Farming Lives in Super Mario 3D World

Super Mario 3D World is a fantastic game, but later levels - especially flying or moving levels with multiple players - can be rather punishing. At some point you may find yourself needing to go back to an earlier world and farm some extra lives because your gaming partner(s) keep dying and losing all your lives.

The absolute best place to do this is underground in World 1-2. All you need is to be a "big" character (just take a mushroom power-up) and go down the first pipe in the level. Butt-stomp the first breakable block you find in the floor and you'll find a green koopa wandering about between some other blocks. Hop on it and steal its shell. Go over to the right side of the room and you'll find a tiny tunnel that leads out to the next room. Stand just inside the tunnel, then throw the shell at the wall so it will bounce back and forth rapidly in the narrow tunnel. Make sure to jump as you throw it. It's pretty easy to time so your character lands on the shell.

This will kick of a chain reaction of you landing on the shell which sends it careening into the wall and back, where you'll land on it again and it flies off into the wall again. At this point you can put the controller down and watch as you rack up 1-UPs essentially for free! You can grab over 100 lives in less than a minute using this technique, and it doesn't even really feel like cheating. It's just making strategic use of the gameplay mechanics.

Hit up this video for a visual sample of this trick in action: