Looygi Bros. Tests Glitches in Nintendo World Championships

Looygi Bros. obsessively plays various games and finds quirks, glitches and interesting facts about them. Their newest video tries out a bunch of known glitches in NES games and sees if they work in the new Nintendo World Championships speedrunning game. The result: in many, but not all, cases, Nintendo has put in code traps to make sure the games are operating as intended, and if they are set off, like if Mario goes through a wall or Link wraps around the screen, the emulator software declares Strategy Unavailable and resets the run. They tested 11 glitches in a ten-minute video, embedded here:

To summarize them:

1. Minus World: the trap occurs when Mario tries to slide through the wall at the end of World 1-2.
2. In Donkey Kong, it’s possible to climb down the first ladder, wrap around the screen, and end up on the girder right below the goal. They caught this one.
3. Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) Fast Carpet: with two carpets spawned, you can travel extra fast. This one didn’t get caught, but the set-up time to use it makes its use in the challenge prohibitive.
4. Wrapping the screen in The Legend of Zelda. This is one of my least favorite glitches honestly. Nintendo caught it, you can’t glitch around the screen horizontally nor get Link into the top-of-screen status area. (I also dislike the term “HUD” for these areas. Dammit Jim, it’s a video game not a jet fighter.)
5. The “door jump” glitch in Metroid. This lets you use a door to get Samus inside the blocks that make up the edges of the screen, from there you can, depending on the situation, either wrap around the screen vertically or explore “secret worlds” created by interpreting random cartridge data as terrain. This one’s trapped.
6. Super Mario 2 double jump. I didn’t know about this one! In some circumstances when you’re near an enemy, characters can jump in mid air. This one is both not trapped, and actually useful in the challenge!
7. Super Mario 3 Fortress skip. In similar circumstances to passing through the wall in Super Mario Bros. to get to the Minus World, you can pass through a wall midway through the fortress to skip an area and go straight to the boss. This one’s trapped, probably checking for the same kind of situation as the Minus World trick.
8. Super Mario Bros. wall jump. Not trapped, and conceivably useful in the World 8-4 completion challenge to get into the elevated pipe.
9. Kid Icarus fortress 1 shortcut. There’s a way to glitch through a wall early in the route through the fortress that takes you almost to the end. This one is trapped, but it’s triggered, not when you get through the wall, but when you go through the room’s exit. It probably makes sure you go through all the essential rooms in order.
10. Super Mario Bros. 2 cave skip. It’s a way to glitch through a wall so you don’t have to wait for a bomb to explode. It’s tricky but possible, you end up taking damage to get through it though.
11. Super Mario Bros. 2 item attachment. A complex trick that lets you get items into areas where they aren’t intended to go. Technically this is untrapped and usable. In conjunction with the cave skip trick, it’s possible to kill Birdo with a Shy Guy, potentially with one throw instead of having to wait for three eggs to throw back at her. Looygi Bros was unable to get the whole trick to work in the World Championships software, but offers the possibility of it working to whoever can chain together all the necessary techniques.

I find it interesting that the tricks were disabled through traps instead of fixing their games, they seem to have enough technical know-how to know how the glitches work to check for them in the emulation layer, but maybe fixing them was deemed against the spirit of the game, or they didn’t want to risk changing the game’s essential behavior?

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