Okay, it’s not one of those objects with a controversial title where we tell you that Paper Mario sucks and that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is so much better. No, the title is literally what we mean: it’s a speedrunning tactic called Arbitrary Code Execution, and it’s absolutely baffling.
We’ve dealt with arbitrary code execution or ACE before: it’s a quick-run trick that allows players to manipulate game code and therefore complete the game faster than ever or simply generate a lot of Arwings in the village of Kakariko.
The last game to become a take on the ACE technique is Paper Mario, which streamer JCog beat in 54:22: a new world record for Paper Mario Year% that runs almost twice as fast as the next runner-up .
“For anyone wondering, no, it’s probably not the new Year Any route, as it requires memory manipulation with OoT, but there’s a good chance of adding it to the category extensions board.
Either way, it’s technically the fastest Mario Paper ever to be beaten by a human using only Nintendo’s official hardware. “
– JCog
This Paper Mario roll is unusual, however, not because of its speed, but because 30 of those 54 minutes are actually spent playing Ocarina of Time. Paper Mario’s JCog speedrun takes place mainly in the world of Hyrule for a simple reason: as WarChamp7 says, “OoT is so great that open people are breaking other games with it now.”
To put it simply: the speedrunner can use Ocarina of Time to write code with ACE that will warp them directly to Paper Mario credits, but to perform this trick, they will have to change the game cartridges at medium speed with fraction time second.
Ocarina of Time clears the memory of the Expansion Pak when it boots, but Paper Mario does not, so if the speedrunner can turn off the console and change the two cartridges for the 1 or 2 seconds that the Nintendo 64 still has residual power, then the code they wrote in Ocarina of Time will be loaded into Paper Mario and the speedrunner will be taken directly to the credits after making a lot of precise moves, including a landslide. a lot.
However, there is a problem: JCog did not blow into the cartridge before inserting it. You may have set a new world record, but does it really matter if you didn’t pull out all the content first?