Superbug loose in Super Paper Mario

So you've finally got Super Paper Mario on your UK Wii! But are you aware that despite waiting the extra six months for the UK release, the game contains a class A bug which will crash your Wii and force a total reset? If not, read on. If you know already, you may resume rolling your D10.

The bug crashes the game, forcing a complete restart of the Wii, losing all current positioning and sending you back to the last save point. Pretty serious? We think so. Somebody in Ninty QA is so getting fired.

But like the lovely chaps they are, Nintendo are already publishing this solution for all concerned gamers:

"At the start of Chapter 2-2, you will come across a character called Mimi. She will tell you to go to the farthest room on the first floor to meet a character called Merlee. Enter that room and press the green switch. A trap will be triggered, and a spiked ceiling will descend upon Mario. Before the ceiling reaches him, flip into 3D and jump on it to find a key.

"If you pick up the key, you won't run into any problems. Use it to open the locked door to Mimi's right. However, if you talk to Mimi without picking up the key, the game will freeze. You will then have to turn off your Wii console and start again from your last save point."

The glitch won't do any long term damage to your system nor the game, and if you wish to return your copy you can contact Nintendo and they'll soon advise you on their provision for this glitch.

So how do things like this happen, you may ask? Simple, actually. It's QA (Quality Assurance). Every major game has a team of either in or outhoused QA working on every version of the game before it goes gold (gold means that it has passed all publisher milestones and is ready to go to the publisher). A game like Super Paper Marion would almost certainly have in-house Nintendo QA working on it and frankly, this is a class A bug. No game should ever go gold with one of these intact, and it is QA's job to catch these a lot earlier than this. To make matters worse, it's actually a repeatable and therefore fixable bug, unlike some class A crashes which are much harder to trace down in the code as to what went wrong.

We think one too many late nights in the QA team and a few too many kebabs may have contributed to this error. Better get the Wii Balance boards out and start working it all off!