Talk:Star Power

Regarding citation

Seems like citation 3 and 4 have issues.

• The iQue Paper Mario booklet citation links to a tieba.baidu.com URL, which when opened, gives an error message that says page doesn't exist. tieba.baidu.com is highly prone to deleting posts, and had an incident where all posts made before 2017, regardless of whether they were against any policies or not, were wiped clean. I suggest always making a backup (eg, archive.org) of any tieba.baidu.com sources, and by extension any Chinese sources, when citing the source.
• The techyoshi URL gives a 500 Internal Server Error when opened. Upon closer inspection, removing the index.php from the URL makes the page accessible: https://ml.techyoshi.com/topic,142.0.html . However, it doesn't mention that SP can be recovered when sleeping in a bed. Not sure if it's bad source, bad placement of the citation, or source changed.

Someone please help check the citations, and probably scan for other similar citation issues on the site.

670839245 (talk) 09:54, February 18, 2024 (EST)

Move to Star Power (Paper Mario series)

This is mostly/entirely linked to Talk:Countdown Timer#Move to "Star power", but if that move happens, I would imagine people would try to search "Star Power" all caps for the Yoshi's Island mechanic. I don't think the Paper Mario series is substantially more prominent than Yoshi's Island series, so I think a diambiguation page at Star Power is the most fair to both series. I don't think we should say that the more recent release of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Nintendo Switch) supercedes the Yoshi series here, because favoring the series with a more recent release in one instance could lead to crazy back and forth name swaps as the different series of the Super Mario franchise inadvertently jockey for the right to have the page name without an identifier by releasing new games, which would make the names of wiki pages very unstable if we followed it. Salmancer (talk) 17:22, July 29, 2025 (EDT)

Oh, and I don't think the capitalization of "Star Power" vs "Star power" should matter. The manual for Yoshi's Island DS [1] calls it "Star Power", as does the Yoshi's New Island website [2], so the Yoshiterm wibble wobbles on capitalization. Someone looking at either source might very well search for "Star Power", proper noun, and land on this page even if the Yoshi's Island page is "Star power". Salmancer (talk) 17:32, July 29, 2025 (EDT)

Yeah I do think this instance should be a bit over the Paper Mario one. I was also under impression that lore also treats the mechanic as a protective star aura that prevents Baby Mario from being taken. And you also collect stars and pass through star rings to increase the timer, so the game reinforces that the mechanic is tied to star power too and not some missable lore factoid from an instruction booklet (I mean, the Yoshi's Island DS booklet makes it large and clear too when referring to this game mechanic). It's constantly reinforced in the series. So, is there a reason we're calling that page "Countdown Timer" instead, and for years? I can't find any relevant discussion why we're favoring Countdown Timer barring a tutorial level and a one-off message. It's me, Mario! (Talk / Stalk) 19:47, July 29, 2025 (EDT)

If I had to guess, it's because people don't really check up on the Yoshi series articles, a problem further bolstered by both Yoshi's Island DS and Yoshi's New Island reviewing poorly and thus not selling as well as they could have. Fewer people with the games overall means fewer wiki editors with the games, which means the initial decision went unchecked. The person who created Countdown Timer named this article after the explicitly named visual indicator and not the vaguer force behind the visual indicator, basically as a Yoshi equivalent of Health Meter, which I think was correct. Even the manual was worded to exclusively use "Countdown Timer", and the Middle Ring was stated to grant Stars rather than build up the Countdown Timer directly.[3] The revelation that the vague force has had a name means we have to course correct. (Apparently "star power" was established in Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3's manual, [4], so perhaps that user should have made sure to buy a copy of Super Mario Advance 3 before they made the article. Ah, the woes of remakes, people with the original have a reason to not buy them.) Salmancer (talk) 20:11, July 29, 2025 (EDT)