Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition player used glitch to achieve Donkey Kong record
Sometimes cheaters do prosper
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was released two weeks ago on Switch, and there’s already some controversy brewing. It seems that the current record holder in the NES edition of Donkey Kong abused a glitch exploit in order to achieve their position on the leaderboards.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the player in question found a way to climb to the top of the first Donkey Kong stage in only 15 seconds by making use of invisible ladders. (If it wasn’t obvious, those ladders are not in fact meant to exist or be usable.)
In most cases if Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition detects that a glitch has been used, it will simply force rewind the game and stop the player from getting a leaderboard spot that way. However, for some reason this Donkey Kong glitch doesn’t ring any alarm bells. Perhaps Nintendo isn’t aware of the glitch, or simply neglected to have it trigger the forced rewind by mistake.
Hopefully, this will be fixed in a future update to the game. Although speedrunners often make use of similar glitches in games, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition’s aim seems to be to level the playing field by disallowing these more complicated maneuvers.
For a closer look at exactly how this glitch was carried out, check out the videos below (first clip beginning at the 1:50:00 mark):
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riftsilver
6d agoI tried my hardest to replicate the glitch after I saw the winning run and couldn't for the life of me. I couldn't even find it documented online, so I was a bit puzzled.
I think glitches can be fun, but when put in a championship setting like this, I'd prefer to see them done away with. Hopefully I don't have to wait too long to see another re-run of this level
It will be difficult to deal with this stuff since Nintendo uses approximation hit box detection to determine whether if a player is trying a strategy, glitch, or exploit. For some games this detection is good enough to stop most tricks outside those Nintendo explicitly allows everyone to use, but for other games, not every trick can be caught.
Like the DK invisible ladders glitch for example. If you put counter-measures on the invisible ladders that intersect where you normally run by, you risk false flagging players that are not on the invisible ladders. You can't just dump counter-measure detection in the middle of the playfield -- too much false flagging risk.
smasher89
6d agotried this once after seeing it, took maybe 10s to start climbing in the air so seems very fair, and most importantly (like the overall game) its educational on how to play the games efficiently and fast, I see no reason to patch it as original werent either.
jason thompson
6d agoI was able to partially replicate this. I got up one invisible ladder, but not two. Even still, it took longer than 15s to get up one.
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