Koopalings! Frog Suit! Super Acorn! More! Let's-a-go!

April 25, 2020 9:00 AM

Finally, you can build an entire “game” out of Super Mario Maker 2 levels [World Maker Update][Version 3.0.0] [Patch Notes] “When the original Super Mario Maker came out on the Wii U nearly five years ago, we lamented how disjointed it felt to just play individual levels without "any sense of continuity or progression." We longed for a Mario Maker that let us arrange individual levels as building blocks to create "a complete game, one that progresses gently from easy to hard, teaching you new tricks and throwing in clever twists on old themes along the way." Nintendo will finally be making those dreams a reality with what it's calling the final major update to Super Mario Maker 2 on the Switch. The new World Maker mode will let you play with "All your ideas that couldn't be contained in a single course and share them with people around the globe," as the announcement video puts it. Yes, that includes the ability to create a world map, complete with bridges, hills, customized course icons, background elements, and a variety of cosmetic themes.” [via: Ars Technica]

• Super Mario Maker 2’s new minigames are full of old-school Nintendo history [Polygon]

“But one new feature for the World Maker portion of Super Mario Maker 2 deserves some attention. There are three Toad House minigames where players can earn 1-Up mushrooms. One is familiar: Match & Win! is the slots-style game from Super Mario Bros. 3 in which players have to match three panel pieces to earn extra lives. The other two appear totally new. Catch & Win! is a baseball minigame in which a Bill Blaster-like cannon throws pitches at the player. It features a little musical jingle lifted from Nintendo’s own Baseball for the NES. But as you can see in the GameXplain video above, the minigame also features a cameo from Weird Mario. The unsettling tall and skinny Mario appears if the player misses three balls. An angry Weird Mario appears to deliver a “You damn kids!” admonishment in a garbled voice (which definitely sounds like another Nintendo reference I can’t yet identify). Weird Mario appears elsewhere in Super Mario Maker 2, even though the Weird Mushroom power-up didn’t carry over from the original Super Mario Maker.”

• Mario Maker 2's Final Update Would Be Better If It Weren't The Last One [Kotaku]

“These details aren’t quite the Super Mario Bros. 2 mode many fans have been hoping for, unfortunately. It was surprising when Super Mario Maker 2 came out without a Super Mario Bros. 2 mode. It seemed likely it might get added in a future update. Here we are less than a year later in what Nintendo says is the game’s final update, and the nods inherent in the mushroom power-up seem like the closest we’ll ever get. In the end, a lot of the version 3.0 update feels like good ideas worth expanding on in a future one. Super Worlds are fun and a completely new way to go about exploring other people’s courses, but are ultimately fairly linear. There’s room to do more with them, like Super Mario World’s own branching paths, just like there’s more to do with the Super Mario Bros. 2 aesthetic, including finally making Princess Peach playable and letting you fly around levels. She does appear in Super Worlds, but only as the damsel to be rescued by completing all of the courses. Mario Maker 2 players are some of the most creative, using the existing building blocks Nintendo’s given them to create complex death traps, ingenious mazes, and unique storytelling machines. It’s a shame they won’t continue getting more.”

posted by Fizz (7 comments total)

I really wish this game had been given better community support. The gallery for browsing and downloading other levels/worlds is too basic and not as robust and customizable as I'd like it to be. There should be a much better way to search for tags, genre, game-types, ranking of uploaded levels & games.

Nintendo is great at so many things but they are consistently terrible at things that are online. And I don't get it. Sony & Microsoft both have robust store-fronts (and they're not perfect), but they're so much better at this than Nintendo is.

This update is very welcome and I'm excited to dive back in. I just wish we had more community focused support.

*sighs*
posted by Fizz at 9:06 AM on April 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

(Not so) coincidentally, my web forum is hosting a Mario Maker World Jam to celebrate and encourage world creation. It's open until May 31! It's only slightly undercut by the game limiting you to only uploading a single world at a time, so this is probably something to participate in/play as it's occurring, rather than after-the-fact, as all these worlds are likely to vanish into the engines of creation after the jam ends and creators come up with new ideas. (Or perhaps they won't; perhaps Animal Crossing and other titles have depleted interest in Mario Maker sufficiently that creators will leave their submissions as-is, and move on to other games afterward. I couldn't say.)
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 3:36 PM on April 25, 2020

Me on March 3rd: "Man, if this results in a quarantine it would be the perfect time to have a Switch maybe I should just buy one."

Me on April 25th lookingat 800 dollar switches online: "I am a fool of the highest order."
posted by codacorolla at 3:40 PM on April 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

Is there a wiki or something that lists the various Super Mario Maker 2 tricks (such as how to make a dark/spotlighted level, how to make an upside-down level, various idioms for using the components and such)? (I'm guessing here that all the Story Mode levels are 100% creatable with Super Mario Maker 2 without any custom code; surely Nintendo wouldn't cheat their players like that, would they?)
posted by acb at 4:21 PM on April 25, 2020

A contrarian opinion from venturebeat:

nearly all Super Worlds you come across are going to feel haphazard. Of course most people aren’t as good as Nintendo at making Mario, but that’s not really what I’m asking from creators. I just want a sign that you thought about another human being actually sitting down to play your stages.

Super Mario Maker 2 never encouraged that kind of empathy with the player before, and I defended that. The game was about inflicting almost cruel designs on our friends, families, and followers. That’s a lot of fun one stage at a time. But it’s zero fun as a string of levels with no overarching guidance or flow, and it’s probably going to prevent me from playing around in Super World mode.

posted by pwnguin at 7:12 PM on April 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've been spending the last few days working on a coherent, 8-part world, which will be a long undertaking even with the time that the lockdown is providing, but damn it's good to finally have this ability.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:09 PM on April 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is there a wiki or something that lists the various Super Mario Maker 2 tricks (such as how to make a dark/spotlighted level, how to make an upside-down level, various idioms for using the components and such)

Spotlight and upside-down levels are made by switching a map into "Night Mode," which changes some of the game rules depending on the theme. If I remember correctly: desert gets wind, water gets a spotlight, castle gets underwater physics, underground gets reversed gravity, and there's some other changes too. I've been documenting them but it'd take some time to find my notes at the moment.

Here's a reminder that we have a blog for Metafilter Mario Makers, for finding levels to play or posting your own (MeMail if you want on for posting purposes).

I think the biggest mistake for SMM2 was that they never adapted the Super Mario Maker Bookmark website to work with it! It's still Wii-U only!
posted by JHarris at 7:25 PM on April 27, 2020