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Patrick R

The St. Bernadette Super Mario World Challenge

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So here's a puzzle I've been pondering in my idle moments for the past 20 years.

 

When I was growing up my church St. Bernadette used to have a fundraising fair ever year. Among the bucket tosses, raffles, and other traditional church fair stuff they had A Nintendo Contest, which I was enamored with. For some dadly reason the competition focused around Super Mario World. But instead of being a Wizard-like competition, there was one system, one cartridge. and the scoring was point based. The way it worked was that each player had 10 minutes starting from a brand new save game to get as high a score as possible.

 

As someone who didn't own a Super Nintendo and didn't understand the concept of going for a high score, I just played it the way I would normally and tried to beat as many levels as I can and never came close to winning the contest. I look back on this and think "Oh, how stupid of me, I should have..." and then trail off because I don't actually know what the optimal strategy for this contest would be.

 

So I pose it to you: outside of insane speed-running prowess, how would one score the most points in 10 minutes in Super Mario World, starting from a brand new save?

 

The best idea I have right now is to immediately speed through

(the first level on the right when you start) and then keep restarting it, constantly killing the row of koopas with the shell. Each time you do that nets you 16,400 points, so I figure a steady stream of that followed by start+select for 10 minutes would get me a ton of points.

 

But maybe there's a better way? I think a capable Super Mario World player could probably beat Iggy's castle in 4 minutes?  I dunno, what do you think?

 

EDIT: This contest only lasted one year before they switched to the way more reasonable Mario Kart time trials.

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That sounds like probably the best strategy to me. But I've never really paid much attention to how the point allotment in Super Mario World works. So I wonder if it would be better to play through that whole level each time and try to get the top of the goal post each time so you can run the bonus round.

 

I think that is definitely the level though. I've been playing this a ton with my daughter over the last several months and it really is the quickest level to amass extra lives and has a pretty easy way to get to the top of the goal post.

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