I got my parents to send my son New Super Mario Brothers Wii for his Christmas present this past Christmas. And honestly, I think I am enjoying it more than he is. To tell you the truth, I am absolutely loving it. I have spent way too many hours playing the original Super Mario Brothers on Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) machine, or “Fami-Com” (short for Family Computer) in my youth. Between that and the original “Dragon Quest” and “Zelda” I decided in my young age that I wanted to become a game programmer when I grow up. It is so funny that my son now wants to be “Lego Designer” when he grow up, and who can blame him, that sounds like a great job and I hope he does!
Anyways, I thought I’d share couple of cheats and tricks that I learned here about the New Super Mario Brothers. Basically, if you have a lot of lives (You can go up to 99 lives, and when that happens, Mario will lose his hat!) and a lot of map items (ones you can use while in the map view) chance is you will beat the game. Here is my guide to how to maximize your life and map items. Once you have those, you can use awesome Walkthrough guide by IGN to beat the game.
Unlimited 1-UP in World 2-3.
I loved this when I was playing the original Super Mario. But It was a lot harder to do since if you miss your chance, you had to start over. You I guess some call this technique “Tipping turtle.” But basically, if you jump on the turtle coming down from the stair, and lock into the loop of kick and you get unlimited (actually up to 99) lives. For the best timing, jump as the turtle is just coming down 2-steps higher than you. Watch this YouTube video’s about 1:07 (below).
Get “Red Mushroom House” when you rescue “Toad” (or Kinopio)
I hate the name “Taod” by the way. We call him Kinopio (as in mix of Pinocchio and Kinoko – mushroom) in Japan and I think it sounds much better. But, I digress… When you rescue him from a trapped world, you get a bonus house. Sometimes its Green, sometimes it’s Gold, and sometimes it’s Red. We want a Red Mushroom House because that is where you get the map items. This is not random. It depends on what the “time left” (upper right corner of the screen) clock’s 1-digit number, when you cross the finish line (meaning, touch the flag poll). If first digit is 4, 5, 6 or 7, then you get Red House. 0, 1, 2 or 3 is Green 1-UP, and 8 or 9 is Gold. For example, if you have 234, 197, 025, or 006 then you’ll get it. So start jumping at “7″.
Get all the item from “Red Mushroom House”
There are 18 panels, 9 matching pairs, in the Red Mushroom House. Of two pairs are bad guys (Bowser and Bowser Jr.), so you can get maximum of 7 items. You can get them all every time. There are only 6 variations of cards layout in each of the world. So, all you have to do is Just go here and print it out, and try turning a few cards, find out which pattern it is, and avoid the bad guys. Easy, huh?
Good luck! I enjoyed writing this. This blog called videogamesblogger.com was also very useful resource.
I was inspired by Boston Globe’s Chad Finn’s posting on Extra Bases blog called 
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