Mario Paint

"An outlet for your imagination"

Mario Paint is a game, and so much more. It was released a few years back and quickly became a huge hit. It brought PC style drawing to the SNES, added tons of cool features, and even came with the SNES mouse. Mario Paint is packed with things do to, don't assume all you can do is draw. Some of the cooler features include animations, custom "stamp" graphics, a large palette of available stamps, and even a simple music composer. Combine this with a wide variety of drawing/painting tools and you've got yourself a game that will outlast most any other game out there in terms of replayability, simply because Mario Paint is not a videogame in the convention sense of the word.

Even the title screen has stuff to do, and clicking on various letters in the title "Mario Paint" will do different things. Cool. Once you get started, you can begin to do anything you want. The drawing system is easy to use, though it gets annoying when you drag the mouse too fast and the line you are drawing breaks up. You can also go into a graphics editor and make customized "stamps", which are small pictures created pixel by pixel that would be near impossible to draw any other way. Get bored of drawing? There's even a built in fly swatting game with three levels where you fight your way through wave after wave of dangerous bugs, and face a giant mechanical fly at the end. This game, while simple, is actually pretty fun and requires a lot of hand to eye coordiantion and quick reflexes. The animation editor is also very cool. You can choose between an animation with four, six, or nine frames. Once you get it done, it displays it on the main background screen you created, and you can make a path for it to follow. Then, you can even set it to music if you composed a tune in the music editor. For me, the best part of this game is the music editor, because I really like composing my own songs. I've actually written a few cool ones, and you have a wide variety of sounds to choose from. The only problem is you can't specify note lengths, so all notes are the same length. Still, it's fun to play around with. If you don't feel like drawing your own pictures, there's a coloring book included with several premade pictures for you to color any way you like using the paintbrush tool. This game gives you so much to do, and never limits your creativity. The only problem is that the music is a bit weird and annoying, so you might want to turn it off. Still, everything else is great.

Gameplay: Very open ended. Since it's not a conventional game with pre-set goals or challenges, it's a bit hard to desribe it. There's lots to do, and unless you just don't like doodling around or fiddling with music, you'll probably really like this game. The fly swatting game is really good for a game within a game, and helps to give you a break from tedious drawing. The animation maker is cool, but sometimes it's hard to make them accurate, and the more frames you have, the less space you have to draw them in. 8/10

Graphics: Since you create your own, this is also hard to describe. The regular graphics are standard fare, and, well, I guess the rest depends on how good of an artist you are. I've seen some incredible pictures created on this thing though, so anything's possible. 8/10

Music/Sound: The sounds in this game are pretty neat, and there are even different eraser affects that make cool sounds (one of them begins to swish the drawing screen around cause static. It sounds like there's water in your TV. I made my mom think I broke it once). The best part of the music comes from the music editor. I love this thing. I can sit there for hours fiddling with tunes. It comes with three examples, all of which are great, and all are possible to make. Various pictures represent the instruments, and you place those pictures on the staff according to the pitch on the note. It ranges from Mario (who sounds like a note on a Marimba), to a car horn (sounds like a organ). There's also planes (acoustic guitars), Gameboys (techno-like beeps), and fire flowers (trumpets). Very cool, and very fun. 10/10

Overall: This was definitely worth buying in its time, and provides hours and hours and hours of entertainment to those with a creative spark.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99