‘Super Mario Maker’ Review: Creating Your Custom Level One Brick at a Time!

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Johnathan Swisa '17, Staff Writer

Ever wonder how Nintendo organized the way Super Mario looks? Well, now you can find out with “Super Mario Maker!” In this game, you have the ability to create your own levels and the obstacles Mario has to overcome to reach the flag pole. You can use different looks, such as the very pixilated designs from the Super Mario game of 1985 (the first one ever, I might add), “Super Mario Bros. 3” from 1988 (slightly less pixilated but not yet 3D), a cartoonish and pixilated mashed-up “Super Mario World” from 1991, or the very HDTV look that is “Super Mario Bros. U” from 2012.

If you are stuck on what you want to make your stage look like, you can view other people’s creations in a mode called “course world.” You can upload your stages for other players to test out as well. There’s also the 100 Mario Challenge where you have to complete eight stages on “easy” and sixteen on “normal” and “expert” with only one hundred lives to survive. There are about 10 Mario challenges similar to the description above.

With the Amiibo device, you can turn into another character besides Mario. If you have an Amiibo of Donkey Kong or Yoshi, you can put it on your Wii U gamepad and Mario will transform into the Amiibo character. Each day you play the game, new items will be delivered to make the game play even better!

What’s neat about this video game is that you can really interact with it, you feel like you just created the next Super Mario! You can put enemies on top of enemies and put stars, coins, and mushrooms inside blocks to hit and collect. You can move the stage closer or farther depending on how you like it. You can add sound effects to the background using the SFX frog icon in the corner of the screen. If you wanted, you could put the flag pole right next to the character, and you’re done! (If you want to cheat, that is.)

As someone who played this game, I recommend it because of how much fun it is and how creative you can get when designing levels. I mean, how else can you simply touch a yellow turtle and become smaller? If I had to give this game a grade, I would give it an A for its creativity and flexibility. Now that’s a company that knows what it’s doing!