It's been almost eight years since Super Mario Odyssey arrived for the Nintendo Switch back in 2017, and still to this day players are tearing the game apart, turning it into one of the most impressive speedrun games of all time (just behind its grandpa, Super Mario 64).
It's gotten to a point now where new discoveries about the game are few and far between, with the current speedrun record sitting at just under an hour by Tyron18. But with this level of speedrun optimization and the lack of a proper new 3D Mario game (Bowser's Fury was just too short), players are making wild discoveries.
Super Mario scholar and archivist Supper Mario Broth posted a video on Twitter showing that the beloved Mario Odyssey capture Pokio (the little bird with the beak that sticks into walls) can destroy the metal blocks found in the Bowser's Kingdom level. These boxes are intended to be destroyed by launching bombs at them, but it turns out that with enough persistence, Pokio can break them open – it only needs to peck at it 200 times in a row.
- Super Mario 64 speedrunners thought a trick that requires landing on a spot "the width of a red blood cell" was virtually impossible - now it's been done blindfolded
- Behold, a Super Mario 64 player discovered that a 34-frame loop repeated 2.8 million times over 36 days can make a log drift through a cliff: "This has no currently known purpose"
When you put that into perspective, someone just decided to use Pokio to go ham on that box, and not only that, they didn't give up until it had been pecked 200 times. This being such an odd thing to find out naturally led to some interesting reactions in the community, such as with Nintendo YouTuber Akfamilyhome, who Tweeted, "Nintendo, you have to announce the next 3D Mario right now. The fans are now discovering stuff like this," in response to the video.
What makes this even funnier is that it turns out this didn't end up being a brand new revelation to the Super Mario Odyssey community. In response to the original post by Supper Mario Broth, another user, DetectiveClipp, posted proof that they actually discovered this first… in December 2017… less than two months after the game released. Considering this is hardly a time-saver when it comes to Super Mario Odyssey speedruns, it's not shocking that it wasn't widely known. But it speaks to how much Odyssey had going for it that there are this many little secrets (I mean, it's probably unintended, but still).
And to be fair to the 3D Mario community, despite going almost 10 years without a proper follow-up to Odyssey, they seem pretty well adjusted. You just have to look at some of the antics Pikmin fans got up to during the wait for Pikmin 4. Then there's the Batman Arkham subreddit, which has more in common with the titular asylum than the games it's based on – for example, the second most popular (and probably least NSFW) post of all time on there is a picture of a bird mixed with a tennis ball which – from what I can tell – has nothing to do with those games.
Speaking of unintended ways to play Mario, a blindfolded Super Mario 64 speedrunner recently set three world records in the span of four days.
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