It’s okay, this isn’t one of those controversial headlines where we tell you Paper Mario is worthless and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is much better. No, the title is literally what we mean: it’s a quick tactic called Arbitrary Code Execution, and it’s absolutely insane.
We’ve covered Arbitrary Code Execution, or ACE, before – it’s a speedrunning trick that allows players to manipulate the game’s code and therefore complete the game faster than ever – or just to spawn a bunch of Arwings in Kakariko Village .
The latest game to fall prey to ACE technique is Paper Mario, who beat streamer JCog in 54:22 – a new world record for Paper Mario Any% runs that is nearly twice as fast as the next runner-up.
βFor anyone wondering, no, this most likely won’t be the new Any% route as it requires memory manipulation with OoT, but chances are we’ll add it to the category expansion board.
Regardless, it’s technically the fastest Paper Mario ever defeated by a human using only official Nintendo hardware. “
– JCog
However, this Paper Mario run is unusual, not because of its speed, but because 30 of those 54 minutes are actually spent playing Ocarina of Time. JCog’s speedrun from Paper Mario usually takes place in the world of Hyrule for one simple reason – as WarChamp7 puts it, “OoT has been so f ***** g cracked open that people are now breaking other games with it.”
To put it in layman’s terms, the speedrunner can use Ocarina of Time to write code with ACE that takes them straight to the credits in Paper Mario, but to perform this nifty trick, they’ll use the game cartridges halfway through the speedrun. need to change timing in a split second.
Ocarina of Time clears the Expansion Pak’s memory when it boots up, but Paper Mario doesn’t, so if the speedrunner can turn off the console and swap the two cartridges during the 1 or 2 seconds that the Nintendo 64 has residual power left, the code they wrote in Ocarina of Time is loaded into Paper Mario and the speedrunner is brought straight to the credits after some precise moves, including hammering on the ground a lot of
There is one problem, however: JCog did not blow the cartridge before inserting it. He may have set a new world record, but does it really count if he didn’t get all the gunk out first?