28th March 2024, 6:23 AM
So, as you all probably know Nintendo is shutting off Wii U and 3DS online service completely in April, early next month. This is a just terrible decision that I hope modders fix -- and they will, I expect -- but for the official service, the big question was, can the Mario community beat every level in SMM1 before the servers turn off and make the game mostly useless? Of the millions of levels made in the first Mario Maker most were cleared years ago, but tens of thousands were left uncleared, most very difficult. The community got to work, though I doubt that even most of the people clearing the levels thought they would succeed...
But, weeks before the deadline, they did! With one exception, but it kind of doesn't count. Yes, all of those tens of thousands of extremely difficult levels fell to the games' best players. I'm not one of them, I'm pretty average at Mario sadly. Then it came down to only one level that was discovered to be exceptionally difficult. It's only ten seconds long, but requires 18 frame-perfect inputs in that time and more within that time. Several people are still playing it, but it still has not been cleared...
Because after a while of people trying, the level creator admitted that the level was actually tool-assisted. Somebody had found a way to make a TAS (tool-assisted superplay) work on real hardware in SMM1 on the Wii U, and made use of that to upload this level, Trimming the Herbs, and one other, bombs5. Nobody knew before this that it was possible to do that in SMM1 back when you could upload levels to the game, so this was a somewhat surprising revelation, but given how insanely hard the level is it makes sense. Illigitimate levels like tool-assisted stuff don't count towards the 'beat all the levels' goal since the goal is to beat evey level acually uploaded by a human, so with that SMM1 was declared cleared some days earlier when the last legit level, somewhat amusingly titled The Last Dance, was cleared. Now, even though it's a TAS, Trimming The Herbs is possible for a human to beat. bombs5 was cleared within the past few months, so despite it being not a legitimate level it's possible to finish these stages, just extremely hard. I hope that someone does clear this last level and some are making progress, but a human matching TAS perfection is really hard so we'll see... but either way, all legit SMM1 levels are cleared, and that's an amazing accomplishment given how many millions of stages were uploaded and not deleted!
But, weeks before the deadline, they did! With one exception, but it kind of doesn't count. Yes, all of those tens of thousands of extremely difficult levels fell to the games' best players. I'm not one of them, I'm pretty average at Mario sadly. Then it came down to only one level that was discovered to be exceptionally difficult. It's only ten seconds long, but requires 18 frame-perfect inputs in that time and more within that time. Several people are still playing it, but it still has not been cleared...
Because after a while of people trying, the level creator admitted that the level was actually tool-assisted. Somebody had found a way to make a TAS (tool-assisted superplay) work on real hardware in SMM1 on the Wii U, and made use of that to upload this level, Trimming the Herbs, and one other, bombs5. Nobody knew before this that it was possible to do that in SMM1 back when you could upload levels to the game, so this was a somewhat surprising revelation, but given how insanely hard the level is it makes sense. Illigitimate levels like tool-assisted stuff don't count towards the 'beat all the levels' goal since the goal is to beat evey level acually uploaded by a human, so with that SMM1 was declared cleared some days earlier when the last legit level, somewhat amusingly titled The Last Dance, was cleared. Now, even though it's a TAS, Trimming The Herbs is possible for a human to beat. bombs5 was cleared within the past few months, so despite it being not a legitimate level it's possible to finish these stages, just extremely hard. I hope that someone does clear this last level and some are making progress, but a human matching TAS perfection is really hard so we'll see... but either way, all legit SMM1 levels are cleared, and that's an amazing accomplishment given how many millions of stages were uploaded and not deleted!
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