It's an interface that encourages a childlike experimentation even in adults. Feeding a mushroom to any number of enemies to make them bigger is a perfectly beautiful and obvious touch, as is dragging Mario into a pipe to turn it into a hidden portal or shaking any number of objects to unlock their secondary forms. Nintendo's interface eschews text-filled sub-menus and complicated dialog boxes whenever possible, utilizing its own symbology to unlock depth instead. Background singers name objects to the tune of the music as you place them, and incidental background elements pop up automatically as you draw platforms. There are plenty of little Nintendo touches to the process, too. ![]() Besides the drag-and-drop efficiency gains of the stylus, it's simply joyous to trap a goomba under your pen and watch it wiggle and shake with real momentum as you move it along, for example. Games like LittleBigPlanet and Project Spark have shown that robust level and game creation tools can be squeezed onto a standard controller, but there's a bit of magic to using the Wii U GamePad touchscreen instead. Being able to jump in and playtest a level in progress with the tap of a button (and half-a-second of loading) is a crucial feature that lends some immediacy and tangibility to the process, allowing you to fix as you go quite easily. The drag and drop grid system does have an extremely short tutorial to go over the basics, but anyone who's ever played a 2D Mario game will instantly understand how to place goombas, pipes, and question-blocks. A magical, intuitive interfaceÄiving in and making your first level in Super Mario Maker is incredibly easy. It's also one of the best examples yet of the underutilized promise of the Wii U. It's a magical, accessible play space that seems primed to create a virtuous loop of gameplay and design collaboration with minimal friction and maximum imagination. By marrying an easy to use creation and sharing interface to timeless and familiar platform gameplay, Super Mario Maker is going to open up the basic platformer design process to the masses in a way we haven't seen before. Seeing Super Mario Maker as old hat is a bit myopic, though. ![]() For a dedicated, tech-savvy player, the prospect of creating entirely new Mario games, or playing original, player-created levels, is not new. The results range from the brutally difficult Kaizo Mario series to the elegant Super Mario Remix. Through the magic of emulation tools, hobbyists have been able to craft their own Mario levels on PCs since at least the mid-'90s. Links: Official Web site | Nintendo eShopIt's easy for a longtime gamer to be a little hipster about Super Mario Maker's existence.
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