11 Old Glitches Tested in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

Me: * tries to glitch * Nintendo: * Sandy saying no you ain't *

Miyamoto: This isn’t how you are supposed to play the game.

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

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.

It's like Nintendo saying "nuh uh, there'll be no glitching in this competition"😂

I think given the nature of the game, it seems pretty fair to disallow glitches that are just going to dominate the leaderboards every time. Things like the backwards hop to speed up mario faster and wall hops are still allowed so its not anti advanced play, i just think they didnt want anything that is going to lead to like 50 guys tied for first in every match because of completely outside information

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

So they kept the glitches in but they also troll you by rewinding the game? Damn, that's evil.