Super Mario Maker review – a designable Mario for the Minecraft generation

The drip-fed tools might irk the impatient, but this chance to take a stab at outdoing Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto has cult classic written all over it

When, in 1985, Nintendo's in-house genius Shigeru Miyamoto unleashed Super Mario Bros on the nascent world of gaming, he could scarcely have imagined that it would act as the definitive blueprint for one of the games world's most enduring genres: the 2D side-scrolling platformer. Still less that, over 30 years later, he would be able to let any old gamer emulate his development process (albeit with vastly superior tools than the ones he had in 1985), while melding the most venerable gameplay with a truly 21^st-century gaming phenomenon. But that's what Super Mario Maker does: by giving gamers the means to create their own Super Mario courses, it enters the realms of user-generated content alongside the stunningly successful likes of Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet.

Super Mario Maker gently eases you into your quest to become the new Miyamoto, with a half-built course that you must jazz up simply by painting new elements on the screen of the Wii U's Gamepad, using the stylus. You can add various blocks, either vanilla or containing power-ups and rewards, enemies such as goombas, trampolines, pipes and so on. Then, using the so-called Coursebot, you can name your creation (the game carefully explains that an interesting name can attract a much bigger audience) and publish it for all to play. Although, sensibly, you aren't allowed to publish it until you've completed a play-through - it's dead easy to make courses that are physically impossible to negotiate.