Ports are a fun subject to talk about. It's interesting to see a game ported from one console to another. Sometimes, it makes perfect sense, like New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, (even if the name is a bit iffy), but sometimes they don't.

A curious case is Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS. (Even more iffy names). Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS, as easily guessed, is a version of the game Super Mario Maker, originally released on the Wii U. At first this makes sense. The Wii U was a failure in the sales department. Super Mario Maker basically was the only thing holding it by the fringes of complete financial failure during 2015.

I bring this up because with Super Mario Maker's financial success, it would make clear sense to bring it to Nintendo's other console at the time: the very successful 3DS. A portable version of this game that people could enjoy on a console small enough to fit in one's pocket sounds amazing! Nintendo was biting a bit more than they could chew, however.

How do you take a game as complex as Super Mario Maker and fit it on something with a 268 MHz processor? Nintendo's answer was, well, you directly put it on there.

That was their first mistake.

Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS's code is basically the same as the Wii U original. Which, again, for a clock speed of 268 MHz is not a very wise decision. It has very poor performance when many objects are moving, as expected. But the extent to which this is treated is... not very good. It even occasionally lags on the menus. It lags during some of the game's built-in story mode, which I'll get back to soon.

I think that most of this could be fixed with some performance patches. But the game never got any. All of the patches were bug fixes; I'm not Ceave Gaming on this topic, but it still hurts a little bit.

On the other hand, most of the built-in levels are actually really good. They preform well (usually) and are actually really fun. For a portable console, you would need to have a good category of offline levels to play on a road trip or something, which I think this port really excels at. The massive amount of quality offline levels included in this port is amazing and I think that this deserves some talk in the debate of this game.

One thing I've been leaving out in this article is the online functionality, and that's because this is basically what everything brings up when they talk about this version of the game. A game maker, if it has a level-sharing system, needs to have a good one, right? The original Super Mario Maker had a relatively nice level-sharing system. You could search for a level by its popularity or difficulty. You could also do a "100-Mario Challenge" where your goal was to clear as many uploaded courses as possible with 100 lives. You could also sort this by difficulty. In Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS, you get a randomly selected batch of levels to scroll through. You also can get "Recommended Courses" based on what levels you played. For a game creator tool, this is a really bad way of handling online levels.

Additionally, something the community gets flared up about for this game is the fact that you could not upload the levels you created to Course World.  This causes a lot of disco--wait. No. Basically every single party of the debate hates this choice. You can only share your levels to people you created in Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS to people over StreetPass.




Overall, Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS is a badly preforming version of the Wii U original, with loads of great offline content and lackluster online support.

I've been koola, and I'm done ranting for today.

(Expect some more Omnifate stuff soon, because I'm getting into getting a demo out by the end of summer.)

Permalink | Comments [1] | Digg This Article | Tweet