Since Super Mario Maker 2 came out, I've been playing it a lot, making a few levels, playing other people's levels, and steadily working my way through Story Mode. It's a lot of fun. Having played and created levels in Super Mario Maker on the Wii U a great deal, I've spotted a few differences with the sequel. They are mostly small things, but differences nonetheless.
NB. This post doesn't cover the additional tools and features that are new to SMM2.
Length of level codes
Yes, there are still level codes, and they are still annoying. However, they are less annoying. In SMM the level codes were 16 characters long (XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX). Now, they're just 9 characters long (XXX-XXX-XXX). So they're a bit quicker to enter.
Conditional power-ups
In one of the free updates to SMM, you could use conditional power-ups. For instance, you'd only get a super leaf, fireball or cape if you hit a ? block as Super Mario, otherwise you'd get a mushroom. I haven't found a way to make these work in SMM2.
Size of starting area
In SMM you could make the starting area shorter. This doesn't seem to be possible in SMM2. I found this out when recreating one of my Wii U levels. I didn't realise it at first until some of my blocks were misaligned - I counted the ceiling blocks from the far left edge of the screen, and the ground blocks from the edge of the starting area. The result was that the ground was positioning two blocks over from the ceiling.
Then, when I reached the end of the level, I realised that in a full-width level, you actually lose 2 blocks. This didn't cause a major issue but it's worth noting if you're transferring levels from the original, and you make full use of the width.
Layering is less predictable
In one of my levels, I've layered two semi-solid blocks on top of each other to give a nicer visual effect. This was always a pain in SMM, but in SMM2 it feels harder to force one block to be the top layer. I've tried deleting and recreating the blocks, plus swapping the styling on the blocks, and they seem end up the same way around most of the time. It takes a few tries to get it right.
One more thing... importing from Wii U
This is a different thing, but I feel we really need a better way to transfer our courses from the Wii U to the Switch. I guess this would either need the consoles to link together, or for the Course World to recognise the author of a course across platforms. Otherwise, you could download other people's Wii U courses and claim them as your own. A missed opportunity. I plan to recreate some of my better Wii U courses, but it's a slow, laborious process.
Have you noticed anything missing from SMM2 that was in SMM?
