Super Mario Bros. Special (PC-8801) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
2,784A playthrough of Hudson Soft's officially licensed 1986 Mario game for the NEC PC-8801 computer, Super Mario Bros. Special.
For how easy it would be to pick this apart, Hudson did a pretty fantastic job given the limitations of the 8-bit computer. The scrolling is non-existent, and you have to thoroughly memorize later levels to stand a chance, but the level design is pretty excellent, the "coloring" looks great considering there are a whopping 4 colors in use, and the flickering is usually not bad enough to seriously obscure anything important.
This is playing on a 4mhz emulated machine, hence the reason for Mario not quite going lightspeed as some people have experienced (if running on the 88's top model 12mhz processor, it becomes so fast as to be unplayable).
I have no idea why the letter tiles gradually become corrupted across the game. The game is riddled with glitches, so I can only imagine that it may be yet another.
I ran into a particularly bad glitch when I reached 8-4 that triggered a disk error and forced restart. I figured out the issue, but it indeed forced me to restart. Rather than screwing with FRAPS and recording another 11gb of video, I played through the entire game again but only started recording at 8-4, in case you notice that the scores don't quite match up between levels.
This game is awesome because it feels like, and is, a legit Super Mario game - a HARD Mario game. It's also a horrendous slog because of the limits the hardware places on it. I guess it's up to the individual to decide for themselves which outweighs the other. I love it, personally, and continue wishing for a legit remake one day that isn't a lame NES rom hack :)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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