Here, captured in a three second GIF, is the entirety of the current top-rated Mario Maker course. It’s hilariously bad. How in the world did it climb the ranks, then?
The answer is in the course title, which is written in Japanese:
It says “I will play the courses of everyone who likes this,” according to a translation provided by Kotaku’s own Brian Ashcraft. This promise alone was enough to get 124,591 people to play the troll level, and at least 26,767 of those players ended up starring the course. Stars, for those that don’t know, are what determine the popularity of a course; the more people “star” something, the higher that course moves up in the rankings. To give you an idea of the scale here: the second place course in Mario Maker right now has only 17,698 stars to its name.
To make matters worse, there’s absolutely no way the player has kept his word. It’s just not possible. I’ve been playing Mario Maker non-stop since launch, and I’ve only tried out about 1,500 courses over the span of 116 hours. I have no idea how long it would take this guy to play through over 100,000 courses, but I imagine he’d have to give up pretty much everything else in life to do achieve it.
Understandably, some English-speaking players are kind of miffed about the entire thing:
Japanese players, who can actually read the course title, seem a bit more amused by the entire thing.
Of course, to veteran Mario Maker players this crappy state of affairs is nothing new. The top courses that Mario Maker highlights have always been bad. Most notably, there was a period in which nearly everything in the top 10 was some sort of “don’t press anything” course. The levels ended up playing themselves, as you can see below:
This type of course still makes up the bulk of Mario Maker’s top ranks, but at the very least creating an auto level takes some degree of effort. Hell, some are even kind of awesome! I can’t really say the same of the latest top Mario Maker course, but hey. I stopped relying on Mario Maker to tell me what’s worth playing a long, long time ago.