Nintendo’s announced that Mario Paint has been released on Switch Online, a movie that I modestly point out that I called some time ago, although I hoped they’d offer an export option that would let you make easy use of your creations, although one can use the Screenshot button to save your creation probably. It’s not the subject of today’s post, but their announcement’s pretty entertaining, so here it is (4 minutes):
The announcement mentions that one can use the restore states built into the emulator to save your work, which is at least better than the single save file available in the cartridge, or “saving” your work to VHS tape as the manual suggested. Another thing mentioned in the announcement is that, not only can people use the Switch 2’s Joycons as mice to replicate the function of the SNES Mouse that came with Mario Paint and required it, but in an uncharacteristic bit of generosity, it also supports USB mice when used on the original Switch models.
Mario Party is an interesting piece of gaming history. Without it, Homestar Runner probably would never have happened. Five years ago H*R posted bits of Mario Paint work to social media on Thursdays, which they compiled in this video (4 minutes, sadly not able to be embedded).
That’s two videos already and neither are the focus of this post, so what is? This digitization of an official Japanese Mario Paint tape was uploaded by Jeremy Parish, it’s 31 minutes, and shows off some frankly amazing creations that were made in the days where you had to actually use the mouse to make Mario Paint creations, without resorting to outside tools or memory manipulation. Surprisingly, it also bears the logo of APE Inc. Shigesato’s company that made Earthbound! Here here, it is this this:
One more note about the announcement video! It mentions that Mario Paint songs have been added to the Nintendo Music cellphone app. It also shows off “Title Theme 2,” which actually isn’t in the app, but is revealed to be Totaka’s Song! Maybe it’ll be added at a later date?
