matt
Local caffeine junky
I wonder how many other people figured this out...
Back in the day, you had a limited number of lives, and when you ran out of lives, it was game over, and you had to start again from the beginning of the game. So getting extra lives was a really big thing.
I can't remember how I figured this out, but it was probably sheer fluke. In Super Mario Bros, if you bounced on a turtle shell successive times without touching the ground, the points you get would I think double each time, until it starts giving you extra lives, and I think if you got more successive bounces, the lives awarded would start multiplying as well. Doing that, especially without being run over by the shell was damn near impossible though.
Here's the trick. If you catch a turtle coming down some steps, the time it takes mario to bounce up and down off the turtle was the same as the time it takes for the shell to bounce off the next step and arrive back in time for the next bounce. So you could get it so Mario would just keep bouncing on the shell as long as you don't do anything. Just get it started and put the controller down for a bit. You would see the points going up and up, and then start getting extra lives, and since there were only 2 characters for your lives counter, when it ran past 99, it would move onto letters, so aa, ab, ac.... etc. Then when it ran out of letters, it would start showing ASCII characters instead. You just leave him bouncing for as many extra lives as you want.
With that many lives, you never had to worry about getting game over on the final castle.
Back in the day, you had a limited number of lives, and when you ran out of lives, it was game over, and you had to start again from the beginning of the game. So getting extra lives was a really big thing.
I can't remember how I figured this out, but it was probably sheer fluke. In Super Mario Bros, if you bounced on a turtle shell successive times without touching the ground, the points you get would I think double each time, until it starts giving you extra lives, and I think if you got more successive bounces, the lives awarded would start multiplying as well. Doing that, especially without being run over by the shell was damn near impossible though.
Here's the trick. If you catch a turtle coming down some steps, the time it takes mario to bounce up and down off the turtle was the same as the time it takes for the shell to bounce off the next step and arrive back in time for the next bounce. So you could get it so Mario would just keep bouncing on the shell as long as you don't do anything. Just get it started and put the controller down for a bit. You would see the points going up and up, and then start getting extra lives, and since there were only 2 characters for your lives counter, when it ran past 99, it would move onto letters, so aa, ab, ac.... etc. Then when it ran out of letters, it would start showing ASCII characters instead. You just leave him bouncing for as many extra lives as you want.
With that many lives, you never had to worry about getting game over on the final castle.