(Copied from Cujo’s pastebin at http://pastebin.com/xGt8wE23)

There’s a glitch in SMB3 that allows you to “complete” a level without playing through it. Basically, you get a card matching game to spawn on top of an unfinished level, play the card game, and when you return to the map the level is marked as completed, allowing you to progress. The setup for this glitch is somewhat time consuming, so it seems you could only benefit from this glitch by using it on autoscrollers.

While the existence of this glitch has been known for a while, the SMB3 community at large has never discussed allowing or disallowing it in 100%, and no one has ever attempted to incorporate it into a 100% run. I am personally in favor of allowing the glitch in 100%, but there are pros and cons to be considered.

Pros

  • Levels skipped using this glitch are marked as completed on the map. The game makes no distinction between levels that have been completed by being played to completion, and levels that have been completed using this glitch.
  • The only levels that can be completed using this glitch to save time are autoscrollers, which are decidedly un-speedrunish.
  • This glitch does not “kill” 100%. Most of the run remains the same, only a few levels that make the category worse are left out.

Cons

  • The “spirit” of 100% is arguably to play through each and every level, including autoscrollers.
  • Allowing this glitch could lead to a slippery slope of similar glitches discovered in the future that could allow runners to complete every level without playing through it.

In my mind, the spirit of a category is completely subjective. You could just as easily argue that the spirit of 100% is to eliminate every level, HB encounter, etc. from the map. From that perspective, the glitch should be permitted, since it would still accomplish the goal of eliminating levels.

The slippery slope argument is totally speculative. Such a profound expansion of this glitch may never be found, and if it is there’s nothing stopping the community from re-examining the rules in the future.

Regardless of my personal opinion on the matter, this glitch has the potential to breathe new life into a speedrun that rarely sees big new discoveries, for better or worse. I hope that we can at least open up a dialog about this thing rather than just leaving the question unanswered.

Notes from Lord Tom

As to how to execute this glitch, Tompa has supplied these notes from TASer Lord Tom:

“One interesting tidbit is that the location the n-spade will go is stored independently for each player in a 2-player game. I don’t think a 2-player TAS could ever be faster due to transitions between players, duplicate map movements, and each player only getting half the items - but a play-around TAS which used 2 players could show off this glitch with more flexibility by having (say) Mario beat the airship and pass the score threshold, then Luigi start the next world and clear the way to the bonus game, with Mario perhaps wasting a turn or two dying in some interesting way or showing the Mario/Luigi duel game (the n-spade location doesn’t update if you die on a level).” “ The glitch only occurs if you have an encounter (hammer, pipe, level) where you don’t die 2 turns before completing the airship - then have a bonus game as the first encounter in the new world. That last bit is the killer for warpless as no worlds start with an easily accessible bonus game (have to use hammer in world 3, cloud in world 6). Hammers and clouds are much more expendable in the 100%.”