"The hardest Mario ever made 2 maps, only 15 people in the world passed, 5 of whom were Chinese," the title of an online video reads. In the video, pixel Mario from FC's original Super Mario Bros. tosses between the swirling flame rods that cover the entire screen. In just 5 minutes, the stocky little Mario passed through 5 sets of the same arrangement and full of flame rods in a row, reaching the end of the entire map. When the castle flag slowly rises and the classic "Mario" playthrough music sounds in the game, a sentence comes from the video: "That's it?" ”
The question comes from the anchor Domi, and this video is also taken from the live video uploaded by Domi on his channel, which challenges various difficult "Super Mario Creator 2" levels. Super Mario Creator is a platform action game launched by Nintendo in 2015 and released in 2019. Domestic players refer to this series as "Mazao" for short. One of the biggest selling points of "Mazo" is that it is equivalent to the official version of the "Super Mario" editor, where players can create their favorite levels from the "Super Mario" materials of the past and then share them with others to challenge.
The video was first uploaded by Domi in July 2021
For players, "Horse Made" levels can generally be divided into several categories: regular diagrams, automatic diagrams, skill diagrams, cooperative diagrams, speed maps, and music diagrams. Interesting levels like auto maps and music maps that use various mechanics are of course popular, and the popularity of the co-op mode is also very high, but the difficult maps that let people experience setbacks in one failure after another have always been the real hot topic of the "Mazao" series. In 2015, after the release of the Wii U version of "Super Mario Creator", many videos challenging the "Horse Made" high difficulty figure can always be seen on social networks, and "Super Mario Creator" has become the darling of the anchors who pursue the effect of the program for a while, and many offline game activities have challenged these high difficult figures as a supporting program.
In 2019, "Mazao" landed on the Switch platform, and the boom of challenging high-difficult maps also struck again. There have been many videos on social networks flaunting themselves as challenging "the hardest figures ever made." The video is fascinating and engaging, but it also makes people ask: What kind of level can be called high difficulty in "MaZao"? What is the real most difficult "horse-made" map?
Jumping, the easiest is also the hardest
What makes the "Ma-made" high-difficulty card possible is mario's most repetitive and basic action in the entire series - jumping.
As a side-scrolled platform action game series, the operation of "Super Mario" is simple and easy to understand: in addition to using the arrow keys to control the left and right movements, most of the time the player only needs to use the A and B buttons to control the Mario jump and sprint. Although in subsequent works, the "Super Mario" game introduces new actions such as spinning, throwing, and wall jumping, the core of the whole game is still the most basic jump.
However, like other Nintendo games, "Super Mario" is also "easy to get started, difficult to master", the game itself is suitable for all ages, even children who are new to video games can learn basic jumping operations, easy to pass, but want to master a variety of jumping skills, quickly pass the level, or get a variety of hidden rewards, the difficulty will rise sharply.
Red coins are generally reserved for players who are proficient in the game to collect
Based on the operation skills of the official levels, "Mazaku" players create various strange tricks by mixing various game mechanics. Jumping, spinning, throwing, combining these actions, with a variety of props carefully designed on the map, can make the difficulty of the operation several times higher. For example, if Mario's throwing action is combined with jumping, it is "turtle shell jump" - the player needs to throw the turtle shell when the jump reaches an accurate height, and step on the bounced turtle shell to take off twice when the turtle shell reaches mid-air, so as to achieve the effect of the in-situ two-stage jump. Advanced operations also require the instant change of direction in mid-air to throw the turtle shell and step on it, in order to complete the "aerial turtle shell jump" of the second stage of the air jump and so on.
The "Super Mario" has strict requirements for operational accuracy. In Super Mario Creator 2, the game runs at a frame rate of 60 frames per second, and operations like "Turtle Shell Jump in the Air" need to be accurate to the exact frame, that is, the player needs to accurately enter in less than 0.02 seconds to complete the operation of stepping on the shell after throwing the shell in the air. Because the accuracy of this operation is so high that it almost requires TAS, that is, the simulator assistance commonly used in the study of speed-up to stabilize and succeed, "aerial turtle shell jump" is also called "TAS jump". At the same time, the height of Mario's jump is determined by the length of time it takes to press the A button, and in many levels, in order to accurately control Mario's trajectory, players must also control the length of the button while finding the right time.
"Turtle Shell Jump in the Air" was once one of the major difficulties of the "Mazuo" map, and anchor Link's famous high-difficulty map "Link's Great Adventure" used the "Turtle Shell Jump in the Air" technique many times. In order to successfully pass the level on his own, he uploaded a video of this map, when he "died tens of thousands of times" to complete the problem he set for himself. However, in Super Mario Creator 2, due to system limitations, players can no longer complete the "Turtle Shell Jump in the Air" normally, and can only complete it on the downwind map or using cloak props. The new technique is similar to the previous "Turtle Shell Jump in the Air", but it needs to be achieved with the help of the terrain designed in the level.
Link's attempt to re-clear the map in the new version of "Mazao" took quite a long time
In "Horse Made", there are also many advanced techniques such as "turtle shell jumping", such as crouch jumping, spring jumping, 1-frame jumping and so on. Among them, "crouch jump" requires the player to jump after pushing the joystick obliquely down before jumping into the squat state, and can maintain a squat posture in mid-air, combined with sprinting, rotation and other actions, can drill through the space that cannot be drilled under normal height.
Many levels have such seemingly "impossible" scenarios that require the player to use these techniques to get through.
Use the squat jump technique to pass through a cubic slit
Maps that require repetitive difficult operations like Link's Adventure are nicknamed "Poison Maps" in the Mazao community. In this type of level, various designs that require high-precision operation will appear repeatedly and continuously in a picture - such as "turtle shell jump in the air" and "1 frame jump" such difficult operations, success once may not be so difficult for old players, but it is definitely not easy to succeed continuously. Because of this, the clearance rate of "poison map" is very low, often below 0.1%.
"If the success rate of one operation is 50%, then two repetitions is 25%, and the more times it is repeated, the lower the overall clearance success rate." Domi said that in the face of these "poison maps" that increase geometrically because of the accumulation of difficulties, no one can get started and pass. To cross each obstacle, you need to practice repeatedly – starting with the most basic jump timing and duration.
Quickpass: Moves towards the border of difficulty
When the mechanisms continue to overlap and mix, the high-difficulty cards of "Ma-made" also become more and more complex, and if they do not practice for a long time, they may not even be able to pass the first difficulty, and they will die at the beginning of the map in less than a few seconds. For most beginners and new players, these "poison maps" are enough to dissuade them.
But the designers didn't stop there. Although it is difficult to stack a map of difficult points, as long as you practice a sufficient number of times and master all the difficulties in them, you will always have a chance to pass the level. The real "hardest" level adds another restriction – time.
Limited-time levels are not uncommon in the game, some of which are marked by a countdown to dangling numbers to indicate your time left, and some of which warn you that time is running out through designs such as slowly rising lava and slowly closing doors. This type of design is often used to increase the player's nervousness while requiring the player to be proficient in the operation and pass the level in one go.
When the time limit appears in the "Mazao" high difficulty chart, the difficulty of the game moves from "difficult" and "very difficult" to almost impossible. In the words of Domini, these diagrams are not even "poison maps", they should be called "ghost animal maps". In fact, the level with the "Speedpass" marker in the level introduction, the time limit, and the high-precision operation are the most difficult types of maps in the Super Mario Creator 2 game. If you want to clear these charts, not only can you not make mistakes, but you can't have any pauses. What's more, because of their own time limits, it is even difficult for players to advance the practice step by step, just breaking through one or two difficult points, and the time may be up. This makes it even more difficult to overcome the quick-pass card.
Based on the information that can be collected, I have counted the 50 player-made levels with the lowest pass rate in "Mazao 2", of which 38 are speed cards with time limits. On the surface, the pass rate of these charts is 0.00%, but it does not mean that no one must be cleared - in the game, the pass rate can only be displayed to two decimal places. In fact, their clearance rate is calculated in terms of "how many tenths of a thousandth", such as the 70-second pass card "Pole めきれ!! スピードラン~炎舞~Speedrun 70sec", there were 237,950 challenges, only 6 people successfully passed, and the clearance rate was less than 0.0026%.
High-difficulty cards with time limits tend to have "Speedrun" written on the title
Of course, judging the difficulty only by the clearance rate is not necessarily very accurate. Because these 50 levels have both figures with less than 50,000 challenges and not too high popularity, and more than 5 million challenges from players, the pass rate is still less than 0.002% - the latter is undoubtedly more in line with the definition of "super high difficulty". Roughly speaking, though, they still reflect to some extent the dominance of the Quickpass card on the list of the most difficult maps.
In terms of outcomes alone, the hardest level in the entire game is a quick-pass card, with players making 651909 attempts (and counting), but only 6 players succeeding in challenging. A clearance rate of just 0.0009% makes it the true "hardest ever" map of "Ma-made".
Players who can't pass the level leave a message in the level, thinking that this author must have hidden the "back door"
The author gave the level a very sarcastic title - "40 Seconds Pass for Beginners Made by Fifth Graders." Although the author may be joking, Domi agrees to some extent: "It is not an exaggeration at all, and we can't stand the 'poison map' made by elementary school students." He told me that Japanese elementary school players are indeed one of the main forces in making poison maps and ghost animal maps, and there are often titles such as "levels made by elementary school students" in the high difficult map hot list.
Are Japanese elementary school students really keen on making such "poison maps"? Hardly. It may be true that elementary school students who are not sure of the upper difficulty limit have beaten a large number of players with their own creations, or it may be that others express their attitude towards the game and other players in the name of elementary school students - it may not be friendly. In any case, "Elementary School Student Makes Poison Map" is a legend among "Mazaku" players.
The picture called "the hardest"
Let's go back to the picture at the beginning of the article. The map is known as "the hardest ever", with 208 players successfully completing the level out of a total of 300,000 challenges, with a pass rate of 0.06%. Judging from the clearance rate, this chart is difficult, but it is certainly not the "most difficult in history". In Domi's view, it is at best a medium difficulty in the high difficulty map. "It took a long time to practice when I passed the first level, but as long as I passed the level once, it is easy to say that I will pass the level later." He told me that the picture wasn't too strict about the timing of the jump, and that the real test was whether the player could jump at the right height accurately.
The reason why it will be rumored to be the "most difficult picture in history", of course, there are elements of social media to promote the pursuit of traffic, but more importantly, it is quite ornamental to play, the program effect is good, and it is easier to get the favor of anchors and viewers. Domi admits that compared to those genuine "high difficulty" and "ghost animal" maps, this map full of rotating flame rods and players operating with clouds and flowing water is obviously more popular: "Every time you play this map live, the heat suddenly rises." The audience enjoyed watching me clear the moment and felt very decompressed. It's much more ornamental than sticking to that particularly hard picture. ”
When passing the customs, this sound of "entering the door and passing the customs", Domi almost shouted out
What's more, even viewers who are not familiar with this picture can easily see its structural problems - just repeating the same level 5 times. This kind of pure superposition can obviously not be used as a criterion for increasing the difficulty, otherwise, if you repeat it 10 times, 20 times, or even add a harsh time limit, you can easily get a more difficult map.
In fact, the original design of the section that was repeated 5 times in the level of the Domi Challenge was a "1-1, but a little rotating" level created by author Sunny in 2019. As the name suggests, it remade the "1-1" map of the FC version of Super Mario Bros., adding countless rotating flame wands to it. These clockwise and counterclockwise mixed flame wands make the level dangerous, and players need to carefully observe and find gaps in them before they can travel through the cracks of these flame wands until they pass the level.
This picture was regarded as one of the most difficult levels of "Mazao" shortly after its release, and almost every anchor who plays "Mazao" will try it. Author Sunny's article about the level was selected by The Game Award as the best game tweet of the year. Compared with the various "poison maps" and quick-pass cards that followed, this map does not have the near-impossible difficulty, but its mechanics are simple and interesting, and the concept of replicating "1-1" levels is also very attractive, and has been regarded as a classic by players for a long time.
The tweet is still Sunny's top tweet today
At the same time, it is precisely because it is interesting, difficult and emotional, it is easier to go out of the circle, so that many players who do not understand "Mazao" feel the impact, but also spawned a lot of meme diagrams used to express shock. To this day, when it comes to "the hardest 'horse-made' level," many people still think of this picture — like the video at the beginning of the article.
However, if you want to revisit this map, you will find that the map code left by the author has expired. I contacted the original author, Sunny, who told me that in order to complete an achievement in the game that required uploading a new level to unlock, he had to delete the level from the already occupied tiles, and then did not leave a grid to re-upload. "I'm sorry." Sunny said, "I very much regret deleting this level. For those who still want to play this picture, his advice is to play the version that someone else uploaded and repeated 5 times - you don't need to complete the level, just complete the level process once.
The original version of the level is forever saved in Sunny's Pinnacle Tweet. It's a video of him completing the level himself, 59 seconds long, more than 30 million views, with only a short sentence: "I have no complaints." ”
The difficulty is endless
Super Mario Creator 2 is still an active game, with a considerable number of players still producing maps on the "Horse Made" platform. It is foreseeable that the "hardest in history" levels we count today may one day be surpassed. These difficult maps will be conquered by more later players, and the new and more difficult maps will be replaced by the new "hardest maps".
However, this does not mean that there is no real "hardest map" in "Mazuo" - in fact, in different eras, there are different most difficult maps. The title used to be "1-1, but a bit of a spin", and now belongs to the exaggerated speedcards, and more maps will be given the name "Hardest Map" in the future. They all deserve to be called the hardest of Super Mario Creators 2. These milestones leading to the culmination of the "Horse Made" difficulty will not be forgotten by players.