11 Old Glitches Tested in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

We tested 11 classic glitches, including strategies that are typically used in speedruns to save time, the Minus World glitch in the original Super Mario Bros. and some advanced techs such as the "item attachment" in Super Mario Bros. 2.
Can these glitches be used in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition? Let's find out!

Here's Part 2 with 8 more old glitches tested!

Timestamps:
0:00 LB Intro
0:10 SMB Minus World
0:40 DK Long Ladder
1:19 SMB2 Fast Carpet
2:02 TLoZ Screen Scrolling
3:08 Metroid Door Jump
3:57 SMB2 Double Jump
4:36 SMB3 Boom Boom Shortcut
5:09 SMB Wall Jump
5:40 Kid Icarus Fortress Shortcut
6:32 SMB2 Cave Skip
6:58 SMB2 Item Attachment

[neonguy]

"STRATEGY UNAVALAIBLE" feels like the moment when you mess up real bad a glitch and the game crashes for the first time

[SilvercattoOsom]

So they kept the glitches in but they also troll you by rewinding the game?

Damn, that's evil.

[BR-jwpm]

This reminds me of how for Ocarina of Time 3D, the developers wanted to keep the majority of glitches intact. They reasoned that it would be depriving new players of fun gameplay options and thus only removed the game-ruining glitches.

[AbnormalAbnorman]

What if you
wanted to go to Heaven
but God said:
"Strategy unavailable.
Rewinding..."

[Widdy]

Someone should speedrun getting all “unavailable strategies”, that‘d be funny

[Sonikkujam]

6:26
The game was like: “You thought we’d let that slide huh? Nah, run it back.”

[DroidBeta]

I appreciate that they phrase it as “strategy unavailable” rather than “glitch not allowed”, making it seem less like they don’t want you to have fun and more like they want a fair game

[vanderquakSP]

My best guess as to why some of these glitches are patched out is because Nintendo wanted the challenges to be as accurate to the ones in the actual world championships, and doing these types of glitches in an official competition is most likely considered cheating.

[camdenlacy]

First of all, I like how they call the glitches "strategies", albeit "unavailable strategies". Second, how have I not seen all of these glitches before?!

[liruenth]

My best guess for this is that the devs put in place a bunch of checkmarks and if you don't hit them in the right order the game rewinds you. Also they marked other areas as out of bounds for the same reason. That way the devs can prevent skips while not having to worry about breaking the game by trying to fix old stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if speedrunners found a way to trick the game into thinking they'd already crossed certain checkmarks though like what happens in Mario Kart skips.

[Kaybeeguy]

It's kind of funny that Nintendo literally said "No! This isn't how you're supposed to play the game" when doing the Minus World trick

[micheal]

There's something oddly terrifying about that "Strategy Unavailable" screen.

[ARentz]

The patterns I am seeing on all the "Strategy Unavailable" scenarios are 1) sequence breaking and 2) entering areas the player should not be able to. That's why a simple double-jump glitch in Super Mario Bros. is allowed - it does not inherently violate either of the rules. That's also why stuff like the fast carpet glitch in Super Mario Bros. 2 works - it does not, on its own, allow for access to unintended areas, unlike Cave Skip, which effectively allows us to skip breaking the rocks - something that'd be pretty easy for developers to check on.
The Boom Boom shortcut in Super Mario Bros. 3 seems to be blocked as soon as Mario starts moving into the wall, since Mario is entering an area he should not be able to. However, it's not the same story with the Metroid door clip. Samus can normally go down there, but not if she hasn't gotten the Morph Ball Bombs to be able to break the rocks above that area. If she's down there without them, that would imply the player has performed some exploit to get there, hence, the "Strategy Unavailable" screen. Now, as for why it's not implemented in a similar fashion, where the screen shows up as soon as the player clips Samus into the ceiling... who knows? Or, I could be totally off-base here, and all these glitch blockers are implemented in a way bespoke to each game. I think the Zelda scrolling glitch is super interesting, since you don't have to be doing anything useful with it for the glitch prevention to kick in. However, it definitely has potential to cheese dungeons and other areas, so I can see why the devs just wanted to shut it down altogether.

Also, I suspect maybe a screen wrap is detectable somehow. That could also be a way for them to stop the Metroid shortcut. They'd have to be wary of games with intentional screen wrapping, though. Who knows?

[varietychan]

I wish there were two categories, one for glitchless and one for glitchy shortcuts

[GTPvZGamers]

It’s amazing how some of these glitches still work perfectly. Thanks for digging into gaming history and sharing these classic moments

[HarvoSpoon]

suppose they added a special category that allowed the banned strategies, so the mega-shortcut gangs can still break the rules as they please without ruining it for those who choose to play fair

[cooldude]

I remember seeing the long ladder glitch done in nes remix for the "beat dk as Link" challenge. I always wondered how that was done...
Honestly I wish you could get some secret pin for getting an amount of "strategy unavailable" messages.

[kabbusses]

It makes sense that the double-jump glitches are allowed; they'd probably be the most difficult to try to detect without hitting false positives. They also have a high difficulty, low-reward factor to them. Same goes for the pidgit carpet, which arguably is not even as fast as abusing jumping to snap the carpet's position in place further.

[supergamer]

I was gonna ask how frame-perfect ability mixing was handled in Kirby's Adventure, but I noticed the KA challenges are specifically chosen sections where it's either impossible to ability mix, or you can only do it at the end where it would cost more time than its worth. Which is honestly pretty clever. They seemingly specifically avoided making people have to frame-perfect a UFO or Wheel for the best times like Speedrunners do.

[mzrsespiritguard]

The fact that the glitches are still in, but just accounted for with the "Strategy Unavailable" screen is fascinating. Perhaps there might be something like an online event centered around performing and perfecting these glitches, as a way to teach players who might not know or remember them about not just their existence, but how to pull them off