TAS and stuff

Aki! Linna might be reading a little too much into this... 👀

I won't be posting anything on Friday, so see you all next week!

The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros. is extremely well-known. By clipping into the Warp Zone room in World 1-2 via a precise jump and entering the leftmost pipe without scrolling far enough to cause the "Welcome to Warp Zone!" text to appear, Mario will be transported to World -1, a glitched underwater level with no escape.

The footage shows a relatively lesser-known variant of that glitch. If, instead of entering the leftmost pipe, the middle pipe is entered (which is more difficult to reach without causing the Warp Zone text to appear), Mario will be taken to World 5-1 instead. This can be used as a faster method to warp to World 5 than the regular warp from the end of World 4-2 (though this is useless when trying to beat the game as fast as possible since World 4 is the one that contains the warp to World 8, and warping to World 5 renders that shortcut inaccessible).

Technical explanation in the rest of the post:

This works because the Warp Zone text is what causes the pipes to be initialized to their proper destinations. Without it, their values are, from left to right, Level 36-1, 5-1 and 36-1 again*. The "36" value, due to going past 10, stops using number tiles and rolls over into the graphical tiles situated after them in memory, where that specific tile is completely transparent, causing the level to appear to read "[nothing]-1", or World -1. The level itself is glitched due to being past the end of the level lookup table, causing the game to read unintended data.

*This is due to those values being used for the World 4-2 warp zone with a single pipe leading to World 5. The left and right pipe locations are marked with a transparent tile since there are no pipes there. Without the proper Warp Zone text initialization, it accesses the blank/5/blank configuration, but can now actually access the blank (World 36/Minus World) destination due to the pipes being present.

Officially licensed Game & Watch Gallery 3 paper bag from Japan. Interestingly, it provides the artwork used on the Japanese box for the game in slightly better quality and less obscured than the box itself.

There is a lot to look at here-

Goldenweek is coming!