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Little more than 30 years ago, the world was introduced to Super Mario Bros., a platformer with relatively simple mechanics that turned out not only to be a classic, but a timeless one at that. Featuring a character known as Mario, players would run through levels, jump to hit blocks and enemies, evade pesky obstacles, and ultimately take down Bowser, the big bad Koopa responsible for kidnapping the Princess - and not for the last time. It was so popular, and made the NES such a hit, that it spawned several sequels and is still honoured to this very day. Such a strong legacy from such a simple idea, yet it's the latest part of the Super Mario Bros. 30th Anniversary celebrations that has garnered the most attention: Super Mario Maker.
Because, let's face it, people have been making their own Super Mario Bros. courses for decades. Even before the internet was a thing, pen must have been to paper in an attempt by a loving fan somewhere to make his or her own courses, and no doubt Microsoft Paint saw its fair share of talented creators - we haven't even touched on the fan games that have been created over the past 30 years. Every new Mario platformer since then has introduced new elements and strengthened existing mechanics, but they all have numerous aspects in common, resulting in the perfect excuse for a make-your-own entry.
Super Mario Maker is, at its core, an extensive Super Mario Bros. course designer, allowing you to create a 2D platforming course however you like. You can choose between the visual styles of Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros. U, each of which has differences far beyond the visual styles, including the items you can place and the background music you'll hear. Each visual style is separated into six different course locations, including ground, underground, underwater, airships, ghost houses, and castles. This includes some configurations which were previously unseen, as ghost houses didn't appear until Super Mario World, while neither it nor Super Mario Bros. featured airships.
Using the Wii U GamePad, you're able to configure courses completely to your liking. Along the top of the screen are your tools, featuring blocks, items, and enemies for you to place into the course. You can customise your tools palette to suit your needs, moving them around depending on which ones you're most likely to use when creating levels, and this can be very useful when you're regularly placing the same tools. On the left-hand side of the screen are your visual options, where you can easily swap between the four main visual styles and the six course locations, while you'll eventually also find sound effects down the side here as well. The bottom of the screen shows the length of your course, and you're able to move the end goal depending on where you want your course to end; this part of the screen also lets you switch between two different areas, once you unlock warp pipes. The right-hand side of the screen houses your save and load buttons, as well as navigation to get to the different parts of the software. Elsewhere on the screen, you'll find options to undo changes, wipe the entire screen, change the time limit, or set a side-scrolling speed.
There are only a few definitive rules where course creation is concerned, all of which are relatively simple. Mario has to start at the beginning of the course and he has to finish at the end. You must be able to successfully complete a course if you're going to publish it online, which we'll get onto a little later. The rules behind taking hits are the same as the game with whichever visual style you're using; Super Mario will convert to Small Mario when hit, or into Super Mario if he has a power-up, except in the original Super Mario Bros. in which any Mario will convert to Small Mario upon taking damage. Enemies do exactly the same as they did in the original games, as do items. Nothing in the creative aspect of the game is designed to catch you off-guard, because you already know what everything does... mostly.
However, this is Super Mario Maker, and if it was just a bare-bones creative editor, it wouldn't be much fun. This is why you have the opportunity to create situations which you'd never normally see in a Super Mario Bros. game, at least for the most part. You can create giant enemies by dragging a Super Mushroom on top of them, resulting in a supersized Koopa Troopa or a megaton Thwomp, for instance. You can also drag the Wing item onto an enemy to give them flying abilities, so again, you could create a flying Thwomp or - to be true to the original games - a Koopa Paratroopa. Heck, you can drag a Super Mushroom and a set of wings onto a Thwomp to create a giant flying Thwomp, and if that isn't mad, we don't know what is. You can bring in some of the daftest sound effects known to man, and that's more than perfectly acceptable when you're as bonkers as Mario can be at times.
It has to be noted at this point, following on from that, that the level of detail the designers have put into this tool is staggering. For example, Koopas and Paratroopas will behave differently depending on the colour of their shell; with Koopas, it affects whether they walk off a ledge, while a green Paratroopa will jump on the ground and a red Paratroopa will hover in the air. In games such as Super Mario Bros. 3, some enemies were originally able to walk up walls, and that trait carries over to Super Mario Maker where applicable. Everything from enemy behaviour to item use and from the sound and music to the little visual nuances is alive and kicking here, and it's truly wonderful to see. Where a mix of visual style and location never existed - such as airships in Super Mario Bros. - the developers have created new sprite sets and music, all of which fits perfectly within the series.
When you first play Super Mario Maker, you'll be provided with just a small selection of tools, including the most commonly used blocks, enemies, and items, alongside two visual styles and course locations. By placing enough blocks and using the software for long enough, you'll continue to unlock new tools, visual styles, and locations, giving you even more to play with as time progresses. This was originally meant to unlock everything over a period of around nine days, though the day-one update quickens the pace considerably. The benefit of staggering these unlocks is that you have plenty of time to play with what you have, or have most recently unlocked - you can start off by creating simpler courses and learning how the various tools work, and later build further on your creations to result in even better courses. The software also provides you with sample courses every time you unlock new tools, letting you see exactly how they're able to work, and you can edit these to test further if you so choose.
Once you've created a course, you're able to upload it in order for players from around the world to have a go at it as well. As long as you can complete the course yourself, you can upload it, and you're initially able to upload a maximum of 10 courses, though you're also able to delete some to make room for others if you want. Other players who like your courses can give them a star, and these get added to your overall tally - you keep stars for deleted courses as well - so the more stars you receive, the more courses you can upload, up to an eventual total of 100 courses. You'll receive notifications within the software every time someone plays or stars your course, giving you a good indication of how popular different courses are, and you can see a full list of your uploaded courses in the Course World as well.
You're likely to spend a fair bit of time in the Course World, as this is where you'll find uploaded courses from all around the world. You have a number of searching and filtering options, and you're also able to favourite certain users whose courses you want to be able to see easily. There's also a section for you to view official courses, as well as special Event Courses (as of the 1.20 software update) created by developers, competition winners, and so on. You'll also find the 100-Mario Challenge here, setting you the goal of beating a certain number of user-created courses in order to unlock special costumes. You can choose between three different difficulty settings in this challenge, and you can easily skip any course you don't like or are having a bit too much trouble with.
On the subject of costumes, as mentioned prior, Super Mario Maker features a special new power-up called Costume Mario, which comes from the new Mystery Mushroom when playing in a course that uses the Super Mario Bros. style. There are 100 different costumes in the base game, with the vast majority representing a character or item from the Nintendo universe, whether it's a Goomba, Isabelle from the Animal Crossing series, or even the lesser-spotted Waluigi. You can unlock the vast majority using amiibo - to date, more than 70 announced amiibo can be used to unlock costumes, and you can expect that number to grow significantly. All costumes can be unlocked by completing the 100-Mario Challenge, however, so you don't need a single amiibo; also, as of the 1.20 software update, some special costumes can be unlocked by completing certain Event Courses as well, and the update boosts the number of costumes to 110.
Super Mario Maker is an incredibly exciting bit of kit. Its aim is to provide anybody with the tools to create a Super Mario course, and judging by some of the incredible courses that have been uploaded, there's some sheer talent out there. The software never hinders you, giving you the opportunity to create anything you desire, whether it's an easy course, an insanely difficult one, a puzzler, an auto-run course - the possibilities are practically endless. The scope for improvement is just as exciting as well: despite the fact that the software has everything you think you need already, just wait, because there's no doubt that this concept will return, bigger and better.
For now, though, Super Mario Maker remains a stunning experience, and one that will go down as an exceptional celebration of an exceptional anniversary. For more than 30 years, Super Mario Bros. has been an experience at the heart of millions of gamers - now it's time for those gamers, and more, to let out their passion and creativity in one of Nintendo's greatest gifts in a generation. Super Mario Maker is a turning point for the Super Mario series, and in bringing out the best in the next generation of video game enthusiasts and developers, here's hoping it'll be a turning point for you as well.
