User:Legokun/Work in Progress Article

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Cosmic Clone Anomaly [WIP, 9/9/2020]
The Cosmic Clone Anomaly is a randomly occurring anomaly that can manifest in personalised copies of Super Mario 64. The anomaly is named after the Clone Comet Prankster Comet from Super Mario Galaxy 2, of which it functionally resembles.

Manifestation
The Cosmic Clone Anomaly can randomly manifest upon entering a course and selecting a mission. In most copies of Super Mario 64, there is no indication that the anomaly is present. Some copies, however, have been shown to have the star for that mission colored purple instead of yellow. Although rare, the anomaly is also capable of manifesting in locations outside of "intended" locations, such as within Princess Peach's Castle or Bowser courses.

While the anomaly can manifest in any course, community testing has revealed that the anomaly appears more often in Hazy Maze Cave and Wet-Dry World.

Effects
When Mario leaves the course's spawn point, every few seconds a clone of Mario will appear and begin to follow the path Mario has taken. While the rate at which clones spawn varies in each instance of the anomaly, community testing reveals that it averages at a 3 second delay between clones spawning. The effects of the anomaly are semi-permanent, and will only disappear after either the mission is completed or the console is powered off.

The clones created by this anomaly visually appear as purple, untextured versions of Mario (not to be confused with the Textureless Mario Anomaly) with no animations, defaulting to Mario's idle animation, causing the clones to slide on the ground while in motion. Coming into contact with a clone will cause Mario to take damage, with how much damage varying, with an average of 2 damage. While unconfirmed, it is speculated the damage inflicted by the anomaly is determined by the Personalisation A.I.

In addition to the anomaly's "intended" effects, due to the incompleteness of the code used as material, it is also unstable. As more clones are created, more areas of memory are occupied by them. Entities within courses, such as enemies and coins, will eventually begin to fail to load as their space in memory is occupied by clones. When all non-essential memory is occupied by clones, essential memory will begin to be occupied as well. Given enough time, all available memory on the console will be occupied by clones, however, due to important information being overwritten by clones, the game is likely to crash before this can occur.

In exceedingly rare cases, these memory corruption effects can "spread" to the Super Mario 64 cartridge itself, rendering it inoperable. In even rarer instances, the entire Nintendo 64 console can be irreparably damaged.

Speculation
The comparative consistency of this anomaly's effects implies that the Personalisation A.I. is drawing from unused and unfinished code, thus implying that effects similar to Prankster Comets were conceptualized as early as Super Mario 64.