Skilpadde wrote:
I heard of it on Nintendo Direct yesterday.
So Mario Maker is good then? I've been on the fence on it. Intrigued but not sure.
As far as I'm concerned, it's the best thing they ever made.
Now it's not perfect... the biggest frustration most players will have is if they try to play the usual online mode in high difficulties. What the game does is, for each level that players upload, it keeps track of how many people have played it, how many attempts they made, and how many of those attempts were actually successful wins. Based on that, the level gets categorized into one of 4 groups: easy, normal, expert, and super expert.
The problem is that the truly difficult levels often arent difficult because of good design, but because of BAD design. Which isnt a fault of the game itself, but is what happens every single bloody time you let players be content creators. Someone will take a new level, put 50 enemies all on the screen, put Mario in the very center of that, and then go "LOOK MA I MADE A HARD LEVEL!!!11!!1". Sure, it's "hard" but for the wrong reasons.
And there's 2 main ways to play levels online. You can browse around, which is by far the best way; for each level on the list, it also shows a side view of that level's front side (the back side being where pipes take you, that remains hidden on the level browser). I found that it was *very* easy to locate levels that were actually worth it by examining these, because the clues of someone actually putting time and effort into their designs are quite obvious.
But then there's the other mode: the 100-Mario Challenge. You have 100 lives, 1-ups dont give you more (they're really just for show in Mario Maker), and you have to beat a certain number of levels (10?), chosen randomly, from your selected difficulty. When you see people raging at the game on Youtube, chances are, they're playing 100-Mario on Super Expert.
Originally, it was just three difficulty levels... I think Super Expert though was added to effectively be an additional filter for the crap. I only tried super expert mode a few times myself before going "no, never again" and just dropping down to the others.
Super Expert mode, the one that everyone always wants to do for bragging rights, is usually stuffed full of these.
Doesnt mean there arent plenty of excellent levels though. People can be very creative. But making a good level takes time. When I make one, it takes me about a week. LOTS of testing and tweaking. The UI for it is excellent though, you use the stylus for everything, and they make it very intuitive. Like, say you put down a Goomba, right. You can then take a mushroom, drag it onto him, and you get a giant Goomba. Want him back to normal? Grab him and shake him to remove it and he'll shrink down. Wanna take that giant Goomba and give him wings? Just drag thee wings onto him (or onto any other enemy, or even onto blocks to create blocks that fly around) .You can also shake things (before you've added stuff to them) to get special variations of them. Shake a green Koopa Troopa and he turns into a red one. Shake the Clown Car (and yes, you can use it to fly) and it turns into a "fire" version, which can shoot fireballs forward or even use a charged spread attack. Take Lakitu, shake him, and he sort of flies off, leaving only his cloud (which Mario can use to fly around for a limited time). You can also do things like stick *anything* into blocks (well, almost anything, I dont think it lets you stick Bowser in a block). Want Mario to get that cloud out of a "?" block? Just drag it into it. Want a hidden block that farts out a Spiny? I dunno why you'd do that, but sure, why not. Sometimes the results of using different entities in different ways can be surprising. Like, putting Bowser or a normal Koopa in a clown car gives fairly obvious results. Putting a Boo in a clown car gets weird, but you can use that weirdness to make some cool stuff.
There's alot of stuff you can use. Most of the powerups and such are the more traditional ones (mushroom, fire flower, leaf, star, feather, and so on) but there's a couple of special ones too. Kuribo's Shoe makes an appearance, which was a very unique powerup from Super Mario 3, but it only appeared in ONE FREAKING LEVEL in that game, so it was really nice to see it in Mario Maker. There were also 4 themes you could use for your level: Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario. Depending on which theme you chose, various things changed. Like, in New Super Mario, you could do wall jumps and had access to that propeller mushroom item (which is still such a strange item to me). Switch to Mario 3, and you cant wall jump, and the propeller-shroom is replaced by Mario 3's Leaf. That sort of thing. Which meant that choice of game-theme actually had some real meaning. It takes some experimenting, too, to figure out just how many differences there are among them (alot, actually). Frankly all 4 of the themes were totally awesome in their own way, and Mario Maker added some things that werent in those games (like red coins for instance, or locked doors)
But yeah, you can get super creative with it. I mostly make traditional style levels myself, but the very first one I released was more of a bullet-hell sort of thing. It was an airship level, where you're flying through a single giant airship, utterly drowning in carefully placed cannons set up to fire elaborate patterns at you. The level was covered in spikes which meant there was nothing you could safely walk on, but question blocks throughout the level gave you clouds to fly around in. It was an autoscrolling level, so the idea was to keep dodging, and then when the next cloud block showed up on screen, maneuver over there and grab it to renew your cloud and keep flying. I had alot of fun making it and it was a highly rated level. Took bloody forever to make though.
The other problem the first Mario Maker has though was that it's basic "palette" of stuff you can use is fairly limited. The ability to do things like stick wings onto anything, that sort of thing, meant that there were more objects and possibilities than it seemed like, but still, alot of things were missing. There were no slopes, for instance. There were water levels, but you couldnt have levels that were normal levels with pools of water in them to swim in (like you often saw in Mario 3). And of course there were like 50 billion powerups, enemies, special objects, and such that werent in the game. This new Mario Maker looks to be changing that. The amount of new things shown in that short trailer alone is staggering, as is the implications for some of the UI elements they briefly show along with them.
Yeah, if you have a Wii U and like Mario games, I'd say... get it. But it's really best if you also like making and playing your own content.
Sorry, this was long, but it's been a favorite of mine since it came out.
14 Feb 2019, 4:31 am
