365//365: Day 048 – Mario Paint (SNES)

Nintendo’s first party titles are rarely ever hit or miss. More or less, you’ll always have a hit in your hands….well, up until the Gamecube and Wii days that is, but I digress. On the Super Nintendo, it’s nearly impossible to find a Nintendo developed title that doesn’t meet their high standards. Even with genre molding titles such as Super Metroid and Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario World 2, you’ll find a careful amount of detail and dedication across the board. There was one title that tried to define a whole other way of playing a video game. One that dared to push the envelope on creativity, accessibility and enjoyment from any age. Mario Paint was that title, and although the ambitious title really pushed what we could and could not view as a home console video game, many aspects have not aged well whatsoever.

Although it took a great deal of effort to get a proper icon constructed, the end results of your labors yields enough personal rewards.

Regardless of the present, when Mario Paint first came out, it was one of the most innovating console titles on the market. I’m sure you could get the same type of excitement on Windows 3.1, but not all of us had a PC back then. Not to mention, most PC’s didn’t come with a mini game that involved swatting flies and other bugs.

Mario Paint had a good amount of content to go along with its packed in mouse and mouse “pad”. You had the ability to draw your own pictures with the varying sizes of markers, crudely animate certain things, create your own special stamp pieces (Wario’s head, a pink Mario hate, etc), add text, and more. That’s just the base portion of the game. You can also construct a crude song with a song creation tool, as well as play a fly swatting mini game. There’s enough variety to stave off monotony, and for the most part, its all a lot of fun.

There’s a few nagging issues that does throws an ugly shade of gray on this otherwise colorful production. Two of them go hand in hand – mouse speed and drawing within fast motions. Default mouse speed is, to be nice, pitifully slow. Putting it on the maximum speed settings, and you’ll still feel like it’s going a a pace slower than Betty White trying to run down Reggie Bush during a punt return. The carry over to the actual drawing is the fact that if you move to fast, your paint brush skips across the screen. What this means is that if you move to fast, a straight line going from left to right, turns into the Morse code for SOS. The unusual paradox is that in order for that to happen, you have to move your paint brush from one direction to another, in a fast manner, but even on the fastest speeds, the cursor is way too slow.

The music composer showed the versatility that Mario Paint had.

Finally, the fly swatter mini game is a good bit of fun, and oddly, the slow cursor movements does not hamper the experience. The difficulty of the boss does, however. Although it’s a tough battle against the bosses, the mini game is a fun little side game.

To the console gamer, Mario Paint did provide quite a few innovations, as well as a few things that PC gamers took for granted. Although certain aspects are crude, as well as some mechanical hang ups in terms of movement speed and paint applications while moving too fast, there’s enough content to spent a good amount of time on, and have a good time as well. It has some clever additions to make it more than just a drawing game, enough depth in those additions to keep you satisfied and is a shining example of what Nintendo used to be – moderately successful enough with their new gimmicks.

Rating: 7.5