Many of us who grew up playing video games spent our childhood afternoons imagining creating our own levels in some of our favorite games. I fondly remember sketching my designs for Mario levels in the margins of my notebooks when I was supposed to be paying attention in class and getting a kick out of sharing my designs with friends. With its Super Mario Maker series, Nintendo has enabled players to make their dreams come true with a suite of level-creation tools and a platform for sharing these levels and playing others’ creations.
The first game in the Mario Maker series, released for the ill-fated Wii U platform, was a surprising and innovative departure for Nintendo, a company that is normally fiercely protective of how its intellectual property is used. While the game’s level-designing tools were somewhat limited, and lacked some of the iconic elements of the Mario franchise, including the angry sun enemy and sloped surfaces, players still found ways to leverage the game in unpredictable ways. Take, for example, a level entitled “Run a Tiny Computer!”, which uses the tools of the game to build a sophisticated array of logic gates allowing the players to add numbers. Another level, “Super Shmup Bros.” re-imagines the platformer as a side-scrolling shoot-em-up, tasking players with defeating a barrage of enemies emerging from the right side of the screen with projectiles.
Half the fun of Super Mario Maker 2 comes from using the game’s built-in discovery tools to uncover hidden gems.
Although the Wii U was a commercial failure, Super Mario Maker proved to be one of the most successful titles on the platform, owing to its playful attitude and unique take on perhaps the most popular franchise in video games. Recently, Nintendo released the game’s sequel, Super Mario Maker 2, on the much higher-selling Nintendo Switch platform. Armed with a much-expanded collection of tools, players of the latest entry in the series have pushed the game seemingly to its limits with fairly amazing displays of creativity. One level takes the iconic 1-1 level from the very first Super Mario Bros. and flips it on its side, turning a horizontal challenge into a vertical one, and another uses the game’s tools to create a first-person adventure game, a feat seemingly unthinkable in the side-scrolling Mario engine.
Half the fun of Super Mario Maker 2 comes from using the game’s built-in discovery tools to uncover hidden gems. Though not every level that players create is as engaging or exciting as those I’ve showcased in this article, searching for randomly-selected levels over the Internet makes for a surprising and unpredictable experience. The game’s “endless” feature gives players a set number of lives to clear a series of levels that are curated by an algorithm that favors levels rated positively by other players over lower-ranked ones. The quality of these levels varies, but even the poorly-designed ones can make for an engaging challenge. Bad levels can be fun, too, as you try to get into the level creator’s head in search of the sometimes bafflingly-unconventional solution. Uniform across the game’s thousands of levels is an amazing degree of creativity, as there are a seemingly infinite number of unique ways to combine elements of the game’s toolbox, leaving you thinking, “Why didn’t I come up with that?”
The experience feels sometimes as if you’re playing the game with the level creator.
In this way, though Super Mario Maker 2 is primarily a single-player experience, there is a social aspect to enjoying the game. Players upload their levels to Nintendo’s servers, knowing that others will encounter them in the game’s “endless” mode, and design their challenges accordingly. As a result, a sort of language has organically emerged within the Mario Maker community, which has been imported into the second game from the players of the Wii U original. Level creators, for instance, will often use the game’s elements to draw the letter “Z” to instruct players when to use the corresponding button on their controller, and skilled creators expertly use coins and arrows to point the player in the right direction. The experience feels sometimes as if you’re playing the game with the level creator – cooperatively in the case of well-designed levels, as you and the creator work together to explore the game’s possibilities; and competitively in the case of badly-designed ones, as you work against the designer to beat his or her creation despite frustrating or unintuitive obstacles.
Although Super Mario Maker 2’s powerful creation tools ensure that players will continue to enjoy the game for a long time, the title is not without its drawbacks. The most glaring disappointment is Nintendo’s inexplicable use of cumbersome level codes for sharing content, forcing players to input a 9-digit alphanumeric code to find specific creations. And while the game offers an online multiplayer mode, players are limited to teaming up with strangers instead of their friends, and cannot choose the course they play with each other. Still, Super Mario Maker 2 is perhaps the most fun game available on the Switch to date, and any gamer interested in stretching their creative wings should check it out.
Tyler Olhorst is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. You can reach him at inquiries@thenationaldigest.com.
