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Build amazing worlds in ‘Super Mario Maker’



 
Inside every one of us is a creative force just waiting to be unleashed. Fortunately, when it comes to artistic endeavors, gamers have a distinct advantage – we have a vast pool of virtual universes and fantastic experiences to take inspiration from.
 
And what’s more inspiring than “Super Mario”? For decades, Nintendo’s flagship series has been giving us some of the most colorful and innovative titles in the industry. And for many of those who experienced the ‘80s firsthand, “Super Mario Bros.” was the first real taste of adventure in the strange, quirky world of video games. How appropriate, then, that for the franchise’s 30th anniversary, Nintendo offers us a way not only to relive those adventures, but also to fashion our own off the building blocks of our childhood.
 
 
It’s the Super Mario Bros. Super Creation Tool!
 
“Super Mario Maker” is a treat for anyone who has ever fantasized about designing their own 2D “Super Mario” levels without going through the brain-numbing inconvenience of coding. While we’ve had other games with similar creation tools – such as “Little Big Planet” – what makes “Super Mario Maker” special is its accessibility.
 
The game lets you create levels with graphical styles straight out of the franchise’s four major 2D outings: “Super Mario Bros.,” “Super Mario Bros. 3,” “Super Mario World,” and “Super Mario Bros. U.” These will affect not only the look of your level, but also the sound effects, music, physics, Mario’s moves, and available power-ups.
 
You can also choose your level’s course style. Prefer things bright and sunny? Go for the Overworld theme. How about dark with a pinch of horror? Get spooky with the Ghost Houses. Other environment types are Underwater, Underground, Airship, and Castle.
 
Building levels is as easy as selecting items from a tool palette and dropping them onto the main screen. Identical objects can be “drawn” by dragging them across the environment. Some can be resized, and groups of items can be copied and pasted.
 
Objects can be combined to produce various effects. Want to create a question block that conceals a mushroom power-up? Simply drag a mushroom into a question block. Thinking of terrorizing players with a flying Piranha Plant? Glue some wings onto its back. You can have monsters popping out of question blocks, or cannons spewing coins instead of Bullet Bills. “Super Mario Maker” opens doors to numerous mind-blowing possibilities, some of which have never been explored in the franchise. And discovering all the object interactions through experimentation is part of what makes the game so much fun.
 
 
But wait, there’s more! Enemies can be stacked, allowing you to create nightmarish towers of Bowsers or Hammer Bros. Shaking items sometimes produces secondary effects; for instance, shaking Buzzy Beetle transforms it into a helmet Mario can wear. You can add special visual and sound effects, such as fireworks, disco lights, screams, and more. And if you’re an Amiibo collector, you’re in luck; touching figures to the gamepad unlocks character costumes, so you can immediately have Mario running around as Link, Samus Aran, or even the Wii Fit Trainer.
 
Switching between level editing and playtesting modes can be done on the fly; all it takes is the push of a button. This allows for an incredible level of fine-tuning, which is handy, given that you can only share a level online if it’s not impossible to complete.
 
Despite the freedom you’re given to do so much, “Super Mario Maker” doesn’t let you do everything. Fans of the series will notice the lack of the desert environment. You can’t create slopes, checkpoints, or purely vertical levels. You can’t tweak the enemy A.I. Certain enemies and even popular power-ups such as the Frog Suit are missing. It remains to be seen if Nintendo has plans to offer these elements in future DLC packs.
 
The items you do get are doled out in small sets. Spend at least five minutes with a set, and a new one will be unlocked the next day, with all being made available in nine days. While this may prove annoying to “Super Mario” veterans who just want to build complicated levels from the get-go, it ensures you’ll learn as much as you can about the simpler items before you move on to the more complex ones.
 
 
Let’s-a go!
 
“Super Mario Maker” isn’t just a creation tool – it also lets you play hundreds of community-designed levels, as well as several dozen constructed by Nintendo itself.
 
“10 Mario Challenge” gives you ten lives to beat eight levels picked randomly from a total of 68. These are some of the wackiest courses ever created by Nintendo, and will challenge everything you know about the “Super Mario” formula – not to mention they’re a great showcase of the various crazy things you can do in “Super Mario Maker.”
 
But “100 Mario Challenge” is where the real fun is. Depending on your chosen difficulty setting, this tasks you with completing eight or sixteen random user-created levels. The unpredictability of this mode is what makes it so exciting; you’ll never know if the next level will be an auto-scrolling horror house of spikes and lava, or a gauntlet of giant Goombas and flying squid. Amateur game designers have a tendency to throw everything but the kitchen sink at you, which is evidenced by the abundance of sadistic player-generated levels crammed with flaming traps and Koopa Troopa pyramids. Thankfully, courses you aren’t enjoying can be skipped. Conquering the mode awards you with the aforementioned character costumes, so it’s possible to earn all 100 of them even without Amiibos.
 
Alternately, you can pick levels yourself from a list that arranges them by popular vote. Favorite creators can be followed, so that the system will alert you every time they publish something new. Whether the quality of these courses will one day surpass even Nintendo’s best creations – or degenerate into a collection of excruciatingly tough, haphazardly cobbled-together murder machines – is utterly reliant on the community. But one thing is certain; with a playerbase this inspired, you’ll always have something to play in “Super Mario Maker.”
 
 
Mario Time!
 
Nintendo has spent three decades perfecting their “Super Mario” game design skills, and in that time, we’ve had the privilege of exploring worlds filled with magic, wonder, and the kind of joy that speaks to the child in each of us.
 
Now, Nintendo is passing the mantle to fans. “Super Mario Maker” is as easy to pick up as it is a blast to use, and with it, we’ve been bestowed the means of shaping the Mushroom Kingdom of our dreams. Sure, as a creation tool, it’s far from complete; there are components from our favorite “Super Mario” games missing, and in the process of crafting levels, we still find ourselves having to adhere to the series’ blueprint. But these are issues that a little creativity and a whole lot of passion can’t get around. If any video game company has proven the power a great imagination has over such limitations, it’s Nintendo. 
 
 
Rating – 9/10
Platform: Wii U


 
— TJD, GMA News