Video Game / A Super Mario Thing

"Hey there raocow, this is everyone!"

A Super Mario Thing is an aptly named ROM Hack of Super Mario World by Talkhaus, the community surrounding Let's Player raocow. Originally made as a "tribute" to his hack-related efforts, it's a game that follows his, at times, Surrealistic commentary to a T, even more so if one doesn't know about the plethora of insider jokes with which the community could not help but fill the game. It was started and originally managed by Kristian, and later taken up in the management department by YoshiCookieZeus.

The game stars Demo Roseclair^note and, if you choose Player 2, her slightly purpler Palette Swap, Iris, an armless cycloptic demon alien minion, which pretty much summarizes the nature of the game. During an attempt to purchase vegetables for her anonymous master, something goes wrong and she is sent to what appears to be the Mushroom Kingdom of the future- a Bad Future where Mario is nowhere to be seen and the world is ruled by the tyrannical King Charles IV, ruler of the Charlies (Chargin' Chucks). After falling right into (or as it were, onto) a deep-seated political conflict about food and meeting up with the Yoshi resistance, Demo sets out to murder the king, who resides deep within a volcano beyond a great veil of Nintendo Hard platforming, item puzzles, silly Touhou Project shout outs and other assorted obstacles.

You can find the game as an .ips patch on ROM Hack archive SMWCentral.

A sequel, A Second Mario Thing (A2MT), was stuck in Development Hell for a while before being officially discontinued on January 25th, 2014, but that didn't stop raocow from playing it anyway. However, in August 28, 2016, it was announced that the game was finally complete, so it was Saved from Development Hell.

Finally, in March 2013, Talkhaus released a prequel on the Super Mario Bros. X engine: A Super Mario Bros. X Thing: Prelude to the Stupid, which throws in even more raocow-fan-bonuses, up to and including raocow himself being a playable character. The plot finds Demo and her sister Iris in the Castle of Absolutely No Significance, where they plan to stock up on vegetables. Meanwhile, Kood^note the Ensemble Dark Horse star of another Super Mario World hack, Drama Mistery is infiltrating the same castle for unknown reasons, Sheath^note the protagonist of raocow's webcomic, Artificial Time XS sort of falls into their reality, and a certain wacky Let's Player finds himself surrounded by his own creations...

The sequel to that game, A2MBXT^note Or, because of the sheer scale of work involved in its production compared to the last installment, A2MBXT Episode 1: Analog Funk, was released in August 2014. Demo and Iris, having completed their excursion through the Castle of Absolutely No Significance, return to their mothership to find that someone had broken in and stolen all the Super Leeks powering it. Not long after the cycloptic sisters are sent back to investigate, Kood teleports to them in time to warn them about someone creating a generator of dimensional portals using the stolen leeks—threatening to rip apart the multiverse in the process. It is now up to the three of them (and Sheath and raocow) to journey across the dimensions to recover the Super Leeks and "save the everything" at all costs. But there is something more sinister afoot than before...

A spinoff game called A Zelda Classic Thing is also being made. Demo also originally starred in a duo of Platform Hell ROM hacks, What the Hell? and What the Hell? 2, by raocow himself. One of A2XT's plot writers has stated they take place before the rest of the series, and they occasionally receive callbacks and references in the ASMT series proper, but they are mostly unconnected otherwise. Both cyclops sisters are playable in Superb Demo Sisters, a mostly unrelated Super Mario Bros.-type SMBX game also made by the Talkhaus.

See raocow's characters page for ASMT's character sheets.

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Tropes that apply to A Super Mario Thing:

• Accidental Misnaming:
  • For some reason, Demo, Kood, and Iris call Feed "Stephen".
  • The Siblings can't tell that the green-shelled guy insisting that he's not Iris actually isn't Iris.
  • The A2XT credits keep referring to Iris as "Green Demo".
• Accidental Murder: raocow inadvertently kills Mario.
• Action Girl: Demo, Iris, and Sheath.
• Added Alliterative Appeal:
  • Present in the ending of the first game, as seen in raocow's LP:
    ???: We have been awaiting the voluminous vegetal victuals, minion. We are so pleased you have finally returned.
  • Also appears in a level in A2XT:
    Toad in the Leek Pillar Sanctuary: Man, a multitude of men whose monikers mostly 'mence with M! More members, merci!
• Advancing Boss of Doom: King Charles
  • The Universe, overlapping with the following trope. Honestly, it would fit better in the latter trope's section if it wasn't the fifth stage of the boss fight.
• Advancing Wall of Doom:
  • Pressure Point
  • Ascend uses Rising Lava Of Doom.
• After Boss Recovery: The Very Definitely Final Dungeon has 2 mushrooms after each of the pre-boss bosses.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: In one of the prequel's postgame levels you play as Tewi.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Vehemently defied in Edge of the Universe. Cue boss fight.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Invoked. Black Plague, the true final boss, is deliberately incredibly easy. According to raocow himself, who designed that battle as a joke, what little difficulty involved was supposed to come from the time limit. The timer in that room is disabled.
• Apocalypse How: Damn near a Class Z.
• Arc Words: ASMT and its variants show up in a fair number of levels.
• Armless Biped: Demo, Iris, and a good number of enemies. Arms are not appreciated in the Mushroom Kingdom of the future.
  • A2MT will apparently feature more of whatever Demo and Iris are (or would have, at least).
    • They're demons, apparently. Mishi from the linked vid is incidentally part goat.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: "CAUTION! Dimensional rifts ahead! Excessive warping is known to cause muscular atrophy, insanity, death, and itchy scalp. Beware!"
• Back for the Finale: In ASMBXT, raocow is the one to defeat the final boss. Well, actually it's Demo in a Raoican suit. On that note, the final boss itself as well.
• The Backwards Я: Present at the very end of the End of World 4 Cutscene in A2XT. Or rather, the ЕИБ ОГ ШОЯЛБ (Yeib og Shoyalb) 4 Cutscene.^{But to be fair...}the game does get the Cyrillic symbol for the "l" sound right.
• Bad Future:
  • The game takes place in the Mushroom Kingdom many years after the disappearance of all the familiar characters, with Mario missing, King Charles taking Bowser's place as Big Bad, and the Yoshis living as refugees.
  • Happens again in the prequel in a certain level that takes place in the Mushroom Kingdom, wherein you have to fight your way through Bowser's army. Dying in this level replaces it with a decidedly more... bleak version where the Mushroom Kingdom is a lava and soot-covered wasteland. Don't worry though, beating the Bad Future version restores the level to its original state.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Most of Demo and Iris's siblings look considerably less humanoid than they do, and they're antagonists (and varying degrees of mentally unstable, ranging from the mere delusions of grandeur possessed by Garish to the downright Ax-Crazy Pandamona). Calleoca, on the other hand, looks very similar to them and serves as a helpful NPC at least until World 8, where she is finally fought...and it still applies since she's the only one of the siblings to turn into something else for her fight, rather than the familiar form she's been using all game. Pily, on the other hand, looks even more like a Palette Swap of Demo than Calleoca does, and proves to be Brainwashed and Crazy rather than an actual antagonist.
• Bee-Bee Gun: One fortress level has cannons that launch bees.
• Bee People: Acting as minions for a snail. Yeah.
• Berserk Button: Did you ever try stealing a 1-up from Demo? Tewi did once.
• Bilingual Bonus: Tête D'Feu is (Quebecer) French for "Head of Fire"
• Bittersweet Ending: A2XT Episode 1; Reality is destroyed, but at least there's hope that Sheath can undo the entire thing.
• Book Ends:
  • At the end of the intro cutscene after you warp to the Mushroom Kingdom, you end up landing on a Charlie's head. At the beginning of the final stage of the King Charles fight, you end up landing on his head.
  • A2XT Ep.1 World 4 begins with Demo Roseclaire and the Militarists, and the final stage is called Johnson McCain and the Communists.
• Bootstrapped Theme: The Lullaby, a small little song raocow improvised on the spot while playing one of the (bgm-less) endgame levels in ASMT, can be heard in several levels in the subsequent games in the series. It was even planned as the final boss theme in A2MT, and Science gets a wonderful remix for his first two battles in A2XT.
• Bottomless Pit Rescue Service: The credits.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Pily
• Brick Joke:
  • The final boss of ASMBXT is the Key Boss from Mario Gives Up. For context, people nagged raocow for a long while to defeat said key boss, and his response was spliced out of order in a confusing manner.
  • The legendarily hilarious boss Black Plague joins in both ASMT and A2MBXT, several years after his first (and only, outside of this series) appearance.
• Brutal Bonus Level:
  • murder death place zone. Given its creator, this doubles as yet another petard hoist.
  • Zebraspace in A2XT. The intro level says that it's a place where you can practice dying.
• Build Like an Egyptian: Ancient Tomb from ASMBXT.
• Bullfight Boss: King Charles.
  • And a regular Charlie in the prequel.
• Bullet Hell:
  • Fittingly, Rumia and Yukari are about as close to Bullet Hell as SMW can get.
  • Panic in the Outhouse is filled with Bullet and Banzai Bills, making it, effectively, a bullet hell stage in its own right. Notably, there are a bunch of coins that spell HELL.
  • The Everyday Life of a Ladder in ASMBXT, too.
  • As is Castle on the Moonlit Hill, from ASMBXT. It contains everything from shell-throwing Blue Goopas to Bullet Bills to Podaboos, and even has a forced Little Angel Girl segment to better simulate the movement type from Touhou Project—which, unsurprisingly, provides the stage's BGM (Retribution for the Eternal Night, to be specific).
  • Curtain Tortoise is a Kamemaku level, of course.
  • The final battle against Science in A2MBXT, complete with a Touhou Project theme replacing the Lullaby which had been used for all previous fights.
• Call-Back:
  (at the beginning of the game)
  Demo: Oh dear. This certainly isn't a grocery store. What to do?
  (later, at the beginning of the bonus world)
  Demo: Oh dear. These certainly are not my master's quarters. What to do?
• The Cameo: Very frequently throughout the series. Characters from Touhou, games raocow's played, Mario and Nintendo in general, Artificial Time XS characters, users who helped contribute to the game, and many, many others show up to make brief appearances, and sometimes not so brief appearances.
• Chain of Deals: Necessary to obtain the Mantreopolis leek.
• Cheat Code: The prequel has a password hidden in every world in the Hub Level. They can be used to unlock cheat codes that can spawn items, speed up the game, or activate the classic.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Trial of Chaos.
  • Trial of Chaos got heavily toned down and is much more playable in the public release thanks to all the interface screws being removed.
• Convection, Schmonvection:
  • The big standout in this hack is level Overly Hot Beach. It's a beach... with lava at the bottom instead of water! Also, Boss Bass is in the lava, apparently a reference to Cheep Cheeps being able to survive in lava in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario Sunshine.
  • Semi-averted in A2MT's Smouldering Stones. While you're still not hurt for being near the lava, it does heat up the ground, so you have to keep jumping frequently or else it'll burn you.
• Cool Starship: A2MT takes place aboard Demo and Iris's mothership, which contains a number of different biomes, buildings, and more. As you may expect, some of the areas are pretty wacky. Due to the game being incomplete, though, this being the location for the game is only brought up twice in two separate stages via message boxes.
• Couch Gag: The entrance to the Hub Level in the prequel.
• Credits Gag:
  • Immediately after "In-House Porting" comes "Out-House Porting"
  • There are also voice acting credits, despite there being no voice acting. These range from known voice actors to raocow's cat and a rubber duck.
  • There's also a caterer, procrastinators, and USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS HACK.
  • A2XT has some humorous music credits. The sound of wind is credited to Nature, and even the lack of music is credited. For example, the first instance is credited to John Cage.
• Crosshair Aware: Yukari Yakumo.
• Cut and Paste Environments
• Cute Kitten: The fishcats.
• Cyberspace: Midway through King Charles's castle.
• Damsel in Distress: Inverted by the princesses of Another Castle, who have taken Bowser prisoner.
• Death Course: Trial of Iron
• Defeat Equals Friendship: Pily.
• Dirty Communists: The communinjis are friendly enough, but Dr. Lakituvitch is the Boss of A2XT World 4.
• Dude Magnet: Con and King Charles both fall for Demo. So does Kood in the prequel.
• Dungeon Bypass:
  • Some parts of levels are skippable if you have a cape.
  • One glaring example is in Trial of Iron, which has a door at the beginning which takes you straight to the final boss.
• Easy Amnesia: Kood in A2XT, by way of not being the same Kood who was playable in the previous game.
• Elaborate Underground Base: King Charles' castle takes place in a volcano, and is rather large.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The inside of the Fleshlord.
  • Zebraspace turns out to be this as well.
• Evil Overlord: King Charles, in a sense. He reigns over nearly everything.
• Exposition Break: Yes, Kood, nobody else cares about what is going on, and nobody wants to listen to your exposition.
  • At the end of World 6 in A2XT, Pily offers a 5-minute-long plot dump. Everybody leaves. Except for Kood. And Sheath, who was also there.
• Expy: The robotic Thwomp King Charles's pilots in his boss fight is clearly inspired by the Heavy Press.
• Fake Trap:
  • "the hardest lvl" is a parody of Kaizo hacks. That said, not everything in that level is a fake trap. As Pink Kitty Rose points out, the rule seems to be that anything nigh-impossible is fake, but anything reasonably doable is real.
  • Spin! Pierce the Heavens! has an invisible block + spike pit trap. Falling into it teleports you right to the leek.
• Fake Difficulty: Trial of Chaos.
• Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: Serve as the Suspiciously Similar Substitute for the generic Mario power-ups:
  • Mushrooms are replaced with Beets. 1-Up Beets are a green Palette Swap.
  • Fire Flowers are potted Cacti. Yes, the general consensus is that edible cacti are vegetables.
  • Feathers/Leaves are... well, still leaves, but it's a Spinach leaf instead of a stock leaf. The transformations differ between characters in ASMBXT: Demo gets the classic Mario cape, while Iris gets the traditional raccoon ears and tail.
  • Tanooki Suits are replaced by Onions. Using this turns Demo into a Cute Witch with a Flying Broomstick, while it turns Iris into a Bedsheet Ghost that can turn transparent like a Boo.
  • Hammer Suits are Gourds. Demo's transformation with this is by far the weirdest of any power-up in the game, becoming a barrel that throws out fish.
  • Stars are Leeks. They play the Leekspin Song when you grab them. They're only seen as the Level Goal in ASMBXT.
• Fantastic Racism: Dodge the Beefsteak in the prequel has blue goopas killing red goopas for probably this reason.
• Fission Mailed:
  • OAME GVER.
  • The Plains of Ulysses Mad is all about this.
• Foregone Victory: The credits; you can get hurt, but you cannot die.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The introductory level of World 4 in A2XT features statues of several Goopas and Garish. In the cutscene after the last level, Garish shows up in the flesh, leading his army of Grey Goopas. Additionally, his alias Johnson McCain is mentioned a few times beforehand, especially in the final level of the world.
  • The music in Science's lair is a slowed-down version of Legendary Illusion ~ Infinite Being. His final boss fight is a straight up Bullet Hell fight.
• Game Mod: ASMT is, of course, a Super Mario World Game Mod. ASMBXT modded quite a few assets of the Super Mario Bros. X engine, and an extension module was created for A2MBXT in order to extend the engine's functionality even further.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Parodied with Black Plague.
• Gimmick Level: The later in the game you get, the more of these you see.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: The Parrot Coins in A2MT. Given that it's impossible to play every level in any given version of the game, it's impossible to do this without cheating.
• Gratuitous German: Spiritia is guilty of this when you find her in A2XT's level Farina Station.
• Gravity Screw: One sublevel of King Charles' Castle.
• Gusty Glade: Currents.
• Hailfire Peaks:
  • "Below the Ice" contains ice blocks in lava caves... somehow.
  • The area in King Charles's castle with tides of lava AND water.
  • Elemental Confusion's first half is an underwater Lethal Lava Land. The second half adds frozen platforms for good measure.
• The Hero Dies: Everybody dies at the end of A2XT Episode 1. Except for Sheath.
• Hey, You!: Done literally to Demo in A2XT. Iris, ironically enough, gets addressed by her name.
• Hypocritical Humor: Catnip calls Demo and Iris out for eating a Toad whole in A2XT's Fun Fungus Function...despite being the stand-in for a particular stupid horse that does essentially the same thing all the time.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Murder death place zone.
• If I Can't Have You…: King Charles when he realizes Demo's affections towards Con.
• In Name Only: One would expect a boss-level named "In Flandre's Skies" to feature a Touhou Project boss, right? Well, wrong, the boss is actually Garish and his army of cyclops goopas.
• I Know Madden Kombat: Charlies (Chargin' Chucks).
• In-Series Nickname: "Samuel, or raocow, as we like to call him."
• Interface Screw: Trial of Chaos; Beware the Physics.
• Invisible Anatomy: Demo and Iris have no arms, despite the fact they can lift shells and such just like Mario would normally. Fixed in the prequel; apparently they are very good at balancing something on one leg while managing to move around normally with the other.
• It Makes Sense in Context: As raocow mentions after finding a bunch of easter eggs, the non-fans playing the games will have a lot of trouble understanding all the references.
• Kaizo Trap:
  • You are told to press L via coins at the goal of Overly Hot Beach. If you don't, a Boss Bass eats you during the victory sequence.
  • Red Koopa's Red Sparkling Death is filled with exit-spheres that cause Demo to walk into Bottomless Pits.
• King Mook: King Charles the Fourth and Master Snailington.
• Knight of Cerebus: The moment that Garish and the other siblings show up, A2XT goes from a MacGuffin hunt to having something resembling a serious plot.
• Ladder Physics: With vines and fences, and without arms.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The Revenge of a Much Abused Horse is all about this.
• Loose Canon:
  • The postgame of Analog Funk logically can't happen given the ending, so it's non-canon, but it does give more presumably canon characterization for Serac and Zebraspace.
  • Earlier on, Castle of the World has the characters destroying the world. Luckily, the game continues afterwards because they reached it with the Ambiguously Cannon, which is ambiguously canon.
• Mad Libs Catch Phrase: In a sense, the Switch Palace messages, which each have a different line at the end of their otherwise identical messages:
  Red Switch: I know. It's amazing.
  Blue Switch: Seriously? Seriously.
  Green Switch: It's a thing.
  Yellow Switch: It's pretty rad.
• Marathon Boss: The ASMBXT postgame level "Edge of the Universe" features the Universe itself. It has five phases. The first is easy and has no special attacks besides flying around. Phase two removes its vulnerability to being jumped on, forcing you to throw blocks at it, and also gives it three special attacks, one of which would not be out of place in a Bullet Hell game. The third phase is strictly a survival segment featuring more Bullet Hell-inspired attacks. The fourth phase is similar to the second, only with toned down versions of both of the previous two phases' special attacks and with the boss staying near the top of the screen, making it tough to even get a block up to it. Finally, the fifth phase is an Advancing Boss of Doom.
• Marathon Level:
  • King Charles' Castle definitely qualifies. Even for not playing the level in full, you have to face through 6 rooms (of a total of 24 rooms) of varying hazards, one of them being long as an actual full-on level itself. Then you get sent to a Cyberspace area and a red hallway, both which are of reasonable length. After that, you face two two bosses.
  • Luna Tower in the prequel. Made less aggravating by having plenty of shortcuts.
• Meaningful Echo: When you start up the game — "Hey there raocow, this is everyone!"
• Meaningful Name: Iris (who is the second player), Tête D'Feu.
• Meta Guy: raocow, in ASMBXT. His crouch sprite shows him sitting down, his legs hanging over the platform. He also sings along to the BGM in certain levels.
• Monster Arena: The Arena
• Mordor: Totally Rad Volcano, where King Charles' Castle is located.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: "Sheath was there too." is a Running Gag in A2XT.
• My Name Is ???: King Charles and Black Plague when introduced.
• Mythology Gag:
  • A2XT wastes little time in referring to Kood's relative lack of presence in its predecessor (for which see Out of Focus below).
  Demo: Why are you asking us for help [saving the universe,] Kood? You hardly know us.
  Kood: But what about our amazing adventures in the Castle of No Significance?
  Demo: From what I remember, you sort of just stared at us creepily from across the room and then stood silhouetted with us after we killed that key.
  Kood: No, I'm sure we totally talked and all became great friends along with raocow and Sheath.
  Iris: Who the heck is Sheath?
  Demo: I'm almost certain you dreamt that.
  • Much of the games references raocow's previous LPs, such as:
    • Levels that are based on games he's played (e.g. Four of a Kind in ASMBXT)
    • Cameo appearances of characters (e.g. Kood and Jowey the poison cow in ASMBXT)
    • Music using soundbytes from his videos or lifted from the games (e.g. the music from Hina's Fluffy Dream used in A2XT)
    • Raoquotes (e.g. Garish's battle cry, some books in the A2XT library)
• Never Say "Die": Those aren't deaths, they are very much intentional demos.
• No Fourth Wall:
  • ASMBXT has "Technical Difficulties," where one of the pipes will take you directly outside of raocow's house as he does a Let's Play.
  • This even happens In-Universe: a particularly powerful Computer Virus destroys raocow's computer to such an extent that it breaks reality, causing him to go and kill the virus physically, winding up right at Demo's side at the Castle Of Absolutely No Significance afterwards. He's understandably freaked out by standing face-to-face with his own creation. In raocow's own Let's Play of ASMBXT, this even doubles as Recursive Reality.
  • You can speak to one of the grass-patches outside the castle in ASMBXT, and it will tell you what version you're playing, along with some nonsensical message.) On the final update, the message is addressed to "Samuel"^note raocow's real first name.
• Nostalgia Level:
  • The Castle of Absolutely No Significance returns as a level in A2XT.
  • The entrance to Black Plague's tower as well.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Doughnuts of Doom! A flying lighter that throws out enemies who don't want their heads on fire, torpedoes with Groucho Marx faces, Yaranaika Bullets.
• Out of Focus: While Demo and Iris are the only characters that are playable for a vast majority of ASMBXT, Kood still stands out because, until you unlock the "Turn into Everything!" room, he only features in one single level. The sequel lampshades this hilariously.
• Palmtree Panic: And So It Began, Water Water Everywhere, Overly Hot Beach
• Pipe Maze: In a literal sense in The Switch Where Yoshi Jumps A Lot. Played straight in a later level.
• Platform Hell:
  • Although the game normally qualifies as a Nintendo Hard hack, there is one section in King Charles's Castle that first of all, disables Spin Jumps. So? Well there's a spinning Koopa Shell that you have to jump over and avoid... while in a room with a disco-light like dealing with giant spiked pillars, Thwimps, Thwomps, blocks that enemies can go through but you fall through, and Fishing Boos. raocow even calls this specific room "Hell".
  • Parodied in "the hardest lvl".
• Player Headquarters: Well, plot headquarters, And Then There Was A Resistance Base.
• Promoted to Playable: Suddenly Nevada.
• Puzzle Boss: A2XT has Mario, who is basically Super Mario Bros. 3 Bowser except there's an unbreakable floor under the breakable bricks. You have to lure him into the lava on the sides.
• Recursive Reality: ASMBXT is a Show Within a Show in A2XT, which is either this or Based on a True Story.
• Remember the New Guy?: Oddly enough, Iris was this in the series' early days. She did exist in A Super Mario Thing, serving as the Player 2 graphic, but plays absolutely no role in the plot, with none of the other characters (not even Demo herself) even mentioning her. A 2 MT was supposed to introduce her as a proper character alongside the rest of the siblings, but the game's cancellation led to that plot point being axed. Come ASMBXT, Demo acts like she's always been around, and over the course of the series a pre-ASMT history is built up for her.
• The Reveal: After defeating Pily, she reveals the true nature of Demo, Iris, and the Siblings.^* She reveals that the cyclops were minions kept in line by brainwashing for "the great space masters of space", due to their ability to be revived. A grand rebellion known as "the Grand Rebellion" took place, but took place during the Great Green Radish Famine of October. Eventually, all cyclops were starved, revived, and then starved again. Eventually, they starved "to complete death". The Artist learned of their former existence, and attempted to recreate the cyclops to assist him in taking over the galaxy. He created, respectively, Science, Pandamona, Garish, Nevada, Mishi, Pily (who is perfect in every way), Calleoca, and finally, Demo and Iris. Each sibling following Science was made with different catalysts in an attempt to balance them out. Demo and Iris were made from a bunch of packing peanuts, a slab of meat, a lead weight, asbestos, and most importantly, a kangaroo. Demo and Iris escaped brainwashing and became servants of one of the masters of space. Now Demo and Iris must free the rest of their siblings from their brainwashing.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Big Squee is so called for a reason.
• Ring-Out Boss: King Charles, Spinning Sand Castle Thwomps
• Ruins for Ruins' Sake: Munchy Plant Ruins.
• Rule of Symbolism: In-Universe — "Each Bowser represents a game you don't LP." ^{Which ones?}In order: Minecraft, Yume Nikki, Jumper, Touhou Project, Katawa Shoujo, Euro Truck Driving Simulator 2, Hong Kong '97, Lasabirdie, Shadow of Ganymede, Erika to Satoru no Yume Bouken, Slender, and Wii Sports. Then you start shooting them with bullet bills.
• Sampling: The background music for "Pavlov Gold" is GenericCaw's remix of raocow's "Yellow hurts."
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: The very final level of A2XT is a patchwork level, with every screen of content having been contributed by a different person. This leads to stuff like confusing platforming areas leading into harmless jokes.
• Self-Duplication: The Super Demo 128 stage's gimmick in ASMBXT. Here it is if you want to see it.
  raocow: What wonders do you hide within your body, Demo?
• Series Mascot: Demo.
• Sequel Hook:
  • Added in the public release where Demo returns to her master's ship to find everybody gone.
  • In A2XT, Pandamona destroys the universe and everybody dies, except for Sheath, who is told by Science to undo it. Demo walks through the credits as a ghost, and the sequence closes with an image of Sheath, still alive.
• Shout-Out:
  • The game is basically made out of shout outs to raocow and stuff he played, such as other ROM Hacks (2chan's Vip and Wall Mix series in particular), cat planet, Touhou Project and a lot of other things.
  • In addition, one of the levels in the prequel, "Blood Cavern", is a homage to Space Funeral, Eversion, and other games with a creepy aesthetic.
  • More bizarrely, the ASMBXT level "Oh, No! It's Lakitu!" contains numerous shout outs to Devo. Word of God from the creator of the level says they were sneaked through the development process to see if any of the other contributors would notice them. They didn't.
  • "Ascend", one of the final levels in ASMBXT, is named for a recurring word in Homestuck, and uses a "Sburban Jungle" MIDI as background music.
  • Are you a bad enough minion to make the proletariat eat soup?
  • The intro for World 5 of A2XT is a (doable) take on the intro of What The Hell, raocow's infamous Platform Hell romhack.
  • Whatever is inside the flesh-lord bears a strong resemblance to the Fly of Despair, with a guest appearance from Zbambabar.
  • Blue Surfer is pretty much a level from the infamous Silver Surfer (1990), including walls that kill you on touch.
  • Monty Mole's Aerial Extravaganza
• Show Within a Show: "Talkhaus presents ASMBXT". The Stinger reveals that it was a movie/show/whatever that Nevada was watching (on screen), making it a Show within a Show within a Show.
• Songs in the Key of Panic: Intentionally taken to hilarious extremes in "Panic Puzzle". The level starts with 100 seconds' worth of time, which, once it counts down to 99, speeds up the already somewhat frantic-sounding level music. The level is designed in such a way that the repeated going through of pipes is necessary, and the timer is reset to 100 seconds every time Demo passes through a pipe, which then triggers the speed-up in the level music once again. By the time the player reaches the end of the level, the music will have become a chaotic-sounding mess.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Colonial Seattle
• Stationary Boss: Phase 1 of King Charles' battle.
• Stealth-Based Mission: A2XT's World 7 ghost house has one to get the leek.
• Stealth Pun:
  • raocow likes to call Yoshis horses. Some Yoshi Turncoats have joined the Charlie army. Put them together and what do you get?
  • World 3's castle, Chocolate Castle. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
  • World 4's castle, a Honeypot Trap, uses a different set of sprites than the rest of the hack, with many of the enemies being replaced by bees—specifically, all of the ghost-type enemies like Eeries and Boos. The latter are therefore Boo Bees.
• Stylistic Suck: the hardest lvl, A Terrible Level, 26th - AUS - 'Level1 - Winter City', and My First SMB Level, to varying degrees.
• Sudden Downer Ending: A2XT: Episode 1 ends with the entire reality being destroyed. Very little of it is played for laughs and the credits scene is rather somber compared to the overall wacky feel of the game.
• Surreal Horror: A2MBXT starts taking this approach as the game progresses, with a (relatively) abnormally high frequency of unnerving levels. There's also a noticeable quantity of unsettling easter eggs hidden in otherwise-normal levels.
• Surreal Humor: Gives off this feel with some of the particularly inexplicable parts of the game.
• Take That!: The ASMBXT level Toad Central is essentially a giant satire of the main Super Mario World hacking community SMWCentral, particularly the perception that they prioritize visuals and story above gameplay and their love of Lock And Key Puzzles.
• Time-Limit Boss: The World 7 boss. Good luck navigating that shell!
• Title Drop: Science, right before his final battle, vows to destroy "this Super Mario Bros. X Thing".
• Token Good Teammate: Calleoca appears to be this for the Siblings, as she appears many times as a helpful NPC. It's actually Pily, who claims to have been mind-controlled following her defeat and joins Demo and Iris. Calleoca finally battles Demo in World 8.
• Unique Enemy: In the original ASMT, the Worms' Cave is the only level in the game that has Blarggs other than the credits. And since the Worms' Cave's gimmick is that all of the regular sprites are replaced with worm sprites, this means that the Blarggs' normal replacement for the game, the Yellow Submarine, only appears in the credits sequence.
• Unusual User Interface: USS Suboptimal in ASMBXT, which you control by guiding a Parakoopa with the chasing AI to where you want to go.
  • murder death place zone, also in ASMBXT, has you climbing on a grate that's controlled by the Boo AI.
• Video Game Caring Potential: There's a sidequest in the A2XT World 4 level Fahren which tasks you with finding a homeowner's missing pet Furbas which have wandered off into the cold. Completing it not only nets you another leek, but it also makes you feel good for helping someone in need.
• Violation of Common Sense: Mercilessly lampshaded in "Island Place That Somehow Floats" from A2XT, which requires you to duck-slide and then wall-glitch to reach the secret exit.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Con, your Yoshi informant.
• Waddling Head: Tête D'Feu, Furba.
• Western: the good, the bad and the stupid is a homage to this genre, lampshades included.
• World of Chaos: As if the Mushroom Kingdom wasn't strange enough already...

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