Okay so we already did a Mario Maker community review. But I feel like now, one month later, it might be a good time to talk about it again. How are the levels? How’s the execution? Are people doing interesting things? What are some of your favourite levels?
To be perfectly honest, I’m a little disappointed. Just a little.
Maybe it’s the tools. Actually, it’s almost certainly the tools. Maybe it’s also that Nintendo makes it bloody difficult to find interesting stuff, but I feel as though the wacked-mental shit I was expecting to see from “the internet” is a missing in action.
Am I crazy? Maybe I’m not playing the right stuff.
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below. And leave level suggestions while you’re at it!
Comments
8 responses to “Community Review: Mario Maker… One Month Later”
It’s been a month?
Wow.
I’ve been playing it for less time than I expected to, but I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly.
Tools are great. The only issue that I have is the lack of a “Search” function. For example, I would love to be able to look up levels with the word “Metroid’ in the title.
My level has Metroid in the title! It’s called Super Metroid Maker! and the code is 465C-0000-00A6-5B31. It’s the game Super Metroid in miniature, complete with metroidvania style gameplay progression, boss battles and even the opportunity for sequence breaking! Enjoy.
There’s only two types of levels. The, ‘put the controller down and watch Mario move to the end by himself’ levels, and the ‘Hell Mario’ levels.
Three – don’t forget the “run to the right to listen to the music” levels 😛
I love it but honestly, besides my select few people that I ‘follow’, I hate playing other people’s random levels.
Looking at the top voted levels, the auto-Mario “don’t touch anything” or music-playing levels are really easy to skip. But playing the 100-Mario challenge, I find myself rolling my eyes at almost every level I don’t skip. It might sound elitist or like I’m asking too much, but I really wanted more out of people’s imaginations.
When I make a level I think it out, I make it make sense; I try to make it feel like a proper Mario level. Most levels I play are just random elements thrown together, instant-death traps, or just too many things going on that don’t make sense. Most of them seem like kids have just picked up the controller and thrown things around randomly and hit upload. I played a level that was literally 5 stacks of giant goombas, then absolutely nothing except flat ground all the way to the furthest end flagpole possible.
I’m probably expecting too much from the general population, but the ratio of good quality levels to random garbage is just way too skewed.
Although, to contradict myself, I’ve loved watching Giant Bomb’s community make ‘random garbage’ levels that have been hilarious to watch Patrick Klepek try to make sense of. Plus, the whole Dan Ryckert vs Patrick Klepek “The Ryckoning” saga was incredible.
I demand a tool for sloped surfaces!
I think it’s the discovery methods are lacking, more than anything else. There’s some brilliant stuff hiding out there, it’s just hard to find through the randomisation of the 100 Mario Challenge. Everyone’s idea of “wacked-mental shit” seems to fall into a few categories: Don’t Press Anything levels, enemy spam levels, precision jumping, troll doors that drop you in a pit, yada yada yada.
But every now and then there’s a gem, a genuine challenge that isn’t needlessly over the top, an interesting spin on old conventions, or that tell a story, like Waluigi’s descent into madness. My favourite levels, I’ve found, aren’t usually the crazy ones but the ones that feel like they belong in a regular Mario game: they have a sense of flow, challenge, something interesting about them without breaking the “rules”… too much.
But to find those you usually need to play friend’s levels, look in forums, Twitter, Facebook, the comments right here, etc. Even Nintendo Australia has been sharing some really interesting ones.
And of course, you can always make the change you want to see in the world.
As mentioned above, there are really three types of levels: auto-run, hell difficulty, and music levels. It’s sometimes difficult to find good challenging and well designed levels.
Maybe if Nintendo better categorized these levels so we can easily find what we want.
You are indeed not playing the right stuff. There are mind-bogglingly clever puzzle levels, levels really faithful to Nintendo’s design sensibility, levels fiendishly hard, but not unfair and eminently solvable. The community has found incredibly combinations and tricks for the tools available, from music players to password generators and calculators.
We’re getting to the point where the amount of tools available are starting to feel all mined-out, but I don’t think there’s a single soul that’s not positive that DLC is around the corner.
Between Kotaku articles with suggestions and sorting the /r/MarioMaker sub by top votes, I’ve been extremely busy whenever I play it, and see nothing but great stuff. I’ve left the 100 Mario challenge behind for dust.