Since the beginning of the franchise, WarioWare has contained a lot of fun and silly nods to past Nintendo games. It often even just directly reuses assets from old games, with my favorite being Dr. Wario, which is straight-up fully featured Dr. Mario but with Wario. However, WarioWare: Get It Together! continues this trend in a way no one expected. This new Switch WarioWare contains Luigi’s Mansion beta assets from GameCube, and modders are already extracting those assets to assist in the creation of the Luigi’s Mansion Restoration Project, a project to recreate Luigi’s Mansion exactly as it looked in its E3 2001 trailer.
Modder Portable Productions has determined that the Luigi’s Mansion beta assets are significantly higher-resolution than those seen in the final game, and the visuals are believed to have taken a hit for the final game due to technical constraints of GameCube. Have a look at these Luigi’s Mansion sofa, chair, and tablecloth beta assets extracted from WarioWare: Get It Together! and try to remember what the actual fuzzy GameCube graphics looked like.
Late night tweet!
Here's the new chairs I just finished up using the Warioware assets, seems like all of the assets dropped from Warioware are upscaled massively, judging from E3 2001 screenshots and media, its fair to now confirm the textures used at E3 were super high res. pic.twitter.com/0zUHfq1CXk
— Portable Productions (@PortableProduc1) September 9, 2021
Follow up tweet!
Here's another example of what I mean when i say the textures are super high res, the mini sofa dumped from Warioware held a massively high res texture for the lower border and cloth, I went ahead and applied that to the final game's large sofa for consistency. pic.twitter.com/v694CwxYAG
— Portable Productions (@PortableProduc1) September 9, 2021
Triple tweet!
So here's a direct comparison, if had to put money on as to why they changed the texture resolution it was probably due to the 450kb per room size limit, considering the Warioware dump comes with some pretty sloppy work such as the E3 2001 candle being cut in half. pic.twitter.com/QVfFuwxgPo
— Portable Productions (@PortableProduc1) September 9, 2021
Below is a clip from yesterday evening of “all of the ported asset pieces from the WarioWare asset dump, models, and textures included, working in Luigi’s Mansion Beta Restoration.”
It’s refreshing to see old, unused assets like this appear in an official Nintendo product — as opposed to being part of the vast, endless Gigaleak.