Super Mario Sunshine 64

Super Mario Sunshine 64 is a hack of Super Mario 64 by Kaze Emanuar released in 2020. It is an incomplete port of the Gamecube game of the same name, only the runway, Delfino Plaza and Bianco Hills. Do not confuse this with the 2006 Flash game of the same name.

You can download the patch for the game here, using the password shinesprite. You can then apply the patch to a ROM called Super Mario 64 (U) [!].z64 using BPS/Flips and run it in an emulator. I had a bit of trouble with the framerate so here’s some footage by Unreal.

Super Mario Sunshine 64 style and gameplay

You start off on the runway where you can find a dirty circle on the floor and a dirty boat. Cleaning them up gives you a blue coin and a trip to Delfino Plaza respectively.

Upon arriving at Delfino Plaza, you’re met with the hover nozzle and Shadow Mario. Once you chase him around the stage a bit, he’ll disappear into an M on the statue wall, which will take you to Bianco Hills.

From there it works just like in the original game on the Gamecube. You fight against Petey Piranha, climb the windmill, you pop some balloons (new), grab red coins, chase Shadow Mario and collect 100 coins. There are no secret areas with platforming challenges inside the stage, but they have been moved to Delfino Plaza.

The playstyle is very similar to that in Sunshine with a couple of differences. For example, FLUDD can only operate one nozzle at a time. That is, you can’t switch between the squirt and hover nozzles until you pick it up from the appropriate box. It also doesn’t have a meter of how much water is in your tank.

The water in the airstrip and Delfino Plaza is poisonous and very hard to make your way out of. This makes them practically a deathtrap.

Review and conclusion

Kaze has said that the game was abandoned due to a lack of motivation, and I can understand why. He did get the start of the game done so you have the ability to mess around in Delfino Plaza with your FLUDD, but adapting all of the original game into Super Mario Sunshine 64 would have been a colossal amount of effort just to make a game that already exists. After all, if you wanted to play Mario Sunshine, you could just play Mario Sunshine. I honestly would prefer he spend his time making games like Super Mario 64 Land instead.

What would be interesting would be to take the concept and adapt it to a new set of levels that are completely independent of the ones in Sunshine. That way you can use FLUDD in new and creative ways without having to deal with the restrictions that the original game’s structure puts on a port.

Even though it’s incomplete, it’s overall fun to be able to run around Delfino Plaza on a Nintendo 64. It feels so wrong yet so right.