Super Mario Maker

Indeed, creating Super Mario courses has been available before, but technically only illegally. Through hacking ROM's of Mario's best 2D platformers including Super Mario Bros.3 and Super Mario World, you would be able to customize and modify courses as well as other tweaks.

Lunar Magic was the tool I used several times perhaps about a decade ago, where I would edit the normal courses from the SNES adventure and make my own challenging creations, but I was never dedicated or really passionate about it.

Now, with Super Mario Maker being officially endorsed and licensed by Nintendo, millions around the world are able to create, edit, upload and play courses of their own, or from others, allowing for endless amounts of different content to be available.

I believe that official statistics regarding uploading these courses has already easily and swiftly reached the 1 million mark, meaning that in a way, gamers and fans will never get tired or bored with no new 2D Mario courses being available.

This glorified level editor with inspirations from the influential Mario Paint on the SNES and tons of cameos from other Nintendo franchises in the form of playable skins lets you be able to switch between 4 kinds of Mario styles(and the associating physics and mechanics with each of them).

This means that in the blink of an eye, by pressing a single button, all of your created levels can be switched to for instance Super Mario Bros. or New Super Mario Bros. based courses, making migration and availability in regards to creative input efficient.

However, not every kind of object, mechanic or feature has been transferred over from the 4 Mario styles into Super Mario Maker. Examples such as slopes and certain enemies are still missing in action, but fortunately, DLC and patches have already been done, and important changes such as adding checkpoints means that Nintendo will listen to what the audience demands. Well, for the most part then.

So this Wii U game/level editor basically has 2 functions; you either create your own levels(or edit those from others), or you start playing the courses from others. There are also special Event courses hosted with themes and usually you are able to unlock a certain 8-bit based character then.

Rating a product like this is difficult for the moment because it mostly depends on the input from users plus it also doesn't feel entirely complete yet, similar to Splatoon(which I will talk more about next year). And because I like to play and beat other games throughout, I have not really taken my full attention with this yet.

But I can definitely recommend this as a no-brainer for anyone who is a Super Mario fan, who grew up with these legendary platformer games, who like to play and judge the creations from others and/or who want to attempt to be creative and inspiring with level design in general.

It's definitely a very user-friendly Nintendo product.

Rating: 7.6