“Super Mario Maker” seems like the game Nintendo had in mind when they launched the Wii U. Using the gamepad’s touch screen and stylus, it allows you to intuitively build your dream platformer from scratch. After numerous, increasingly stale “New Super Mario Bros” entries that attempted to recapture the roots of the series, “Super Mario Maker” ends the cycle by presenting the player with infinite potential courses in both the modern and classic “Mario” styles.
Super Mario Maker gives the player a grid on which to drag in blocks, enemies and items and allows the creator to switch between the style and mechanics of “Super Mario Bros,” “Super Mario Bros 3,” “Super Mario World” and a tweaked version of “New Super Mario Bros.” Collectively, new features include the ability to grab objects like shells, spin jumps — which lets the player safely bounce on spiky enemies — and wall jumps.
Aside from a few select items, most elements are shared between the games, including enemies and items that were not present in the original. While not every power-up from the series appears, new elements like wearing shells as helmets, the bizarre “skinny mushroom” and the ability to ride in Bowser’s clown car make fresh, impactful changes on the gameplay.
The creator is generally well designed, but includes a few oversights like the inability to make checkpoints, the absence of slopes and no particularly good way to make a mandatory boss fight — most stages end with the classic flagpole except for castle stages which end with the axe from the original game.
Although the game comes with several sample courses, the biggest draw is the online component — here, players are allowed to play courses contructed by passionate, experienced gamers, as well as post their own, usually vastly inferior creations. At present, the most popular designs tend to be 2-D versions of “Mario 64” stages, remakes of “Megaman” levels and recreations of “Super Metroid.” However, in the near future, there is sure to be a huge collection of the most creative and difficult Mario levels ever made.
The main flaw with the online functionality is the difficulty of searching for courses. While any course can be found via an ID code, there is presently no way to search by title — players will probably have to rely on a random reddit thread to find any cool courses outside of the top 50.
Even for players who have no interest in creating courses of their own, “Super Mario Maker” provides users with an endless number of imaginative stages, making it potentially the best and most enduring 2D Mario game of all time.
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