Normally, people play games to get high scores. But, when games are designed to give you points for whatever you do, there’s just as much challenge in playing a game without getting any score at all.
Check out this fascinating run of Super Mario World by switchpalacecorner: they manage to beat the game with a score of zero. The run was inspired by a different low-score playthrough, where a player named SomeGuy712x managed to beat the game with a score of 150.
While it is a tool-assisted run, it’s fascinating to watch switchpalacecorner meticulously clear the game like this. It’s clear that they know the game inside-out, and that this sort of playthrough takes a lot of planning. And while there are moments where it looks like points have been accrued, switchpalacecorner exits the stage before the points are actually recorded. Much of the game is played this precisely: they make sure to kill enemies in a very specific way, or to only hit the goalpoast when it is at its lowest, among other score-saving tricks. If nothing else, the run gives us a look at how the game works. Worth a watch if you have a couple of hours to spare.
And, if you liked this run, make sure to check out this Super Mario Bros low-score run too.
Comments
2 responses to “Player Beats Super Mario World With The Lowest Score Possible”
Anyone care to explain why Mario turns a darker colour around 19:49 and how relevant this is to getting a low score?
I don’t know the why, but I can give a rough how. Like many tool assisted runs, the run relies on memory manipulation to get the game in a particular state. The visible evidence of the changing states is the changing of the sprite’s colour palette when certain conditions are met.
These sorts of manipulations are good for getting other weird things to happen in the game or getting enemies to behave in certain ways (usually only if messing with the memory values of the random number seed, or similar).
As I said, I don’t know why in this particular case, but that’s the how.