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Super Mario Maker
Wii U
Giving Mario Fans (Most of) What They Want.
4/5 stars
Six years after “Terraria” developer, Re-Logic, showed Nintendo the path to follow toward the future of 2D ‘Mario’ games, the seed of this idea has borne fruit. After strongarm attempts by Nintendo to expunge “Super Mario Bros. X” from the face of the Internet, that glorious game is still going strong and last year received a minor update. Nintendo, for their part, seem to be taking the high road – for the time being – and have produced their own, official answer to the 2D Platforming greatness of Re-Logic’s homebrew game: “Super Mario Maker.” The question is, though, between the free “Super Mario Bros. X” and the $60 “Super Mario Maker,” which is the better overall experience.
Presentation
“Super Mario Maker” re-uses the art and music assets from the original 8-bit “Super Mario Bros.,” the 8-bit “Super Mario Bros. 3,” the 16-bit “Super Mario World,” and the modern polygonal “New Super Mario Bros.” Most of these assets are completely unchanged from their original forms, though there are small differences, such as the original “SMB” springboard and the addition of several new looks for Mario via power-ups (shell helmets, the Weird Mushroom, and the Mystery Mushroom, specifically). Unlike “Super Mario Bros. X,” which allows stage designers to drop any ‘Mario’ assets into the same stage, “Super Mario Maker” limits stages to specific styles, so a stage built using the “Super Mario Bros. 3” style will look like “Super Mario Bros. 3,” only, with no crossover assets from other styles. All of these traditional ‘Mario’ creativity assets are contained in a framework modeled after the user interface of the SNES creativity suite, “Mario Paint,” with recurring icons, motifs, and even a minigame that seem specifically engineered to evoke knee-buckling nostalgia from folks who grew up in the NES and SNES eras.
While the soundtrack and Mario vocal quips are largely excellent (and classic), the ability to add custom sound effects to “Super Mario Maker” stages is a bit of a mixed offering. Most of the custom sounds (and their accompanying visual effects) are grating and obnoxious, like something out of the abysmal “Meme Runner” on WiiUWare. There’s even the ominous return of the demonic Round Face from “Mario Paint,” which still makes its disconcerting ‘Eh-ewww’ sound. *shudder*
Outside of the weird and undesirable custom sounds, “Super Mario Maker” is a tightly designed piece of software with a very user-friendly, mostly-intuitive interface for creating stages and finding stages to play online. In this respect, it far exceeds the stage editor in “Super Mario Bros. X” due to a super smooth learning curve and easily discoverable functionality.
Story
“Super Mario Maker” does not have a story. Hell, it doesn’t even really have a single-player mode worth mentioning. It also doesn’t allow users to create their own stories or add things like cutscenes to their created stages. But with Nintendo constantly striving to keep their squeaky clean image in the North American market, it would be impossible to curate user-created content if users were given unlimited freedom to express themselves. Likewise, it would be impossible to host all of the full-blown custom games that users would create given the opportunity, as the game already hosts over 2 million user-created stages with its current limitations.
Gameplay
“Super Mario Maker” is, like “Super Mario Bros. X,” a blend of creation and play. However, each of these two titles handles one of those aspects far better than the other.
Both “Super Mario Bros. X” and “Super Mario Maker” attempt to unify the ‘Mario’ physics for important platforming activities like jumping and sliding. Both games do an admirable job, for the most part, as the stiff, clunky physics of the original “Super Mario Bros.” have been relegated to the past. However, every single style in “Super Mario Maker” features weird bounce physics for trampolines/springboards/jacks/music blocks that caused me to groan whenever I saw one in a stage.
Where “Super Mario Bros. X” has fully fleshed-out campaigns and innovative dynamic split-screen for 2-player simultaneous play, “Super Mario Maker” is much more loose and disconnected within itself, and strictly single-player. None of “Super Mario Maker’s” stages are connected in any way and power-ups don’t carry over between them. Indeed, the only single-player ‘campaign’ content provided by Nintendo is a mode called “10-Mario Challenge,” in which players are tasked with completing 8 stages using only 10 lives. In ‘challenge’ mode, players are limited to accumulating 3 extra lives in each stage, and those lives aren’t added to the player’s total until they complete the stage in which they were earned. “10-Mario Challenge” contains a total of 64 ‘sample’ stages, thus clearing the mode 8 times unlocks all of them, adding them to the Coursebot that contains saved stages so players can use the ‘challenge’ mode stages as frameworks for their own creations.
After clearing all of Nintendo’s sample stages, the player is relegated to finding stages online that have been submitted by others, either via one-off plays or as part of the “100-Mario Challenge,” which tasks players with completing 16 random user-generated stages using only 100 lives… which is more difficult that one might think, considering that the vast, overwhelming majority of user-generated “Super Mario Maker” stages are awful, intentionally difficult, troll stages, or just poorly thought-out. When it comes to actually playing 2D ‘Mario,’ I will still take “Super Mario Bros. X” any day of the week, because the user-generated content is large, comprehensive, and generally well-thought-out… which is only the case because creating anything in “Super Mario Bros. X” is a lot of time-consuming work that requires a certain level of dedication and technical expertise due to the stage editor’s less-than-user-friendly interface and esoteric functionality.
The cumbersome and difficult nature of “Super Mario Bros. X’s” stage editor, however, allows the simplicity of “Super Mario Maker’s” stage editor to become the centerpiece of the entire game. In “Super Mario Maker,” every custom stage automatically has a start point and a goal. The player is free to adjust the stage’s length via a simple slider, and it is possible to take stages beyond the basic default maximum size by adding a full-sized sub-stage (accessible via the classic warp pipes). The player (no, creator) is free to add blocks, structures, enemies, and power-ups however they want.
The editor starts with only a small pallet of tools unlocked, and it seemed like Nintendo was intentionally forcing players to unlock the full pallet of tools over an arduous 9-day period. However, by spamming one kind of tool within a stage, it’s possible to unlock the full tool arsenal within a few hours, as the game interprets the spamming as a lot of creative work happening in a short period of time.
The tools in “Super Mario Maker’s” stage creator are generally very intuitive, and the interface itself relies entirely on the WiiU GamePad’s touchscreen. By poking a tool, the player is then free to ‘paint’ that tool’s object all over the screen, which has a nice gridline overlay to assist in lining-up assets, obstacles, gaps, etc. Creating an asset with a tool, then poking it and rapidly shaking the stylus activates the tool’s alternate mode, which most (but not all) of the tools have (for example, changing a normal Koopa Troopa into a Red Koopa Troopa). Other functionality – like Giant enemies – can be achieved by the intuitive act of dragging one tool asset over another one (in the case of Giant enemies, a Super Mushroom). Unfortunately, it’s not possible to add every power-up to every enemy.
Nintendo has taken a bit of heat for releasing “Super Mario Maker” with an incomplete set of stage creation tools. While it is true that the game launched without staples like mid-stage checkpoints, that specific asset has been patched-in via a free update. Many “Super Mario Maker” creators are still bothered about the lack of enemies from the supported game styles, the complete lack of a “Super Mario Bros. 2 USA” style, the inability to create vertically-scrolling stages, and the omission of sloped tiles that allow Mario to slide on his butt… and these ARE indeed huge oversites by Nintendo that have been in “Super Mario Bros. X” for years. But with Nintendo’s willingness to listen to user criticism and add missing features via free updates, it’s still possible that “Super Mario Maker” will become complete at some point in the future… provided Nintendo doesn’t decide to lock away some of the most in-demand features behind paid DLC!
Once a player has a creation they want to share with the world, it’s easy to upload to Nintendo’s servers. In order to upload a stage, the creator must prove that it can be cleared, but other than that, anything goes. Once a stage is online, it competes with other stages for plays and Stars (essentially Facebook-style Likes with a Nintendo flare). Players are free up upload up to 10 stages by default, with additional upload slots unlocked by the accumulation of Stars (unfortunately, accumulating plays doesn’t amount to anything). Creators with a MiiVerse account associated with their user profile will be delighted to know that “Super Mario Maker” automatically makes a MiiVerse post for each uploaded stage, making sharing with friends (well, MiiVerse friends) much easier than the cumbersome 16-digit codes that facilitate sharing stages outside of MiiVerse (it bears mentioning that Nintendo is planning to release a web portal in December, 2015 that will facilitate players sharing stages outside of MiiVerse as well). Creators are given access to a variety of interesting metrics, such as stage completion percentages and the number of plays that resulted in the player clearing a given stage. There are even little icons that display on each stage’s preview image showing where the majority of players screwed up and got Mario killed.
Overall
“Super Mario Maker” is – at its core – a Nintendo-fied effort at replicating the amazing results of the homebrewed “Super Mario Bros. X.” While woefully incomplete and lacking in quality control, “Super Mario Maker” serves as a fantastic stepping-off point for budding game designers to get their feet wet with some dead-simple platformer design using the most iconic characters and tools in the history of the genre. After seeing the results of both independent and “AAA” developers taking a stab at the same thing, I am left with two parting thoughts: 1) I would really like to see Nintendo release a “Super Mario Maker Deluxe” on PC via Steam that includes all of the missing features that fans are demanding. 2) I would really like to see the folks who took over development of “Super Mario Bros. X” after Re-Digit left rework the stage editor to be more like the one in “Super Mario Maker.” Sadly, I know neither of those things is likely to happen.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: N/A
Gameplay:
Play: 3.5/5
Make: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
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