"Most of the time when sprites battle, they're just playing with each others' programming: Simulating game actions to trigger each others' 'damage' and 'death' subroutines. Live or die, no code is actually damaged during such skirmishes."
But when the Mods use their weapons to punch holes in ROMs, they're not doing that. They attack the code itself, resulting in corruption and deletion. The lack of limitations outside of games makes it possible.
"Any focused beam above a certain threshhold of power begins to channel the energy of cyberspace itself, and thus can be used to obliterate the code of programs. That's how the Mods do it, and that's how you will do it."
Your power will tear through the fabric of millions of operating systems, causing them to collapse just like those games. And just like those games, everything and everyone inside will be destroyed with them.
