Super Mario Maker

My main complaints with the last wave of 2D Mario platformers has been the fact that they'd become far too routine and quite frankly too easy. That's no longer the case with Mario Maker, because with this creation tool/game you never know what to expect when you hop into another user's levels. You could get a level that is balls to the wall difficult and poses as a true tests of skill, you could get very perplexing levels which test your cognitive ability, or you could just get trolled hard!!! The amount of tools Nintendo allots to you is quite staggering, and creating levels is generally simple and seamless making perhaps the best use of the WiiU's gamepad to date! I was flabbergasted when I'd learnt that you'd be given the ability to swap between four different Mario games, add on top of that the variety of different environments to choose from (i.e. overworld, underworld, underwater, castle, haunted house and f***ing airship!!!). What I thought was especially neat is how every course element/environment would translate between each of the four Mario games, EVEN IF THEY WEREN'T IN THE ORIGINAL GAME!!! Which of course leads to nearly infinite situations that have never been in previous Mario plat-formers. I also loved the fact that you were able to which between two different environments within a single course!

The online features are pretty effective, the amount of courses you can upload depends on your total star count, so if nobody likes your levels, well then f*** you! :P It's an efficient way of keeping the database fair and troll free, there's nothing worse than doing the 100-Mario challenge and being trolled like a bitch on the last few levels, but thankfully we have the option to skip unplayable courses. The only problem I have with the star system (and it's not Nintendo's fault) is the fact that a large portion of the "most popular" courses listed are of the "don't touch anything" variety, and those types of courses are boring as heck even if a lot of work had been put into them. I'm loving the game's bells and whistles though, the sound effects that you can insert into levels are dope, especially the spooky ones, they really get the heart racing in those cut throat moments. I'd also appreciated the nods to Mario Paint, that fly swatting mini-game is one of the reasons I'm a passionate gamer today!!! :3 And what the hell's with that skinny Mario mushroom? Da fuq! And when Mario starts drinking that lean and the whole screen gets wavy, it's those little touches that make this game special. My only complaints are that I wish there was more verticality to the level creation, and I also wish that the filtering system was bit better so you don't get trolled so much online! Otherwise this game is a gift that keeps on giving!!!

I'm playing this game way too late, but did pick it up for a few pounds. Super Mario Maker has a level creator and you upload them to the Nintendo Network. Nintendo are going to be shutting down the servers next year, so it's got limited shelf life now.

Not all the tools are available from the start, but delivered over many days of playing. There's a great amount of objects to create your levels. You place blocks, items, enemies, warp pipes, vines, springs, keys, red coins that grant you with a key to unlock a door, extra sound effects, visual effects. You can shake selected objects to modify them. Apparently checkpoints were patched in later which could be why they seemed like a rare occurrence. You have the option for normal levels, or autoscroll. You can style the graphics with most 2D Mario games: original, Mario 3, Super Mario World, New Super Mario Bros.

You are allowed to create levels which would never exist in the actual games. For example, the Ghost house levels never appeared in the original game but you can use it with the original game theme, so Nintendo has created brand new sprites to support this.

There's a special mushroom, which gives you a character skin so you can play as all kinds of characters: Pikachu, Excitebike, Link and loads more.

The creator has to beat the level once for it to be valid, but that doesn't stop them making something almost impossible, or requiring you to do some advanced technique, or find some fairly obscure route through the level when the level implied a different path e.g. have a hard to reach warp pipe as the actual route forward).

You can play single levels, or randomly chosen levels in a set. I didn't really get the difference between 10 and 100 challenge because it's still a randomly selected batch of levels. You have difficulties within, and with a higher difficulty you have a longer set and they are generally way more difficult. Unless you are extremely wasteful of lives then you are going to complete the Easy and Normal modes. You can save and quit so its not even an endurance challenge. If a level is too hard, you can skip and swap to a different one.

You can see where people have died with an X speech bubble. I think this used to have a Miiverse post, but Miiverse closed down years ago.

The levels can be put into certain categories. There's well-made standard levels, ones which are short and have maybe 1 challenge, ones where you just run forward, ones where you just sit and watch, ones that are just trolling, and ones that are pure carnage. I was actually surprised that the quality was higher than I expected, but there were still too many bad ones, and too many of the ones you just watched. I think those ones are clever and must take a lot of trial and error to put together, but what is the point?

In this game, you make Mario stages and then play bad stages people posted online. It's a hoot. Do I need to say more about this? I will give Nintendo major credit for making essentially the product I wanted here. Awesome game to share with a friend or SO who likes being creative so you can play their stages.

As a creation tool, it's absolutely fantastic! While the level creator itself is not nearly as complex and intricate as, say, LittleBigPlanet 2's is, and won't lead to creations that are as complex and creative as that game's best user-created levels, to say that it's much more user-friendly is a huge understatement. The whole drag-and-drop interface, made possible on consoles thanks to the Wii U's gamepad, really makes a difference here and allows you to make levels in almost no time at all (whether or not they're any good depends on your skill and creativity, obviously). A near-5/5-worthy creation tool if I've ever seen one, even if it still lacks slopes at the time of this writing.

As for the mechanics in the levels... well, it's Mario. Four different styles. While the mechanics of Super Mario World [スーパーマリオワールド] aren't perfectly emulated here (you can't spin jump on buzzsaws, for example), it's more than acceptable, and the mechanics of Super Mario Bros. [スーパーマリオブラザーズ], Super Mario Bros. 3 [スーパーマリオブラザーズ3], and New Super Mario Bros. Wii transfer over perfectly fine (to my knowledge. I have a feeling that those who are obsessed with them could write a dozen essays about how this is terrible in transferring them over). And thankfully, in the case of the SMB1 and NSMB styles, due to the options available and the fact that this is a user-creation tool, you can easily make levels that are much more interesting than the ones available in the original games (at least in my own opinion. I was personally never the biggest fan of those games to begin with, though)!

Playing the levels of others isn't consistently the best of experiences, though. At all. This is to absolutely be expected due to half of this being a user-creation tool, with said expectation being larger due to this being a Mario game and is thus inherently marketed towards children, but the majority of the levels that are present at the moment... really suck. If you're just going around internet communities that share their levels, this isn't too big of a problem, but if you want to unlock most of those neat Amiibo outfits to use in SMB1-style levels, you're essentially going to have to jump into a pit of lava. The 100 Mario Challenge that you'll need to play through multiple times (at least 50+ times, even if you're an Amiibo hoarder) has various difficulties, each with their own problems: Easy will often give you levels that are either obviously a young (like... really young) person's first attempt at making a level in any game period or one of the many currently-existing automatic levels, that are cool the first couple of times you see one but quickly become a bore. Normal is a somehow bigger mixed bag as it's a mixture of levels fresh off of the creator and ones with a decent clear rate. Anything goes here, though this is probably your best chance at finding something good via the Challenge. Expert is typically filled with Kaizo-esque bullshit, only not nearly as creative as the levels in the Kaizo ROMhacks themselves. Thankfully, good levels do exist, and randomly stumbling upon them feels really good and makes it almost worth it. Almost. Well, kind of, since you're usually catapulted back into a shit level afterwards unless it's the end of a 100 Mario Challenge, but that's enough about that.

I'm personally not the biggest Mario fan out there. I mean, I like the series, but I personally wouldn't call it one of the greatest things to grace the medium. But this has a lot of longevity in it. Even more so due to the fact that Wii U emulators are becoming a thing, and the way that this saves levels means that people could very well be sharing levels even long after Nintendo eventually shuts down the official servers. Even if my enjoyment during sessions of playing levels fluctuates constantly due to the variety of levels quality-wise, it's still worth it in my opinion (well, maybe not for $60 unless you're a huge Mario fanboy or are really interested in a fantastic creation tool. Maybe wait for the inevitable price drop otherwise). Unless you don't like Mario, obviously.

tl;dr: As a level creation tool, it's kind of incredible. As a Mario game, mechanically it's fine (but not amazing. Though I personally don't think that any of the original games this uses the mechanics and style of were 5/5 material in general, even if SMW comes kind of close) and level-wise it's obviously a mixed bag.