taffer wrote:Yahtzee's review pretty much sums up my view on this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5TjeU4xKqE
That guy's review makes a couple of valid points but for the most part I disagree with his review and I think it's bogus. I'm sure he got a lot of positive points and LOLs with the younger surly crowd for his cynicism, swearing, and juvenile references to dicks, spunk, and potty humor of the like.
1) The physics between the four graphical styles, it is not merely cosmetic only. The various suits for flying are different among the later three styles, NSMB can do the wall jump, etc. The only thing that in the graphical styles that feels changed to me is in the SMB style you can jump higher by holding down the A button - something you couldn't do in the original game. The various graphical styles do feel like the individual games they are based on, for the most part. The big criticism I can find is that you can't do hills, nor vertical/diagonal scrolling levels. Hopefully Nintendo will address that criticism as they did with the lack of level checkpoints.
2) As the weeks have progressed people have been making better levels, not just lame auto-play levels. The best way to experience the levels through the game is in the 100 Mario Challenge where you will get a randomized levels. I've played some excellent ones and some terrible ones, exactly what I expected from this game when I bought it. I think too many casual gamers just go into look for the highest rated levels and find novelty auto-levels thinking that's all that the game is. The random assortment of levels (good and bad) through the 100 Mario Challenge is where the fun is at, and that's where people's creative levels can shine other than early released crap levels getting regurgitated by people finding it already highly rated and not knowing of the other gem levels that are out there that simply aren't on the radar. Honestly the good levels outweighs the poor ones, and when people come across a good level they usually mark it as such by starring it and/or commenting on it. Unfortunately, still not enough people are starring those levels yet so they're being drowned out by shitty auto-play levels. So please, if you play Super Mario Maker and you come across a fun level that you enjoy - PLEASE STAR IT. The crappy levels are slowly getting weeded out but there will always be some. This is to be expected with a game that relies on UGC. I do wish that Nintendo had a different way to sort highly rated levels, perhaps have a different category for auto-play levels and a different category for real levels that actually require the player to pickup the controller and play. Who knows what difficulty of the Challenge this guy was playing, but I've found the normal difficulty to be the best. It is largely devoid of both those insanely hard "asshole Mario" levels typical of the SMW rom hacks of years past where they put invisible blocks over a pit you need to jump over (which I hate) and the stupid levels full of the same type of enemy or block (which I also hate).
3) Nintendo limiting the amount of creation tools at the start is intended to keep people from jumping right in and making a stupid level full of random enemies or blocks, which sometimes still happens anyway, unfortunately. They want the player to experiment slowly at first, in creative ways, instead of overwhelming them with everything at the start. Maybe that's an appropriate mindset for the younger crowd playing the game but not for grown ups that are familiar with these types of games, I don't know. At any rate, it's easy to work around that to unlock all of the elements within an hour or so of first playing the game. Instructions for how to do this were widely posted on the web the day the game was released. Also I'm glad that Nintendo limits players to only uploading ten levels, this helps to ensure that players only post their ten best creations, until they get enough stars/likes on those levels (100) to open up the next tier where they can upload up to 20 levels, then after a further 100 stars (200) they can do up to 30 uploads, and so on. I think this also helps ensure that people only upload their very best creations.
At the end of the day Super Mario Maker is not without its faults, its not perfect and its not the best Mario game ever, some would argue it's not even a game, but I'm having a good time with it and it utilizes the Gamepad in a better fashion than any other Wii U game I've played. I'd like to see Nintendo take the concept further to their other franchises such as 2D style Metroid, Mario Kart custom track creation, and perhaps even 2D Zeldas.