Video Game / SuperTux

SuperTux is a free and open source Linux-based Super Mario Bros. clone. It is inspired by the first and third games in the Super Mario Bros. series, and even has a level editor and fan-made addons that can be played to extend the game.

This page will talk about both the original game and it's addons.

---

Both the main game and its addons provide examples of:

• Action Bomb: There are different types of enemies which explode when hit, such as Mr. Bomb, Haywire and Skydive. Short fuse is special as its explosion does not deal damage but instead knocks the player back, potentially into deadly pits or obstacles.
• Airborne Mook: Many enemies, but the most notable ones are Flying Snowballs, Snowshots, Owls, and Zeeklings.
• The Artifact:
  • The old Jumpy sprites still exist in Milestone 2, but haven't been changed, aside from porting it over to the new animation format, and adding frozen sprites.
  • The time limit becomes this in Milestone 2. While it was mandatory for every level to have a time limit in Milestone 1, the timer is now an optional feature in Milestone 2.
• Artificial Stupidity: The most basic enemies will walk off platforms and into spikes and lava, causing their own demise.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Being Big Tux is usually a good thing, as this gives you a second hitpoint. However, it's not so good if you have to make wide and precise jumps between small platforms. In levels requiring this you are better off as Small Tux.
  • Downplayed with the air flower. It lets you move faster, which is not always a good thing. And it lets you jump a bit higher and hover briefly as you fall. Until you get used to the timing, this can cause players to miss platforms they would have hit without the powerup. However, with multiple air flowers, It instead becomes Difficultbut Awesome, as you can hover for a longer time.
  • Collecting powerups of the same type above a certain limit. Let's face it, eleven fire flowers aren't much more powerful than ten.
• Big Bad: Nolok has captured Tux's girlfriend Penny and forces him on a long and dangerous adventure to get her back.
• Bowdlerise: In older versions of the game, the Snowshot enemy was wearing a kamikaze headband. When Milestone 2 officially came out, the headband was removed, and the Snowshot instead has a silly face.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Some enemies exist in "smart" and "dumb" varieties (the former being auto-turning enemies while the latter fall off platforms). These are mostly distinguishable by their different colors.
• Convection Schmocvection:
  • In some levels Tux can stand on platforms less than one tile above a lava surface without getting hurt. Also when he has a powerup and falls into a non-bottomless Lava Pit, he will not die instantly but instead take a hit, giving the player a chance to get out alive (if the pit is shallow enough; otherwise Tux will subsequently die).
  • Most ice tiles and blocks survive being hit by fireballs, struck by (action) bomb explosions or walked over by sentinent fire. However, there is one type of block which averts this trope because it melts as soon as Tux touches it.
• Cranium Ride: Ice crushers and their Forest World reskins.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The earth flower is really useful in dark underground levels, as it gives Tux a "safety helmet" equipped with a little lamp. Obviously, that lamp is effectless in a fully lit environment. Even in a partially lit scene it can be more debilitating than useful because the bright light cone impairs perception of things outside of it. Plus you need a relatively even floor for it to be most effective - small platforms with bottomless pits are difficult to cross because you can't direct the light diagonally... Yeah, the earth flower also has other nice effects - it gives you an extra hitpoint (like the other flower powerups), and allows you to "petrify" briefly and become invulnerable. Hitting the key combination for triggering the petrification at the right moment is difficult, however.
• Cute Bruiser / Badass Adorable: Tux fits this, in a broader sense.
• Damsel in Distress: Penny.
• Death Throws:
  • Tux does it whenever he dies, while flailing his wings.
  • Happens to some enemies, too (depending on the way they die). Even the Yeti does it as well.
• Depth Perplexion: Played with in some bonus levels, especially in Adventure To The New World.
• Difficult, but Awesome: A single ice flower lets you throw ice balls that can freeze many enemies in place and extinguish fire, but only one at a time. And the iceballs tend to ricochet for several seconds before disappearing. Meaning if you miss your target you have to wait until the iceball has disappeared (or hits by chance after bouncing off several obstacles) until you can throw the next. However, with some skill you can hit enemies indirectly using obstacles as "reflectors". This is not possible with a fire flower.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: While not overtly shocking, the death animations when mooks are hit by fireballs are a bit more graphic than those in a typical Super Mario platformer. Susceptible ice and snow enemies will melt, while those of Forest World will burst into flames briefly before disappearing.
• Flunky Boss: The Ghost Tree is surrounded by special will-o-wisps that you have to use in a particular way to defeat him. But don't touch them or you get hurt.
• Goomba Stomp: Many mooks can be defeated this way. Those who can't usually either have obvious spikes on their top, or they are ghost-like entities. Also the first boss has to be defeated by repeatedly jumping on his head.
  • Goomba Springboard: Tux can also springboard off of squished enemies. This is even required in a few locations, and can be abused to bypass parts of a level in others.
• Ground Pound:
  • Big Tux can "butt-jump" and break wood blocks under him. This move also kills frozen enemies (with a few exceptions).
  • The Yeti boss uses it indirectly as his main attack pattern.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses:
  • The developers avoid making bosses too easy, but SuperTux still counts as this. For example, look at the sheer number of levels on Icy Island that you have to go through in order to reach the Yeti boss, and then look at the boss fight itself. Which one will likely take more time?
  • Subverted with the Yeti in Yeti's Revenge. The Yeti's attacks last a long time in this fight, and some even Insta-kill Tux.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Some enemies can be stunned and then kicked around like Mario's koopas. Like these, they can defeat other enemies when sliding around, but they can also hurt the player himself when they bounce back from an obstacle.
  • Also, there are particular blocks which burn away when hit by a fireball. Be careful when walking over these blocks with a fire flower, especially when there is a Bottomless Pit underneath.
  • Mooks hit and frozen by an ice ball mid-air will fall down and hurt Tux when he is below.
• Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: In Milestone 1, lava is just a reskin of water and is completely harmless. Lava in Milestone 2 deals damage on contact, but otherwise works exactly like water, even letting Tux swim in it.
• Luck-Based Mission: Whenever you need to use multiple Flying Snowballs as springboards to cross a large pit, unless you're playing Milestone One. These guys move up and down irregularly and in doubt, at least one will be either in a too low position or a too high one when you approach.
• Made of Iron: The Yeti boss is insensitive to fire or ice balls, unscathed by his own stalactites, and he can walk over spikes and through lava if necessary.
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: Picking up a flower powerup will replace any other flower powerup you already have.
• Obstructive Foreground:
  • High grass in some Forest levels hides small mooks nearly completely, so that you walk into them if you're not careful. Also there are areas of darkness in some (other) levels where the view is obstructed by a black foreground.
  • This also happens a lot in Adventure To The New World.
• One Bullet at a Time: A single fire or ice flower lets you have one bullet on screen at a time. This limit increases by one for each additional fire/ice flower you collect, but resets if you lose the powerup.
• 1-Up: Zig-Zagged with the Tux Dolls. It's Played Straight in Milestone One, but downplayed in versions before 0.6.1. Each one grants the player 100 extra coins if they catch it, and coins were originally needed to restart from the last checkpoint when Tux dies.
• Playing with Fire: The Fire Flower, analogous to that in Super Mario Bros.
• Respawn on the Spot: Happens when you die right at the beginning of a level, or just behind a checkpoint.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: Given the relatively large number of levels per world, SuperTux inevitably has shades of this. (In part also because both implemented worlds feature different environments throughout their courses, such as Underground Levels, sky levels, water-rich levels and castles.) This architecture makes it very hard to constantly ramp up difficulty.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World:
  • Icy Island, the start point of the game. Usually Tux has no problems walking over snow and ice tiles, but there are surfaces which are so slippery that even the little penguin will slip (oddly enough, this doesn't affect enemies).
  • Also applies to most of the Addons.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Some of the hardest levels have rather happy or calm soundtracks. Especially the main theme (a frantic techno soundtrack) is used for many levels of various difficulty levels, while Underground Levels mostly have calm and melancholic soundtracks regardless of difficulty, including "Think fast, or die".
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics:
  • Largely averted for Penny.
  • Some mooks, like smartballs, seem to have them, though their gender is not officially specified. (Older manuals refer to them as females, but this has later been dropped.)
• The Goomba: Snowballs on Icy Island, and poison ivies in Forest World.
• The Unfought:
  • In current versions, it appears Nolok is this. However, one day he will be added into the game... probably.
  • Partially Subverted in Adventure To The New World, where he's a Cutscene Only Boss.
• Video-Game Lives: Played Straight in Milestone One, Subverted in all future versions.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!:
  • In some older versions, Nolok leaves a letter for Tux after he captures Penny.
  • In later versions, when Tux reaches the end of Nolok's castle on Icy island, he finds an empty room with a letter from Penny telling him that Nolok brought her to a far place. Then the Yeti suddenly shows up and chases Tux out, until Tux gets cornered in a large pit.
  • Also happens in Adventure To The New World 2.
• Waddling Head: Many mooks are this.
• When Trees Attack: Both the Walking tree (a generic mook) and the Ghost Tree boss count as this.

---

The main game and the official addons provides examples of:

• Brutal Bonus Level:
  • Incubator Island (actually a set of incompletely implemented levels thought for testing) has a few very hard levels that require many nigh-impossible jumps and dodging of a bunch of Goddamned Bats and Demonic Spiders. These levels tend to cluster in the lower right of the island.
  • Take the maze of Level C-4 from Super Mario Bros.: The lost levels, multiply its length and make it a freaking fast auto scroller level, and what you will get is roughly comparable to Bonus Island II: Think fast, or die.
• The Bus Came Back: Many enemies from versions before milestone 1, and enemies only seen in the milestone 2 beta, both return in Redmond's Revenge.
• The Lost Woods: Forest World, the second world after Icy Island.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The Ghost Forest, plus the later levels of the old Forest World.

---

The unofficial addons provide examples of:

• Adaptational Badass: Good lord, the Yeti in Yeti's Revenge. What was once a normally easy fight is now almost impossible to beat.
• Adaptational Villainy: The Yeti tries to annoy Penny constantly in Yeti's Revenge, kicking off the plot. It turns out this was his intention the entire time, so he could lure Tux and kill him.
• Adaptation Expansion: Waffelwüste, unlike most other levels, is a desert world with custom assets and enemies.
• Checkpoint Starvation: There's almost no checkpoints in the Adventure To The New World series. Justified, in that the series was originally made for milestone 1, which didn't have proper checkpoints.