Very neat, but like most Mario clones, it does not properly emulate the jumping dynamics of the original. When jumping, the length of time that you hold down the jump button should control the height of the jump. Should sort of be as if, instead of jumping, Mario has a jetpack which is almost out of fuel, but is refilled when he lands.
This is excellent, but doesn't quite "feel right" when playing. In my opinion, anybody interested in playing Super Mario will remember its distinct feel -- so it will be important to nail down the exact dynamics of running, jumping, falling, stopping, mid-jump corrections, ducking while running, how close you can get to edges, etc.
This is an incredibly deep and fascinating topic in the context of the original Super Mario Bros. The answer to how close you can get to a wall edge is one or two pixels inside it. This is actually very important for SMB's playability, vastly increasing the tolerance for moves like jumping up in a narrow shaft or bending a jump to get on top of a block you're currently under.
The game then needs a mechanism to eject Mario out of those walls if he ends up inside. Among many emergent behaviors, this gives rise to the famous entry to Negative World, which occurs by fooling the game into ejecting Mario in the macroscopically wrong direction. (BTW, we hackers should know World -1 is really World <Blank>-1, accessed by entering a warp zone pipe before it initializes.)
A friend of mine hacked https://github.com/odbol/mariohtml5 with me during arthackday.net/gaffta . We made it a one-button game that you can only die once. It was fun!
Quick note - I actually wanted to make Mario in HTML5 but came across this today before starting. I'm not the author :). Thought it'd be interesting to share.
On my first generation i5 with integrated graphics, it runs fine in Iron, which is basically Chromium. Looking at the Wikipedia article for RockMelt, that browser hasn't even seen a preview release in over half a year, so I would assume its performance might lag a bit behind the upstream projects.
Wow, thanks to the raw power of HTML5, my dual-core 2Ghz laptop, can nearly achieve the performance of my 20 year old 1.79 MHz NES. The future is now! Color me impressed.
What are you talking about? I had both a NES and a SNES as a kid. Super Mario Bros was originally released for the NES and later re-released for the SNES as Super Mario All-Stars. But this HTML5 version runs worse in my broswer than the original did on my NES, nevermind the SNES.
