| Mario Maker(Wii U) |
I'm going to admit, I'm a bit out of touch with video games past, oh say, the Wii era, and if it were not for me having a stint with NOA (Nintendo fo America) for about 8 months of 2007, I probably would have stopped with the SNES being my strongsuit at the latest, and the N64 being the last time I ever really paid attention. By that point, I was learning guitar, and using the NES and SNES to exercise my fingers when they were not jamming on some strings and fretting notes.
So somewhereabouts 2015, Nintendo finally created something I had wanted since I was a wee little kid - Super Mario Maker - a game where you can create your own Mario Levels. Why it took Nintendo this long to create something like this is anyone's guess. Before that, if you wanted to make your own levels, you downloaded a ROM for the desired Nintendo system, and then used a bunch of website-begotten tools designed to decode and allow you to manipulate the software code for said game. This was called NES ROM Hacking. I'm willing to be Mario Maker was a response to this, especially considering Nintendo's litigious and heavy handed rules for online streaming (which I'm not so sure I fully fit in with, but oh well). But either way, this was an answer to all those wants from over 20-30 years ago when I was drawing up my own Nintendo levels with colored pencils on graph paper as a kid. So we'll explore some levels in here I've created maybe.My inner Level Designer - My Experiences I got my hands on this thanks to my Aunt MariJo. She's getting well up there and still buys the latest game systems, she has 2 Nintendo Switch right now, and a PS4, and the Wii U - the total opposite of me (who will probably pick up a Switch when I see them in goodwill for $10 covered in horrible dime store Mario stickers). I'm actually using the Wii U she owns for this. See, I got my start designing Mario levels as an 8 year old kid. Something I've never talked about is my love for the modular elements of video games and video ggame programming. I always noticed how there were these little "blocks" that made up a level consisting of repeated and tiled elements to create the world in which the characters lived. So I used to draw my own levels, some of them really cool. I was a weird little kid, and quite bored (east Alabama), so this was one way to cure boredom I guess. Next I got my first computer with Windows in 2001, and I started messing around with NES ROMs with a Hex Editor after a online tutorial in NES ROM Hacking. And one of the things I liked to mess with was Level design, though it was very tricky. See, unlike Mario Maker, where youjust place elements with a stylus or your finger, we now enter the world of 6502 assembly programming - Stacks, Pointer Assignments, Allocation of Resources that are both finite and strict where you can't add any enemies from the game - but you can MOVE them and CHANGE what they are. First off, any game you wanted to edit needed a tool - the Mario Games had this - they were called Mario Improvement, Mario 3 Improvement, and so on - where the program would look at the ROM Code, decode all of the levels, make an accessible list, and then you'd roam about the program making edits and changes to the levels within the ROM File, and then save and/or export as an IPS patch that you'd need yet another janky utility to apply the changes to a fresh Super Mario Bros 1/2/3 ROM file. This was further made difficult as not all NES games had the same "revision". IE, you could have Super Mario Bros. (NES-SB-001), then you could have an "A" revision (NES-SB-001-A), you could have "Multicart" versions like Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt or Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet (ie NES-SD-001 or NES-WH-001) - and those could have revisions too. And those revisions might make minor alterations to the game code that could make your patch work, or not work, depending. So imagine my surprise that Nintendo never came out with anything like this sooner. |
