i killed the thread with tux racer (and actually bounce touch previously. yeah.) lets kill it a third time with supertux
which i also downloaded spontaneously
so its a lot like smb1 of course but theres some interesting things to it. for example , you can backflip and ground pound! te entire time while performing the groundpound you can actually keep moving left to right even after the little bounce after landing so thats neat. the controls otherwise take a bit of getting used to though. i find it hard to land on tiny precise platforms. also, you can swim! the swimming controls are better than in any 2d mario!
and also the fire flower (its literally just called that in the game) actually has a purpose when collected while youre already powered up, as it lets you cast an additional fireball that can be on screen at a time. like youve collected 4 fire flowers so then youre allowed to have 4 fireballs up on screen at the same time before you can cast another
ALSO! the bounce arc of the fireballs depend on how far they fall from where you are, like if they just land on the floor in front of tux they only bounce a little (just enough to easily kill any on ground enemies) but if youre standing near a cliff and shooting downwards then the fireballs do a BIG bounce. its neat theres more complexity to fire flowers than i expected
also theres no lives, instead theres a "tux doll" that immediately came off to me like it was intended to be a 1up equivalent at some point before they got rid of lives and made it just give you 100 coins. presumably thats how that happened anyway. idk what the coins are for but they also accumulate from each level and you can also 100% each level by collecting every coin, secret, and killing every badguy its interesting
a neat thing is that the empty question mark blocks actually leave a tux reflection if you stand on them
heres a cool background (this also demonstrates the fire flower quirks)
one of the first levels is an obvious smb 1-1 homage