Why Stomping Wigglers Glitches Super Mario World 

Man, I spent hours of my life stomping… Wigglers, in the original Super Mario World.

old games: we reused half of the face texture for the butt sprite to save space also old games: bible length of unused code and data

Oh boy, out-of-bounds tables resulting in garbage data being read, my favorite

I always found it weird that if you eat a wiggler while on Yoshi and are running too fast you can TAKE DAMAGE AS MARIO without losing Yoshi in the process.

It's funny that Crash Bandicoot 2 and 3 have a variant of the same bug; the game lets you gain increasing rewards by bouncing on enemies consecutively, and the devs didn't put a hard cap on the value, and they overlooked the fact that there are some spots where you can rack up unlimited bounces by bouncing on an arrow crate for several minutes then landing on an enemy. This makes the reward table go out of bounds and give you bogus rewards including crystals and gems from other levels.

As someone who watches with subtitles on, I appreciate you moving the subtitles to the top when you do any animations at the bottom of the screen. If I could give a second like on the video I would!

For some reason, the 5UP sprite has always fascinated me. Its upside down and shifted sprites intrigued me, because it's still there and you can see it's there when you look at the glitched sprite. I didn't know the blue-green colour palette for it was a glitch, or that the garbage attribute data was responsible for vertical and horizontal mirroring.

Maybe the E0-EF sprites were originally moons? They seem to be used for "harder" things to acomplish, which is what 3-up moons are for?

0:31 It makes me VERY happy you're keeping this being a thing. It's nostalgic and makes me feel like I am watching a PBS educational show in the best possible way.

Mario steals the life force of baby Yoshis to keep the grim reaper at bay. What horrors must we endure to achieve immortality?

I remember using the Wigglers to max out my score in Super Mario World. Neat to finally know why it happened.

aaaaand yet another entry in "Super Mario World Indexes Table Out Of Bounds, Shenanigans Follow" great work, as usual!

With the first discovery (end gate items check table), I believe this is an example of the developer planning ahead and then reining in the outcomes due to one of many reasons such as running out of time, not liking the idea, or finding a bug in testing, so they instead decided to link numerous status combinations to the same outcome. With the second discovery, enemies not using the same stomp reward routine, this is a prime example of why you should not copy and paste code and should instead have one routine that all instances of a scenario point to. Not only do you save space in your program, you also avoid the risk of forgetting to update the routine to be the same as another version of it that you’ve fixed or settled on. Nintendo should have had one routine but instead have ended up with three that all have different behaviours.

3:28, maybe the super star was intended to go into the reserve box as there are unused graphics for a star in reserve

I actually never knew the power up changed. I always thought it was either a mushroom or 1up. Never seen a feather/flower in my years of playing through the game, lol.

I don’t think anyone appreciates how each of your videos gets themed around the game you’re exploring, but I wanted to thank you for scratching that perfectionist itch in the back of my head.

About the star counter, would it make sense as a half-implementation of a star reward system? Like you collect 7 stars and get rewarded with a star at the beginning of a level. But then they thought it might be broken or something and just removed invincibility as you touched the goal post as a bandaid patch to disable the code. It would explain why you need multiple stars to obtain it and why it clears after it’s achieved, and maybe the fact you only need to reenter a level to increase the counter is just due to the unfinished implementation. Idk code that great, but I like hearing theories on this kinds of stuff.

I always found it interesting in Mario that when you got a one up nothing happened to your score so if you wanted to maximize your score you'd want to stop stomping on enemies right before you get a one up and then kill the next enemy in a way to gove you 200 points.

this is fascinating i love seeing how games work internally and the weird quirks that come from messing with them

Love that you uploaded this on Wigger Wednesday

thank you so much for using grey for the backround white wouldve made this so much harder to watch

I can see some romhacks messing with these unused bonus power ups - like changing what item at the tape you get to troll people (like enemies). Imagine needing to trigger a star power up to avoid a kaizo trap 😂.

"Now for the fun part where I explain why everything is broken..." made me laugh and like

I very much love the PBS style intro lol

12:47 I actually said "ohhhh" out loud. The whole video i was thinking "ok but why are the sprites past 3UP flipped?"

when the "sponsor" segment turned out to be just a patreon plug + viewer appeciation moment, i loudly exclaimed "YAAAAY!"

Ah yes, our old buddy, "Inadvertently reading code and data out of the intended range to produce nightmare crazy unintended outcomes" glitch.

7:31 *Hex $E0 and $F0* Me after hearing the F0: _Mute City theme plays in my head_

5:00 the slowed down jump noise sounds kind of like michael jackson saying hoo

By the love of God, please make a video explaining slopes and jump through platforms (including moving ones) in SMW! That's the point I have the most curiosity about it, specially since it appears to have different states to handle flat ground and sloped ground.

I seem to recall the original SMW players' guide even giving details on how to do this for maximum score.

I remember seeing the early sprite table over on TCRF when it first showed up in an article, and quickly made the connection when I did the Wiggler glitch and watched my coins counter closely after passing 5UP. Not hard to imagine my 'eureka!' face making that link, so when he started talking about the glitched values, I knew what was up.

Barring some early arcade games, the Super Mario Bros series has something in common with Whose Line Is It Anyway: the points don't matter.

That Star Power gimmick would be SOOOOOO cool in a Kaizo World setting. Not only would you be able to create a situation where ONLY the refreshed Star Power Mario from getting the Star from the Goaltape would keep you alive you could also set it up in such a way that the immediate next stage requires you to take a path through it in such an exact 'correct' way that the Star Power triggers in a room where you absolutely need it with no other solution like a stretch of Munchers.

seeing that the glich caused the "flip x" and "flip y" bites to be overriten on the 5up felt like fitting a perfectly cut insert of metal into a hole

Beautiful visualisations!

"You only need to stomp on forty-eight Wigglers to max out your score counter." ~RGMEx Speedrunners: NEW STRAT UNLOCKED

I think for the superstar power, i think the developers of super mario world initially planned on the super star to be a carryable item instead of a limited time item. This explains why there are references in the game for items to giving super stars. It likely would have went into your item box like a regular item, however they must have changed their minds on this at some point since they made invincibility immediately go out and made the star not able to go into the item box. It's a cool thing to think about to be honost.

I admire the presentation and the pace of this video a lot. Keep it up!

My hat goes off to your for the commentary. No corny jokes .. No long stretched out intro .. Just straight to the point And I like how you speak as if this is an educational video that would be watched in school or maybe a training video for a job 😂❤

That "viewers like you, thank you" bit at 0:32...that was totally the PBS broadcasting credits thing, wasn't it? I had the biggest & dopiest nostalgia-fueled grin when I realized what you were referencing when you said that.

Your videos are top notch quality. The animations are so helpful to understand the topic! 😊

Man... that purple amorphous patreon logo sucjs so badly... we should go back to the orange stick + circle one.

May I just say I love the PBS style "this video brought to you by" intro to your videos? Retro indeed!

I find it amusing that vids like these for Mario World (a game I don't even like that much) are so interesting, entertaining, and fascinating.

I love smw and ive seen so many videos on it, rarely do i hear anything new, yet i still loooove watching these videos.

Keep the Mario (and especially SMW) videos coming. I'm really enjoying these. :)

ive been super excited for this video to come to youtube since you announced it in your community tab thing! i love the wriggly worms!! i love mario!!! i love your videos!!!!

Oh boy oh boy more Super Mario World and Super Nintendo code execution explanation :)

Thinking about it, it would have been cool for the super-star goal to set one of those bits at random instead, so that you'd end up becoming super-star mario anywhere between 1 and 7 rooms/levels afterwards, making it a sort of "Super Lucky" state.

There is another way to see glitched value tiles, and that is in Chocolate Island 2. Leaving the second screen with 249-235 seconds left and holding less than 3 dragon coins you will come to an end tape goal with about 7 Rexes. Using the L and R buttons to move or call them into the screen and not touching the tape will show you a glitched value. It's even better if you somehow go through the goal with an item. I have to make a video of this because I don't think I've seen anyone document it.

One of the best channels on RU-vid. Thank you for the info!

Thank you for this birthday gift!

The coolest thing about your channel is the lack of music, I wish it was a thing for more content on RU-vid

I was already familiar with the goal tape item routine, but the visualization here makes everything easier to reason about.

Best RU-vid on RU-vid. Honest original content, no ads

another brilliant video. well done man ❤

i fall asleep better when there's something i really want or need to pay attention to. this video feels like a class, but im also very intrigued and interested so this was perfect for my nap. thanks i guess.

I like the palette the 5UP sprite ended up with

amazing video very entretaining and informative c:

0:42 NES Remix nostalgia

another amazing video, this guy's a wizard!

Decades ago when I discovered this I had a paper where I'd try to get as far into the glitched coin awards as possible before the level timer ran out. I would periodically do runs to try and update that sheet by getting farther than before. It was hard because sometimes I'd have to stop and keep stomping on the red Wiggler just to watch the coin counter finish updating otherwise it would be ambiguous how many points I was getting, which lost me time so it required multiple runs. I've since lost that piece of paper and it frustrated me greatly, and although now with access to emulator I could recreate that sheet more correctly than ever, I never bothered. At the end when the glitched coin gains were discussed, I could remember the sequence of 4, 6, and then I knew there were two very big numbers that I couldn't remember. It was so satisfying when 222 and 255 fit like pieces into my mind's 2-decade-old puzzle! The paper ran for quite a bit longer. I'm sure today by just knowing the offset and spacing between the addresses I could technically create a "complete" list. I found it quite odd when the first coin awards incremented so nicely and then it suddenly began giving weird coin awards and at that time I could not wrap my head around any of it. I had programming knowledge but it was all amateur QBASIC stuff and QBASIC is a managed language so concepts like overrunning a buffer and reading garbage data were absent to me. Initially I thought the score was tied to the number of coins provided and thought to use it - since it updates instantly - to calculate the number of coins I'd received without waiting for the coin counter. However, I quickly realised the scores weren't making sense.

when you said "viewers like you" it gave me nostalgia of PBS when I was little

amazing video as always!!!

I love when people talk about broken things in old Mario games in depth. Its so awesome to me! =D

do a video on glitch mario statuses and how poweups affect them

Thanks for your great work. 😊😊

Stomping Wigglers like you showed was something I remember doing back in the day.

Wigglers also behave different when you kill them with star power but I think it just caps at 2-up in that case

Haven't finished the video yet. The only other states I can think Mario can be in are "death animation" or "p-balloon". As everything freezes when you die I'm going to go with the balloon. EDIT: I remember the powerup video now. Death wasn't considered a powerup I believe so I'm double extra sure it isn't that, but I also don't remember if p balloon is either though.

Hey I love watching your videos! Very informative I am wondering if you would do a video explaining DKC2's infamous Castle Crush glitch which can lead to a literal blue screen error message on emulated or original hardware? I know the initial setup to cause the glitch is involves one enemy and a dk barrel which is re-grabbed after it's destroyed resulting in Diddy holding a null object but not much else beyond why it does what it does leading up to the crash.

3:16 I wonder if that's related to the star in the item box in some way. Maybe at one point they thought of making a separate star item that would be added to your item box, and when used would make you invincible, similar to Super Mario Bros. 3, and the normal star dropping was just a placeholder. Though the counter you mentioned later on sort of disproves this, since it seems like they already started working on it and just gave up later, leaving it half finished. The 7 entries delay thing is probably an unfinished requirement.

I had totally forgotten about how broken the score counter was on wigglers in SMW. I remember maxing out the life & score counter way back when on my quest to go through all 96 exits for the first time!

I love looking at these leftover data in games, thinking about what could have been

Man I was so proud of myself for discovering this glitch when I played SMW as a teenager.

You show the P-balloon on the chart, but I think an aside about how it works and gets treated as a held item would have fit. Maybe you've mentioned it in other videos, IDK, but not everyone watched all of them, and I think it would have made a lot of sense to draw a bit of attention to. (It's also possible that you did and I spaced out during that time; if this is the case then I apologize for my ADHD.) Anyway, neat video!

YESSSSSS NEW RGME VID!!!

neat idea to release this on a wednesday

I had a list of "strange symbols." I would gear up with a Cape, start from the checkpoint, and blast the whole clock trying to get as far into the list as possible before time ran out. I remember using easy-to-remember "rare" symbols as progress markers to see how far i was getting down the list. I remember when you got Double Grey Boxes with X's, you were getting pretty far into the list. The game made all the various permutations of the glitched symbols in the same order every time, so it wasn't random. And every time you saw something easy to remember like a big orange O, or a hot pink box with x, it was always as many bounces as last time. I had always thought it might be fun to make a ROM Hack with lots of green berries on that level, so i could have extra time to uncover more glitched sprites beyond what time would normally allow. Now I'm thinking maybe a Game Genie Code could suffice for this purpose. I wish this video would show what all 256 glitches looked like, so i could see real quick how many wiggler hits it took to reach double grey boxes with X's.

I actually remember getting up to the 2up with the wigglers way back when I played it on an emulator that runs on a PS2 (a friend lent me that disc). I couldn't really keep the chain going because I didn't know about it I wasn't good enough to jump from one wiggler to the other, so I never got to see the 3up, 5up and bugged coins

Hi RGME, first of all, amazing video as always! I've been watching your content for a while and thought you would be the perfect guy for diving deep in to the Playstation's personified fear and fearful harmony errors, I've always wondered how they've worked down to specifics and your content style seems perfect for them!

Nice, uploading a video about wigglers on a Wednesday ;)

Stuff like this also highlights how much coding optimization was implemented between pokemon gen1 & gen2 lol. I always wondered why the score number was offset depending on what the bonus was, never would've guessed it was a pair of spites to display one number.

7:32 I loved that game as a kid

fixed the 5up sprite in ms paint, looked pretty nice

0:42 bro i thought i was watching cartoons on satellite tv That brought me back to

why did this drop during school ahhhhh cool vid none the less

Those leaking invisible walls also bug me...oh, wrong channel.

It actually felt eerie and bizarre watching a video with no running BGM. Feels empty and lonely somehow.

omg King RGME at it again

7:32 Falcon Punch!!!

I like how they fixed it in the gba version. I remember getting a +30 lives sprite by bouncing on wigglers as a kid. (Or something like that. It’s been years since I played it.)

wiggler wednesday

boy I remember hitting wigglers to stack up lives and sometime later I even made a patch to fix it! Sadly I couldn't even post it to SMWCentral because I forgot my login details and by now the files are probably lost. Only thing that remains is an old recording of it 😔

This is such awesome facts, so fucking awesome. Thanks for this awesome info awesome channel!

Interesting stuff. I always thought that Wigglers starting off being worth 100 points instead of 200 when stomped as the first hit of a combo was intentional. Also, with an invincibility star combo, Wigglers actually cap at 2-up instead of 1-up. I wonder if they meant to cap Wigglers at 2-up with stomps as well, but forgot to do so.

Those Wigglers are making the whole game goes loosey-goosey wiggly-woggly 😎

I remember an OG Sonic myth about being able to obtain golden without game shark cheats. These days I just assumed it was debug mode but now I wonder...

Do you know about the secret 2nd playthrough? The turtles if I remember right as a head kind of like Mario if you meet the requirements and beating the game the 1st time. The requirements are they you open every colored switch and go through the secret stages that are opened up as you activate every colored switch.