Mario Paint

Games: Mario Paint

Release Date: 1992
Style: Art/Paint
Genre: Home
Similar Games: Art Alive (Sega Genesis)

Game Description

A fun creative outlet for aspiring artists and musicians, Mario Paint lets youngsters (and the young at heart) color, draw, compose music (from more than a dozen sounds) and produce four-, six- and nine-frame animations. Simple interfacing combined with a variety of colors, icons and backgrounds give the game virtually limitless replay value. The biggest drawback is that you can only save one picture at a time. Also, unlike with similar computer programs, you can't print your work. As a bonus, the cartridge includes a surprisingly enjoyable game of Gnat Attack, which involves using the mouse to maneuver a fly swatter around the screen in order to swat pesky critters.

~ Brett Alan Weiss, All Game Guide

Review: Overall

Mario Paint is perhaps the most ingenious and inspired idea Nintendo ever came up with for a product. See, it's not really a game; it's a paint program that lets you create your own animations, music and artwork with the mouse that is included in the packaging.

When you start up Mario Paint, you are presented with a blank canvas. It is here where you can design your own drawings and artwork. There are over 15 different colors to chose from. While that might sound limiting, it's really not because you're also given a lot of other things to use. For instance, you can choose from pre-existing icons. You can use these icons in your artwork for backgrounds. There are houses, clouds, terrain textures and fences to chose from; it works just like clip art. You can also go into the icon editor/creator and make your own icons. You can store more than a dozen of your own creations on the cartridge, which is a really nice feature. Once you create your drawing, you can save it, but unfortunately, you can only save one drawing. If you come up with something else that you like better and go to save it, you'll have to discard your pre-existing artwork. This is perhaps the only real drawback of Mario Paint.

When you're done creating your masterpiece, you can try out the nifty animation program. This gives you the option of either a four-frame, six-frame, or a nine-frame animation. What you basically have to do is think of something you want to animate. If you wanted to animate a flower in a four frame animation, you'd have to draw your flower and background in frame number one, copy and paste it to frame number two and edit it to give the illusion of moving. It's a quick and simple process and while your animations aren't professional in any means, they're really nice to mess around with. You can lose yourself for hours and hours just playing around with this feature.

And last but not least is the music maker aspect. Just like the rest of the game, making your own tunes is a very easy and painless process, but you'll need to be creative in order to do anything worthwhile. You don't make traditional music with this program. Instead, you use sound effects. There are dogs and cats, hearts (for a drumbeat), car horns, computer blips, laughing, etc. With the mouse, you just point and click to what sound effect you want to use and drag it down to the note that you want it on. With a few points here, a few clicks there, you've got yourself a tune! And if you want to get technical about it, you can hook up a stereo to your Super Nintendo and record your tunes to tape.

Needless to say, Mario Paint is an easy to use, incredibly fun and inspired piece of software that any creative mind should not be without.