Ultimately, Mario Kart is about two things: Annihilating your friends with red shells and finding ways to shave seconds off your lap time. For serious players, that second thing means optimizing runs with E-brake turns and short hops over lava gaps. For obsessive speed-runners, it means finding weird, broken ways to clip through walls and virtually skip the entire level. In his latest, extremely thorough video, YouTuber Summoning Salt gives the history of all the game-breaking, ultra shortcuts that have been discovered in Mario Kart Wii, which you can now use to piss off all your friends.
Whether you’re playing Grumble Volcano, Mushroom Gorge, or Coconut Mall, the best shortcuts are all about tricking the game into thinking you’ve completed a full lap when really you’ve just turned around and gone through the finish line again. This usually involves launching yourself off the track in some precise manner or doing a frame perfect turn at a particularly broken corner of the level. But, as Summoning Salt explains, each of these ultra shortcuts is founded on the same basic principle.
Simply put, Mario Kart Wii levels are divided up into invisible checkpoints, some of which are “key checkpoints” that tell the game if you’re making progress on your lap. In order to trick the game into thinking you’ve completed a lap when you haven’t, you must at least make it as far back as the final key checkpoint before proceeding through the finish line. Over the years, speed-runners have discovered and perfected these small loops, enhancing them with glitchy wall-clip jumps and strategic mushroom boosts.
Using the techniques explored in this video, you should have no problem trouncing your friends the next time you pay a visit to Rainbow Road. Of course, if you’ve played Mario Kart enough to actually be able to do any of these tricks, we’re not sure you have time for friends in the first place.
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