Monday, December 21, 2015

Super Mario Maker 1.30

Hey everyone!  Released today was Super Mario Maker 1.30.  This is the version that gives us the Super Mario Maker Bookmark site, which is both an easier way to search for interesting courses and a better way to play them!

If you sign into the site with your Nintendo Network ID (NNID), you can choose to "bookmark" a course.  The next time you load the game up on your Wii U, there will be a list of bookmarked courses you can choose and play immediately from!  And I hear, if you're using the Wii U's Internet Browser, you can even jump to the course immediately from the listings!

Furthermore, and of special interest to us, it is possible to more directly link to one of your courses, for bookmarking or immediate play!  The URL of your stage on the internet takes the form:

https://supermariomakerbookmark.nintendo.net/courses/[course ID here]

So, my recent course Beneath The Floating Islands has the URL:

https://supermariomakerbookmark.nintendo.net/courses/67AA-0000-011D-B357

Its worth having a look at the site even if you're not playing immediately, as a maker can now "tag" his course with one of a number of descriptors: Automatic, Music, Puzzle, Gimmick, Dash, Remix, Thumbnail, Costume, Yoshi, Theme or Speedrun.  Apparently you can only apply one tag to each of your courses, and they have to be one of those, which kind of sucks, but Nintendo seems to be learning how to do this better and so maybe it'll improve in the future?

Additionally, courses now list both the first player to finish it (excluding courses uploaded before the update) and the world record completion time for finishing it.

And there are also three new course elements!  Shaking a Grinder (sawblade) creates a pinball-like bumper, shaking a door turns it into a P-Switch Door that can only be used while a switch is in effect (it appears as a dotted line otherwise), and the Koopa Clown Car can now be shaken to make it into a more powerful armed version.

Sunday, December 6, 2015

The Lost Level Exit

The Lost Level Exit
BCDD-0000-010E-BE47

With the Wii U offline for the past month or so due to a move, my Mario making has been getting a little rusty. But playing some old Mario games in the meantime, I was struck by inspiration. This one homages/shamelessly swipes the gimmick from one of the later Lost Levels stages. I suspect my tolerances may have been thrown off by playing a lot of Expert Mode in Mario Maker, but going back to Lost Levels, they don't seem nearly as unfairly difficult as I remember.

But anyway, now that I'm back online, I'm pretty delighted to see everyone has made a lot of stages--I'm looking forward to playing through the backlog!