A lot of video games have a pause feature.

The main goal of pausing is to suspend gameplay

until the player either unpauses

or decides to save and quit.

Mario Sunshine's pause menu fulfills this goal with flying colors,

but it turns out there's also a side effect of

completely altering Mario's physical interaction with objects.

Uhhh....

Uhhh....whoops Nintendo...

Uhhh....whoops Nintendo...much?

Alright, so it's not nearly as egregious as it sounds,

but it's an interesting oversight regardless.

Quick shoutout to Noki Doki for helping me to understand this stuff --

if there's anyone I'd trust more than myself with obscure SMS knowledge...

It's probably him.

There's a couple useful clips in Delfino Plaza that involve

running down a sloped surface and throwing a fruit.

For now,

For now, let's focus on the Chuckster shine building clip.

If you're speedrunning on the non-Japanese version,

this shine actually gives you a slight advantage.

Instead of messing around with spraying a banana out of a tree,

You can simply just use this papaya which is

one of many fruits missing on the Japanese version.

Uhh...huh.

That's weird.

Oh, right!

I forgot to

I forgot to pause my game first.

Wonderful.

Now if you think that having to pause the game for this papaya clip to work is strange...

That's because it is.

But, there's at least a solid explanation for this.

Mario Sunshine, much like some other Gamecube classics,

had a pretty rushed development.

[OH NO!]

In the interest of saving time,

it borrowed pretty heavily from its predecessor, Mario 64.

It may not have kicking or

That EPIC long jump,

but a surprising amount of the underlying physics are exactly the same.

One of these physics's quirks that carried over is that

Mario's collision is checked four times every frame.

These are known as either quarter-steps or quarter-frames

and Bismuth explains it best in his Mario 64 TAS Explained video.

Bismuth: As Mario's moving,

Bismuth: the game checks if there's an obstacle on each quarter-step of his movement.

Bismuth: As long as nothing is in the way,

Bismuth: Mario will keep being moved on each quarter-step.

Bismuth: However,

Bismuth: if he's about to move into a ceiling,

Bismuth: the quarter-step will be cancelled and he will stay in place.

While the game is running physics calculations

a hundred twenty times a second,

it can only read your inputs thirty times a second --

once at the beginning at each frame.

Every time you jump