch that one if you can help it!
  • From there, the top priority is obtaining images (preferably, direct emulator screenshots in particular) of the levels that presently lack any altogether. Once that's done, though, we think that's literally it for this project, which is kinda wild? So close, and yet it feels so far away. Probably because Sharp X1 emulation is... uh... yeah.
 
So uh. There was a bit of a change of plans. We figured out Sharp X1 emulation. You can tell, because we kinda... got all the images before we even made a single page, and literally played all of SMBS. Whoops! (It was actually surprisingly really fun, but also, we are an unabashed fan of weird, janky video games, so it was appealing to us in particular.)

Sometime later tonight, we'd like to write 8-2, and MAYBE 8-3. Consider this your last chance to claim a World 6 page before we start poring through those ourselves, before we finally finish off the individual level articles on 8-4!
 
We've gone ahead and made 8-2 and 8-3! 5 levels remain and all images are accounted for. This might genuinely be done before our birthday on April 7th... Wild, considering how distant it felt not even a week ago. We will say that if you want to claim a level page to help write in World 6, speak now or forever hold your peace, we will probably start on the first available level in World 6 tomorrow evening (that's 6-1 if nothing gets picked!)
 
And that's that! We had a lot of creative juices in us, and so we finished off World 6, went ahead and did everything we wanted to for the World articles (that we can do until the English/Japanese name proposal wraps up), and we finished World 8-4 just now.

While we definitely were the ones posting the most in this thread, what we did just straight up wouldn't have been possible without the folks over in the Discord, who gave us suggestions for images, and more importantly, helped us figure out X1 emulation in the first place to make a large chunk of this possible. Seriously, stuff like the 4-3 glitch and the weird precise movement in 8-4 would not be mentioned if not for those. Thank you very much to Reese in particular for that one.

While this project's original "scope" is more-or-less done--all the worlds and all the levels are accounted for--don't think we're done with SMBS just yet. We'll likely be going through and revising anything we feel is necessary to re-adjust as need be, and of course, given the nature of the wiki, it's likely that years on from now, people will find new things to document on these levels' pages. And, of course, the gallery, which at this point has started to leak into helping clear blind spots in the gallery pages for SMB1 and SMB:LL... But that's starting to veer a bit off-course.

This was an immensely silly undertaking, but not one we regret one bit. Thank goodness we got it wrapped up before our birthday!
 
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