Topic: Yahtzee's review of Super Mario Maker left me feeling oddly conflicted...

Yes, but those mods don't have this:

Not to mention Mario Maker is actually legal, the mods are a bit of gray area (it is illegal to distribute ROMs, and any ROMs you have must have been dumped by you yourself). Mario Maker is missing a lot of stuff though, most likely to keep it simple or to add it in the inevitable sequel/DLC as the entire design philosophy of Mario Maker seemed to be to keep it clean and simple to allow easier access and understanding at the hands of a newer gamer/someone not experienced in rom hacking or game development.

I'm sure that they saved some money by minimizing the size of their team on the creative side. But that's not even my main point. The point is that we shouldn't be upset whenever Nintendo makes a quick buck with a game or design decision, unless it's at the expense of the consumer. Mario Maker is a great game, period, and however much money Nintendo spent on it is none of our concern.

I think part of the problem is that Super Mario Maker is a completely different sort of game depending on how you play it. If you're only dipping your toes in to the making aspects and then only dipping your toes into it? It can look a bit shallow. But once you go deeper you realise how much there is.

I'd say that probably 90% of the levels are pretty average. So there's a chance that you can go through the motions a couple of times and not get much out of it. And with the creation stuff? That creation addiction only starts if you start to get some recognition. And you'll only get the ability to build up a collection of levels if you make levels worthy of stars. So it's entirely possible that you won't get grabbed by that either....

but if it does grab you? it's incredibly rewarding. And you'll dive into the 100 Mario Challenge just to get new ideas. Or just boot up the game just so you can see whether you got any stars. That's when it becomes truly worth it.

@LztheQuack: You can always ASM hack it into SMB1 :> (Of course, easier said than done)

@AceDefective: Thats why we distribute something called patches, which just hold the new content, and not the rom. Is up to the user to get the rom :> (But of course, said patch could also have copyrighted materials like, songs ported from other games)

@skywake: That's true. It might not grab someone who's writing a review, and playing the game just to have adequately experienced the game for the review.

On the subject of "creators addiction," I might be that special case who had that same addiction without really getting much recognition at all. I dunno about anybody else.

There's also plenty of games he loves that feel terminally flawed to me.

Yahtzee, the guy that was happy to ride the GamerGate wave for as long as it was profitable to him, and only publicly spoke out against it when someone close to him was targeted by harassment.

His opinions are not valuable.

It's extremely silly to compare Super Mario Maker to PC editing tools though. Modding and editing have been ingrained into the Personal Computer scene since the late '70s. You rarely see this stuff on console.

And, just asking, are there really so many drag & drop editing softwares on PC that allow you to do what SMM does only better, with more options, for free and don't require you to have studied electronics engineering for five years?! Can you list them, I'd like to see them.

No. Such software does not exist, free or paid, on PC or anywhere else.

The closest I can think of is the RPG Maker series, but even that gets quite complicated in creating scenes. You don't need programming knowledge, but you need to have a basic understanding of how scripting works.

And it's only free if you pirate it. The most recent release is currently $70 on Steam.

@spizzamarozzi: AFAIK, there are only a couple of tools for hacking ROMs that make the process even remotely accessible to non-hackers. Even then, you still have to know quite a bit about programming and ROM hacking to be able to do anything like what SMM allows. Add on to that, hackers have to deal with the cartridge's limited storage capacity, which almost always precludes anything like SMM's variety.

SMM makes it possible for the average person to make a level, no matter what their level of skill is.

I want someone to draw a hyper realistic version of weird tall Mario.

Don't you think it has competition? Compare the number of LBP levels made during a year, compared with how many SMM levels that were made during the first week. Is the comparatively low number of levels in LBP a result of a product that hasn't been popular? Or compare it to the number of levels produced with any free PC level creator that has been available for years.

SMM is not about the number of options available and SMM isn't a level editor in the traditional sense. It's a game, even in creation mode. If you'd try the product yourself, you'd know.

And how is it possible for the level makers to make better courses than Nintendo's (according to yourself) with less options available? Perhaps level creations isn't about the number of options available? And if each produced level created in SMM required an average of 1 hour, the time that people has spent creating SMM levels has surpassed 1,000 man-year's of work by far. The output happening in SMM isn't much different from any other kind of product for crowd creation that has been available during the past 20 years.

Actually Toad's Tool, Lunar Magic, and to a lesser extent Zelda Classic do indeed exist as free (if not entirely legal) ROM hacking (well level creation in Classic's case) tools. Lunar Magic and Toad's Tool do require ROMs to work though, and Zelda Classic is a fan remake of Zelda 1 with a built in quest creation tool. But in terms of them being as comparable to Mario Maker? I imagine Lunar Magic and Toad's Tool being quite complicated and cumbersome to use and can confirm Zelda Classic is hella complicated and confusing (hence why I believe Zelda Maker will never be a thing). As many people have said before, Mario Maker's aim is to be simple, clean, and to the point so others can create levels simply and easily.

In response to the original post, Yahtzee has a long-standing history of bashing formulaic anything and absolutely despising anytjing that revolves around user-created content. Super Mario Maker was always bound to get a bad rap from him for thosr two reasons.

I also got fairly annoyed when he acted as if there's no difference between the various styles. Yeah, the differences have been decreased even from what they were, but the game style actually has a really big impact on how you design levels, as wall kicks, air stalls, and ground pounds are only available in NSMB, Spinning can be done only in SMW and NSMB, and te powerups change based on the style, forcing you to think differently in each scenario, rather than using the same design philosophy in all cases.

Reviewing Mario Maker as 'a game' like any other (at least like any other Mario game) is always going to fall a bit flat, as it's largely a creation tool. I don't think that fact leaves the player 'duped' in any way (unless they were expecting another fully assembled Mario game), it's just a different product.

It's the same trite little truism that's been bandied about a million times before, but the whether you enjoy the game or not really is worth far more than any review, especially in this case where no standardised game even exists. You really get out what you put in, and how much work or money a company put into it is irrelevant if the product itself is sound. Majora's Mask was hurriedly assembled from scraps of OoT, and yet it's still many people's favourite Zelda game.

You've bought a tool, and if you're enjoying it, then you're using it well. It's also worth bearing in mind that Yahtzee is basically a professional complainer as much as a professional entertainer. It's his trademark to machine-gun his way through as many faults as possible in the allotted time, with short breaks to throw in some obscene metaphors and a few high notes before continuing to mow down the product in question. I think such a style is going to make a few shots at miss the mark, but they're over so quickly that's it's hard to notice if you haven't got a good knowledge of the game yourself. They're not really designed to inform people as much as make them snort their orange juice all over the keyboard.

There as still arguments to be had about the tool itself, missing features etc., but that's another story.

It appears this is oviously part of the sinister dice/board/card game plot to smear & take down the video game industry.

Dun Dun Dun!

@RR529: lol. Yeah they really hate Nintendo because they were apart of the evil board game syndicate before the 80's.

You have to be devoid of soul to hate Mario Maker. You know they're probably going to throw out some awesome DLC before the holidays.

Everyone cares too much about reviews. What is YOUR opinion? Who cares about others' opinions. It's about what YOU think.

I'm not trying to be arrogant or a jerk; I mean this in the kindest way: Why is it so hard for people to realize that?