The ingenuity of some gamers frightens me sometimes. Super Mario Maker is a simple, yet accessible level maker that allows fans to create their own Mario adventures. Some are genuinely fun, some are hard as balls, and some are just shit. But surely, they were never meant to do this.
Super Mario Maker creator Giant has created a working calculator with what I always thought to be a very limited set of tools used to design side scrolling levels. A calculator.
It actually works like a calculator should (albeit in a more entertaining way than just pressing numbers). If this was ten years ago, Giant would have been burned at the stake for witchcraft. At least in Yorkshire.
This ungodly creation is called The Cluttered-Chaos Calculator (code 705C-0000-01B3-FE78 if you wanna see it for yourself). There’s a video below that looks kind of insane to mere mortals, but Giant assures there’s a science behind it.
Giant (under the name Helgefan) explains on on Reddit:
The Cluttered Chaos-Calculator is a digital circuit consisting of logic gates such as AND and OR not unlike an electronic calculator. However, instead of 2 different voltage levels, shelmet (1) or no shelmet (0) are used as binary states (bits). Simple adding machines have been created in the past with Super Mario Maker, but to my knowledge this is the first one with a decimal conversion and proper display of the result. For clarity, have a look at the big supplemental image!
It’s early, so that doesn’t mean a lot to me (not that being more awake would make a huge difference). Still, maybe you’re nodding your head sagely now because it all makes sense. Good for you if that’s the case.
If there’s one thing we can take away from this, it’s that Super Mario Maker is learning. Before we know it, there’ll be a level where Mario can jump on a Goomba and work out roughly where you live within a five mile radius.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.