Mario Paint

"Nintendo does yet another orginal game!"

To say it right out: Mario Paint is one of the best SNES games. It's original, innovative, creative and simply cool!!

When you first buys the game it'll come packed with a mouse for the SNES. Yes, a mouse, just like the one you used to get to this review. But the SNES mouse is much more primitive, just two buttons (Ok... I'm using a two-button mouse for the PC, too! But that's primitive).
You plugs the SNES-mouse into your controller port and voila, you can use it! The only SNES game that I know supports the mouse is Mario Paint, but there may be more...

Well, well... After plugging the mouse into the port, insert the cartridge into the game slot and start the game! You'll be welcomed by Mario running across the screen, with the word Mario Paint above. You can click on Mario if you want, that'll take you to the main ''game'', but if you clicks on the letters, special things will happen...

The main portion of the game is the screen with two toolbars in the upper and lower side of the screen, and a white page between them, it's that white page that you are going to paint at! The toolbars does have all the normal features; paint, spray, stamp, lines. There are more, but standing here all day going through that...

The palette is the upper toolbar; here you can choose between a set of colors. If you click on the little figure at the right side of the color bar, you'll get a new set of colors! If you clicks like that until the last color scheme; it's blank! Now, what can that mean?

The blank scheme is your's: if you go to the other lower toolbar (clicks on a figure there to). You'll find a lot of interesting options. One of them is to do your own color scheme (or stamps). Another one is to compose your own music, not that advanced, but the games name is Mario Paint, right? There's also a minigame for those not used to a mouse (it was back in 1992, after all). The minigame is to kill different kinds of insects by pointing at them with the mouse pointer and click!!

Now... the most interesting feature of Mario Paint: the animation maker! With this wonderful tool you can do your own animations. You can choose to do a four images long animation that gives you one fourth of the screen to work on your animation pictures, a six images that gives you a sixth of the screen and a nine images... yeah, you understand. When you have finished the images used for the animation, you go on to the movement. When you are finished, you can look at your animation that moves on the background that you painted while listening to your own music, COOL!!!. If you can, hook up your SNES to a video, do your own movies! (Well, not really, but...)

The only real bad thing about this game is that the memory is so bad... You can only save one ''set'' (background + animation + music) of your works, really a drawback...

SUMMARY

Graphics: 10 - Impossible for me to say; it all depends on how good you are at painting, but if you can, is this a good tool for doing it. ;-)

Sounds: 9 - You can do some real good pieces of music with the music editor. You've got drums, guitar, dog... yes, dog!

Control: 6 - The mouse is good, but after using it a long time like me; it begins not to respond at movement. The pointer just stops, higly irritating while painting!

Long-living: 10 - If you thinks that it's fun that paint, like me, this game will last forever; even longer if you hook up a video so that you can save more than one of your works.

TOTAL: 9 - It's a good game, a really good game. It starts to feel old, but compared to many other SNES games out there: this is great, a must-buy if you owns a SNES.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/22/02, Updated 07/22/02