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[Mista]

Super Mario Sunshine director Yoshiaki Koizumi has revealed to Retro Gamer:

“The idea was that you’d wash the pollution away with FLUDD and also use it to defeat the boss enemy, the source of the pollution.” When the decision was made to make the game into more of a typical 3D platformer, some of these abilities were removed with just four remaining in-game such as cleaning off graffiti to defeat enemies and save people.

Source

 

[Spring-Loaded]

Any info from the full article?

 

[gofreak]

I wonder if it was even a Mario game at that point, or was a different prototype that kind of got merged into an action Mario game, with the mechanics that would ultimately require. Nintendo does that a bit, right? Starts with some unrelated idea and then skins it with established IP?

 

[Fireblend]

Sounds like the original idea was pretty close to what we got from that quote.

 

[whyreggielie]

I wonder if it was even a Mario game at that point, or was a different prototype that kind of got merged into an action Mario game, with the mechanics that would ultimately require. Nintendo does that a bit, right? Starts with some unrelated idea and then skins it with established IP?

Yes usually that is the case and it was even considered for Splatoon to take on the Mario universe. Fortunately, they turned that concept into a new IP instead and we all know how well that has panned out for them.

 

[Ridley327]

Yes usually that is the case and it was even considered for Splatoon to take on the Mario universe. Fortunately, they turned that concept into a new IP instead and we all know how well that has panned out for them.

The opposite has even happened from time to time, as one of the big features of the original Super Mario 128 demo would wind up being the foundation for Pikmin.

 

[TheMoon]

I wonder if it was even a Mario game at that point, or was a different prototype that kind of got merged into an action Mario game, with the mechanics that would ultimately require. Nintendo does that a bit, right? Starts with some unrelated idea and then skins it with established IP?

That's how we got Mario Kart.

https://www.nintendo.com/super-nes-classic/interview-super-mario-kart

Konno: Early on, we had young men in overalls driving the karts.

Sugiyama: We put helmets on them and used different colors to differentiate between them. But looking from behind, we couldn't tell who was who.

Konno: They were all wearing overalls, so they had the same form.

Sugiyama: And it's pixel art, so...

Konno: With eight nearly identical guys racing, it'd be boring. Until then, we'd been focused on the system, so then we began to focus on design.

Sugiyama: We wondered what kinds of characters would be recognizable from behind and gave Mario a try.

You put in Mario as a test.

Sugiyama: And it looked like it just might work!

Didn't you consider completely new characters instead of Mario?

Sugiyama: Well, it needed to be someone anyone would recognize from behind, so...

Konno: You would be able to tell immediately whether it was Mario or Luigi by the colors red and green. They looked good visually, and we were able to clearly differentiate their characteristics, so we thought it was a good choice.

It's always a case of "does it make sense?"

And for Splatoon, for example, it didn't.

http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/splatoon/0/1

Nogami
That's true. After we made the characters human and added depth to the arena, things did start to fray a bit. We weren't sure how to solve those problems.

Amano
We were struggling, even beyond trying to solve those issues.

Nogami
We even talked about turning them back into tofu.

Amano
But then we thought "How many copies could we sell with tofu?"

Iwata
I don't think tofu would have really worked...

All
(laugh)

Nogami
By the way, one of our options was to make the character Mario.

Iwata
Over ten years ago, we had a game called Super Mario Sunshine. A unique element of the game was using a pump to spray water. Did this game come to mind?

Nogami
We get asked that a lot...

Iwata
Is there any connection?

Nogami
I forgot about it...

All
(laughs)

Nogami
We only remembered it later on. Like, "Oh yeah, there was a water gun in Super Mario Sunshine." As Nintendo employees, that's pretty embarrassing. (laughs)

Iwata
But the structure of the game is completely different, after all. And this wasn't an idea that could have come from Super Mario Sunshine.

Nogami
Right. We wanted to come up with the play structure from scratch and then create a design to match the structure. So we didn't really want to borrow a pre-existing character.

Iwata
So how did you find a way out of your struggle?

Nogami
We tried switching the character from humans to rabbits.

Iwata
Why a rabbit?

Inoue
Well, a lot of it was because of design factors. Rabbits are white to begin with, so it would be easy to tell if they were inked. They've got long ears that would move when they did, so you could see them moving and when viewed from above, it would be easy to tell which direction they were facing by the direction of the ears.

Nogami
And when asked which character they would choose for our new game, a rabbit or tofu...

Iwata
Everyone would say rabbits. (laughs)

Nogami
Right. (laughs)

All
(laughs)

 

[@MUWANdo]

Okay, so, this is a personal and somewhat complex web of nonsense involving a highly unstable individual I was friends and briefly FWBs with, but I can only assume there will be a never-ending clusterfuck on gaf now until the end of time, which inevitably involves you guys and gals on the mod team in some way, so I'm an open book here. The woman in question ended up being completely psychotic and held a grudge against me after a bizarre love triangle situation developed a few years ago between me, her, and another girl (the other girl I ended up in a long-term relationship with shortly thereafter). This NOLA story she apparently just put up on social media is a delusion of a deeply disturbed person who had a total psychological breakdown as a result of me and the other girl getting together, because she (phew, yeah...) became obsessively infatuated with the other girl (she's bi) on sight when the three of us met up. I wanted to just stay friends with the girl making the accusation and made it super super clear ahead of time that me and the other girl were interested in each other romantically and that could play out as such when we met up. Supposedly this was not a problem for her from accusation, but in reality she uhhh wanted me to die painfully after seeing me and the other girl interact. Plus she became infatuated with the other girl simultaneously to this (she's bi), which created the aforementioned bizarre love triangle that ended up causing her to implode and have an apparently very intense and long-lasting grudge. The whole story about how that love triangle thing played out is, frankly, nuts and scary, and involves this girl bringing us to a compound of dangerous scientology spinoff cultists on that same trip, who roofied us, attempted to recruit/scam me and attempted to abduct/rape the girl I ended up dating, in what was a fucking scary situation that resulted in me and the other girl and the rest of my friend circle never speaking to this girl from the accusation again.

 

[Falchion]

Hmm, definitely sounds like the groundwork for Splatoon a decade early.