Super Mario Maker review

[MarioMark]

This arrived today, dispatched yesterday by www.thegamecollection.net. I'm off work this week so result!

It's very good. You're greeted with a tutorial in making a basic level, don't worry it's not one of those patronising boring tutorials, you can do what you want and they advise you on your way, 5 minutes in and you're already an expert. With unlimited options I found myself wondering what kind of level to do, I set my level size limit it and lost myself in the game. 2 hours later and my short level was done, I made it for my lad while he was at school with a little surprise at the end, a Sonic costume in a question block used by his Sonic Amiibo. He loved it.

It's really simple to make a level, Nintendo really have smashed it. They ease you in by giving you new tools to play with every day. My lad only turned 6 last week and he's making me a really good level, putting all the pipes, blocks and baddies in the right places.

Now it's time to play some levels. There's a short 10 life map to play through, Some levels are short and sweet but others aren't the best. The trouble with this game is you're relying on the gaming community to make this as well. Sticking to the positives though you can really get some inspiration by some user created levels and you can edit other players levels to make it your own, but I prefer to make mine from scratch.

My only gripe about this game is the Amiibo support, the Amiibo characters only work with standard 8 bit SMB, not SMB3, World or Wii U, so if you want to use Amibo you HAVE to make your level in standard SMB mode.

Visually it's what you'd expect but it is nice to play the classic Mario levels in full sharp widescreen.

Looking at how popular the LittleBigPlanet creation community is I'd say this is going to be a huge hit.

[Decider-VT]

After playing for most of this evening, I have to say that giving these tools to the public is like letting chimps tackle oil painting- high quality materials given to the community currently being trampled over in a wild bid to fling faeces at a blank canvas.

Nobody expects a masterpiece but some of the people designing levels for this seem to have learnt absolutely nothing from years of playing Miyamoto's levels- there are some reasonably tricky stages but there are precious few so far that are actually fun to play. Maybe it's just the luck of the draw but most of the levels I've downloaded so far just aren't good. Perhaps people are just finding their way at the moment or something.

Hopefully the cream will rise to the top soon as most people grow bored and a handful of designers become good at it but I fear that the 100 Mario mode will forever be polluted with scrappy nonsense or gimmicks from those determined to shoehorn as many enemies or dead-ends into their levels as possible. We need some filtering on that mode, and we should be able to comment on a level without starring it.

[Asura]

Nobody expects a masterpiece but some of the people designing levels for this seem to have learnt absolutely nothing from years of playing Miyamoto's levels- there are some reasonably tricky stages but there are precious few so far that are actually fun to play. Maybe it's just the luck of the draw but most of the levels I've downloaded so far just aren't good. Perhaps people are just finding their way at the moment or something.

Yeah, MarioMark's comment about LittleBigPlanet surprised me, if I'm honest - I always thought LBP, and stuff like it primarily exist to teach people how difficult video game design actually is. I didn't play a single level in LBP that I thought as particularly memorable, except for one or two comedy gimmick ones that made fun of how imprecise the core game was.

I was concerned Mario Maker would be the same.

[Decider-VT]

Agreed. Did the player levels for LBP improve at all over time, or were they consistently drowned by nonsense?

I think that there should be a threshold for level uploads- something along the lines of not being allowed to upload one until you've created at least ten or twenty to familiarise yourself with the tools. As it stands, people are just uploading their initial experiments for the sake of doing so. Some sort of system that removes levels with poor completion rates would be welcome too, although I fear that this would encourage designers to be too forgiving.

[Dogg Thang]

I can't speak for LBP because I declared myself out on that one very early on but they got much better in Sound Shapes over time. But it did take a LONG time. Early on, a massive number of people were creating levels and over half of them were about making something else out of the pieces - like, here is a level that looks like Pikachu or here is a Spongebob one. Clever looking sometimes but not actually fun to play. Others ranged from simply awful to interesting but far too hard (I fell into that trap myself with my own ones). But after all that came some really good ones. Challenging but fun and enjoyable to actually play through.

[MarioMark]

Yes maybe I wasn't very clear, when I mentioned LBP I was mainly talking about the popularity of it and how long it's lasted.

I do agree with the comments about user created levels. People are forgetting the basics. Put rewards like lives in hard to reach places, having secret areas high up for the advance players, and only having 1 bowser rather than 10. In a lot of areas people are just mindless in where they put things.

[danholo]

Just canceled my order: Realized I wouldn't play this at all, as with most games. I'll let the LE go into someone's hand who appreciates it. I'd just think of it as a trophy and sell it on at an inflated price.

I'm so moral.

[Baseley09]

Are the user created levels ranked in some way so that the best ones will get to the top?

[Decider-VT]

You can access rankings to download individual levels but there's no filtering for sequential challenges, like the 100 Mario mode. (Unless I just haven't unlocked that yet, or something.)

[MarioMark]

It also feels rewarding when you log in the next day and get a notification saying that people have played your level.

[Decider-VT]

I think that the real benefit of this will lie in being able to create levels for my wife to play- just tricky enough to test her but nothing impossible for her to beat. Having instant feedback (i.e. dodging punches or thrown controllers) would probably knock any level design skills I do possess into touch as well.

Should we have a separate thread for us to share our levels in?

[Dogg Thang]

That would be a great idea. I'm actually quite itching to have a go now but Amazon haven't even shipped mine yet. Could be end of next week before I get it now (for some reason post from Amazon UK takes longer to get here than from Amazon US).

[Asura]

Agreed. Did the player levels for LBP improve at all over time, or were they consistently drowned by nonsense?

The game had loads of systems to try and filter/rank stuff, but I never felt that the good levels rose above the quagmire.

Admittedly, though, part of the problem with LBP was that it offered a lot of freedom. This meant that there was very little consistency. We tried it in multiplayer for a bit, and I think each evening we'd encounter 20-30 broken, half-baked (and sometimes simply crap) levels, 2-3 finished but not entertaining ones and maybe one good one. The word I would use is "tiring".

making something else out of the pieces - like, here is a level that looks like Pikachu or here is a Spongebob one. Clever looking sometimes but not actually fun to play.

This is part of the reason I like the fact that game design kits such as Mario Maker exist.

Loads of people play Call of Duty, and many of them think they could make amazing maps until they actually try. Ask a secondary-school-age CoD fan what kind of map they'd like to make, and most of them would describe a theme or a gimmick, not an actual map. They might say "I'd love a map set on an oil rig" or "a map on a moving train". These can be cool scenarios of course, but they're not really level design ideas.

A better answer could be "I want a map which has both long-range and close-range combat, tied to different areas", or "I want a map with tight locations and lots of columns for good cat-and-mouse games". The kind of person who comes back with that answer is likely to get more out of map-making than the prior answers.

Of course, someone who is dedicated might start off with the former answers, and after playing with Mario Maker or LittleBigPlanet, they might give you the latter answers. That's why it's good to see these types of games proliferate.

[Golgo]

I don't have a WiiU (yet) but from what I've read the well-worked out dripfeed of elements and tutorials here seems really appealing. I also thought the LBP 1&2 designer (never tried 3) was overly-complex and the lengthy condescending tutorials by Stephen Fry got right on my tits, and often simply the game's systems didn't work or stuff would bust apart, although there was a lot of truly amazing stuff produced by talented people. Loved WarioWare DIY and made a few games there, but even that designer could be quite obtuse even though the games only lasted 5 seconds.

[wakka]

Not tried my copy of this yet - just dropping in to say that while I didn't like LBP's platforming anyway (and never got the hype over it) the thing I really hated was Stephen Fry's condescending 'reading a bedtime story to a child' voice. Just didn't work for me at all.