This Paper Mario Glitch Takes 4.5 Years To Pull Off
Remember last April when a glitch in Paper Mario was discovered that would take 416 years to execute if attempted? The same man who discovered that glitch has unearthed another one. It turns out plenty of time-related bugs exist in the game due to no scripted limit being placed on them.
One such glitch occurs during Peach’s cake-baking minigame. At a certain point, Peach is instructed to make a cake, place it in the oven and leave it inside for approximately thirty seconds. There’s no on-screen timer or any other indication of how long 30 seconds is. The player is expected to guess.
To give some leeway in this task, the game will accept anything from 23 seconds to 36 seconds as a perfect cake. But the time limit can actually be stretched farther than that. If you simply leave the cake in the oven, there’s no point where the in-game timer stops counting. It’ll just keep adding +1s until it reaches the maximum amount the CPU can calculate (4,294,967,295), and from there it’ll wrap around and start over.
This means your discriminating boss, Gourmet Guy, won’t know the difference as long as you can keep the cake in the oven until the wraparound occurs and then a bit longer. Unfortunately, it would take approximately 4.537 years to reach that point again. Not attemptable, but amusing all the same. You can bake a cake for four and a half years in Paper Mario and it’ll come out perfect.
And the integer overflow will just keep occurring, so feel free to keep it in nine years…