SURPRISE! Y’all thought Your Anniversary SUCKS was over and done with when we rolled the credits that totally weren’t ripped off from Super Mario 64, but as the closing skit revealed — assuming you could guess what the gag was clearly telegraphing — there is an entire pack of 40 levels that I’ve created and dubbed “Your World SUCKS”… even though the game defaults to “Super GBox Draco World”. That one doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely as mine. The code to access this world is what was scrawled in “blood” in the final sketch of the show but since it’s going to take me an eternity to get to posting the marathon videos to YouTube here is what was written on the sign: 8XG-LK9-8PF
A few episodes into Your Level SUCKS 2 I stopped showing off “Courses of the Week” and instead replaced the segment with “Cool Stuff” citing that I just didn’t have the time or energy to design a stage every single week with the busy schedule I had at the time. This wasn’t exactly a lie because I was pretty goddamned busy, but in actuality I was still doodling stages here and there; I just never posted any of them because I either never finished them or I did but I was too satisfied with the aforementioned Cool Stuff segments that I didn’t want to cheap out and feature some crappy level instead of showing off a piece of Mario/Nintendo history from my personal collection of junk. When the “Worlds” update was released for Super Mario Maker 2 I immediately knew that I wanted to assemble something for the end of the series but I just didn’t know what that was exactly; I had a few levels I’d already posted and showed off, some other stages I’d designed and either never finished or posted for whatever reason, and some historical stages from Super Mario Maker 1 that I could easily revive and remix within the new game.
I began to categorize my ideas and levels into groups of five: four stages that would act as the standard fare plus a fifth stage that would be that world’s “castle” level, even if it wasn’t an actual castle. “Boss stage” is probably a better term to use. I did this eight times given the fact that you can have eight worlds maximum in one complete package. Do the math and that comes out to 40 levels. I set out to find the inspiration needed to hit that magic number, and what follows below is a brief guide and walkthrough for “Your World SUCKS”, Your Level SUCKS’ equivalent to the golden Voyager records — something that will surely, and hopefully, far outlive this show. Every world actually has its own name and theme, though due to the limitations of Super Mario Maker 2 most of this information isn’t provided to you as there are either no fields for these or things like level descriptions are only shown if you access a level directly by typing in its unique code as opposed to accessing it from within a Super World.
Spoilers for the entirety of Your World SUCKS are below. If you want to be surprised by each stage read no further! Punch in the code in the first paragraph and get at it!
WORLD 1: MEXICO
World Theme: Mexico features easy stages and levels that are relatively straightforward for beginners. Included in this world is “the tutorial stage” from Super Mario Maker as well as some re-imaginings of existing levels from the classic Mario games. Nothing here is too challenging and even the “Boss” stage has a gimmick that is telegraphed pretty easily. (World 1 is named “Mexico” because of how Mario says “Let’s-a Go!” in case you hadn’t picked up on that yet.)
1-1: IT BEGINS
Code: HJT-TN3-SGF
Description: “plz no cyberbully”
Summary: As featured in the very first episode of Your Level SUCKS 2, this is a remake (from memory) of the tutorial stage from Super Mario Maker. It was created and submitted live on the air to officially “open the floodgates” and kick off the second season of the show. There’s not much else to say, we’ve seen this level a million times, and now here’s #1,000,001.
1-2: Echoes of Birabuto
Code: 0CF-Q15-TYF
Description: “You’re suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling you’ve been here before…”
Summary: Technically this is the first stage I ever designed in Super Mario Maker. When I first played the game on September 11, 2015 I learned how to use the course designing features while referencing Stage 1-1 of Super Mario Land as a baseline kind of like an artist drawing a still life. The stage is named after the opening level of the amazing Super Mario World romhack The Second Reality Project: Reloaded (which itself was a copy of Super Mario Land’s 1-1). However simply copying stages over 1:1 is something I’ve grown to scoff at on this show so rather than just port the level over as it was I decided to mix it up a bit and create something that has elements of 1-1 but has enough unique features to also stand on its own.
1-3: What the Electron Beam Sees
Code: 28Y-KXM-1LF
Description: “On a CRT circa 1985, at least…”
Summary: It’s just World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros… backwards. That’s the whole gag. On an old school cathode ray tube (CRT) television like you’d have played Nintendo on back in the day this is how the electron beam inside the television would’ve “seen” the stage if it were capable of doing anything more than agitating photons against a phosphor screen. Technically this is a straight up copy of a level from Super Luigi Bros but that treasure was hidden inside of NES Remix 2 and I’m not sure how many people actually know it exists, but yes there is an official release of Super Mario Bros out there where every stage is 100% identical… and you go left. It’s surprisingly disorienting.
1-4: “That” Castle
Code: DTP-JPC-FDG
Description: “It’s just the one from the title screen. I promise.”
Summary: You know that Super Mario World-themed castle stage from the title screen that sometimes appears when you turn the game on? This is it, and I promise I didn’t do anything weird to it like add a break point in the middle where there’s a brief vertical lava chase scene before the stage picks up exactly where it left off. Nope, none of that. Just hop on the platforms and grab the axe.
1-Boss: 8-4 Except It’s On a Super Joy 3
Code: VBX-FYK-XGF
Description: “Life Lesson #23: Never buy a bootleg.”
Summary: Those of you who watched our streams where we played Super Mario Bros on the “Power Player Super Joy 3” bootleg system will know exactly what the “trick” to this level is. Everyone else trying to play this thinking it’s just a shot-for-shot copy of World 8-4 is going to get very pissed off. (And in case you missed those streams, because as of this article going up they are on Twitch but not yet on YouTube, you’ll probably figure out the joke after dying a couple of times.)
WORLD 2: DE-MAKE DESERT
World Theme: Flatland is an old novel about rigid social class structure whose only relevance to this section of Your World SUCKS is how three-dimensional objects are observed in the titular Flatland, a two-dimensional world. Reading parts of it inspired me to “flatten” something that was three-dimensional so that it would become two-dimensional without losing any of the core features of its identity. In that regard, De-Make Desert consists entirely of Super Mario 64 stages that have been flattened into side-scrollers while still keeping their challenges intact. Each stage (except for the Boss level) contain five “stars” (represented with 10-coins) based upon goals from the original game. Any three of these “stars” need to be collected before the stage becomes complete-able.
2-1: Bob-Omb Battlefield
Code: K3W-9ST-V0G
Summary: Super Mario 64’s flagship stage is recreated here across two maps the second of which sees you scale the iconic mountain to have a showdown with King Bob-Omb. Meanwhile down on the ground floor there’s plenty of things to do like flying through rings of coins, sneaking behind the Chain Chomp’s cage, and making your way up to the floating island. This was the very first 2D “de-make” I attempted so it’s a little rough but the elements of the original course are still there. The only course challenge not represented here is the red coin one which will be a pretty common feature across most of these levels.
2-2: Shifting Sand Land
Code: N91-MRN-VYG
Summary: This was a challenging level to flatten because Shifting Sand Land has so many iconic features to it, however unless you use the Koopa shell or perform a glitchy jump the stage is largely linear for being in a 3D game. That lessened the challenge because you’ll be able to go through some recognizable portions of the stage in the approximate order you’d encounter them during standard gameplay in Super Mario 64. The Tox-Box maze was the hardest thing to translate over and keep “fair” but as long as you tread carefully and pay attention to where all the hazards are you’ll make it through, and there’s even two paths through it! Down in the pyramid is a splitting path where one side takes you to a makeshift boss fight where bricks are thrown at you or you can take the other route and go for the “secrets” in the pyramid represented with red coins.
2-3: Jolly Roger Bay
Code: 0T0 SRK-XGG
Summary: Pardon the use of the forest theme for this level, I was forced to use it because it has a water effect and going full-on underwater was out of the question because portions of Jolly Roger Bay take place above the surface of the water. This level makes use of P-switches to activate various parts of the level, not just the bridge to the pirate ship, because there are no cannons or anything like that in Super Mario Maker 2. The P-switches will assist with obtaining at least three of the “stars” in this stage, so don’t smash all of them because there’s a finite amount on purpose. I will say one thing though, Wiggler made a great replacement for the eel, I only wish I could’ve attached the 10-coin to his ass to make it that much more authentic.
2-4: Lethal Lava Land
Code: BGN-GPC-V3G
Summary: Probably one of the more challenging “de-makes” in this world, I settled on Lethal Lava Land that way there’d be a distinct and different type of world for each level (land, desert, water, and lava). Lethal Lava Land beat out the snow levels and Tiny Huge Island in order to make it into this project. This is one of the levels whose red coin challenge is intact and it’s surprisingly hard given that I had to use a real Bowser and surround him with red coins and moving platforms. A seesaw provides the arena where you fight the “bullies” (Boom Boom and Lemmy Koopa) while the stage’s iconic volcano awaits a challenger. The volcano is divided into branching paths, one of them based around riding an elevator and climbing some poles and the other focusing more on platforming and dodging hazards. Both can be obtained in one go.
2-Boss: Bowser in the Dark World
Code: NKW-QC2-72H
Description: “It’s finally time to showdown with Bowser, can you traverse the Dark World?”
Summary: Of all the Bowser stages in Super Mario 64 to flatten I felt most confident with Dark World because Fire World was out of the question (since we already had a fire stage) and Sky World was just a tad too complex and had too many moving parts or things that could not be replicated in this game to a degree I was satisfied with, so Dark World it was! I went ahead and included the red coins where applicable even though there’s only five instead of eight but if you grab all of them a secret cache of 1UP’s awaits before the battle with The Big Man. It’s not possible to throw Bowser into bombs like you do in 64, but you can certainly throw and kick bombs into him instead and that’s what this battle is centered around.
WORLD 3: LUMINE HALL
World Theme: Lumine Hall is a place in Earthbound where Ness is able to see his thoughts projected onto a “screen” of shimmering crystals; it is one of the many “Your Locations” throughout the game that activate the Sound Stone and ultimately allow the player to confront Giygas. Lumine Hall is a place of memories, and in Your World SUCKS the makeshift “wall of crystals” reflects a cave filled with stages based upon experiences you may have had in other non-Mario video games. Many of the stages are based off of Famicom/NES titles, however a couple are focused on the Sega Genesis. This world also contains the first appearance of an optional level.
3-1: Super Mighty Mario Bomb Jack
Code: WXJ-CSP-KCG
Description: “You’ve got Nintendo Online, go play this.”
Summary: This level is based around the action stages of the Famicom game Mighty Bomb Jack. In this game the objective is to collect all of the bombs in a level before you are allowed to move onto the next screen, which depending on the level you are on could be another action stage or a bonus room. Rather than collecting bombs Mario is instead tasked with collecting coins within a level laid out very similarly to the designs seen in Mighty Bomb Jack. This game is available in the NES collection through Nintendo Online and I highly recommend checking it out sometime.
3-2: Earthworm Mario
Code: 47X-P3K-55G
Description: “What color is Mario’s red hat?”
Summary: Earthworm Mario obviously takes its cues from Earthworm Jim and while thinking about what stages I could translate into Maker I remembered the submarine sections of Down the Tubes (which were parted out into their own separate level, Tube Race, in certain releases of the game due to cartridge limitations) where the player would have to steer Jim within a glass submarine pod racing against time in the form of an oxygen meter. No such functionality like that exists in this game so the best I could do is break this up into 10 second chunks using P-switches… which still works out nicely because periodically in Down the Tubes you’d come upon oxygen recharge stations that resemble the P-switch dispensers I made. (PS: The answer to the question posed in the Description is “green”. You’ll get it if you’ve played the Earthworm Jim series.)
3-3: Mario Spacehead’s Crusade
Code: GWH-7RG-2GG
Description: “Go to Cape Carnival, all will be revealed!”
Summary: Cosmic Spacehead is a point-and-click and platforming adventure game created by Codemasters that was released for the Sega Genesis (its lesser-known port on the NES is known as Linus Spacehead’s Cosmic Crusade). At one point in the game you receive a foreign letter telling you to backtrack to a specific area where there is now a “secret tunnel” that lets you… illegally cross an international border. It’s a strange game. But when I saw the spot shadow effect in Super Mario Maker 2 I immediately defaulted to memories of the Secret Tunnel stage in Cosmic Spacehead and faithfully remade it here. There are no blind jumps, just look very closely at the edges of the spot shadow (or look at a map of the Secret Tunnel level itself).
3-4: M.C. Mario Kids
Code: GQP-MDH-FSF
Description: “*Big Mac sold separately.”
Summary: The final game represented in this world’s regular levels is MC Kids, one of my favorite games of all time and something of an in-joke on Gatorbox because each year for our Extra Life charity event I perform the “Cheeseburger Challenge” where every time I die in the game I stop playing to eat a McDonald’s cheeseburger (while the speedrun timer keeps going). Games based off of licensed properties catch a lot of heat, but MC Kids is fantastic and Super Mario Maker 2 afforded me the ability to take two levels and combine them into one stage. First is a replica of MC Kids’ 5-1, “Moon Monsters”, where the low gravity of the night sky theme allowed me to imitate the higher jumps and dangerous platforming of the original game. Once you “beat” this stage the second half is MC Kids’ 2-3, “Icy Maze”. The theme shifts to the snow tileset so ice physics take effect. This is an easier level but its secret is intact and fully accessible.
3-Boss: Atlantis no Nazo no Mario
Code: 8MY-9F6-NDF
Description: “They removed Costume Mario so just pretend you’re Chief Arino.”
Summary: Here’s a stage you’ve seen before if you were around for the original Your Level SUCKS. I was genuinely surprised that Chief Shinya Arino from Japan’s Gamecenter CX made it into Super Mario Maker as a costume. I suppose given the way the game was set up he would’ve been added globally no matter what but it struck me as somewhat odd of Nintendo to add a character that most people in North America won’t recognize. Gamecenter CX is a fantastic show where Arino is tasked with beating some notoriously hard games, mostly on the Famicom, and in the show’s pilot episode he was handed a copy of Atlantis no Nazo. This stage is a 1:1 copy of “Arino’s Atlantis no Nazo Flashback” from the first season of our own show.
WORLD 4: ST. ELSEWHERE
World Theme: Not everything that was designed for Your World SUCKS was a neat little package of levels that all had something in common. Lots of ideas I had just wouldn’t fit anywhere else even with a little bit of tweaking and modification, but these were decent stages and I didn’t want to just let them go to waste. St. Elsewhere acts as a potpourri category of mismatched levels that don’t really have any real cohesion with one another but were still stages I wanted to share. If it helps you better understand the aim of this world I’ll let you know it takes place inside of a snow globe. A select few people will understand that reference.
4-1: ADA Compliant World 1-1
Code: VMK-3D5-FRF
Description: “Based off of a tasteless joke from a crummy internet show.”
Summary:The story behind this level is a one-off joke I made about Nintendo receiving complaints that World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros wasn’t handicap accessible. In order to maintain compliance with the ADA Nintendo had to send in a crew of specialists to install ramps, lifts, and other assistance devices to help those with mobility challenges also have a fair shot at reaching the flag pole. That one off color joke turned into an entire full blown stupid level. It literally is just 1-1 with moving platforms. You can theoretically just hold right and beat the stage.
4-2: MXC’s “Dash to Death”
Code: XYF-W2V-YTF
Description: “Right you are, Ken.”
Summary: 30 seconds are on the clock and you’ve gotta get from the start of this obstacle course to the very end. Standing in your path are things like the Skull-cracker, contraceptive sponges, and the Nards of Doom. Will you clear the course? Or will you wind up on Kenny Blankenship’s Most Painful Eliminations of the Day?
4-3: Radical Train
Code: X5R-QDT-2YG
Description: “Let’s rekindle the old argument: Mario or Sonic?”
Summary: “Radical Train” shares a name with a stage from the infamous Sonic ’06, but that’s about where the similarities lie. If anything this level is more akin to the old Famicom game Challenger where the objective is to gain access to a moving train and save your girlfriend from the bad guys, except here you’re just traversing a moving train and destroying its furnace to ensure that it comes to a halt and Bowser’s delivery of materials and other nefarious things doesn’t reach their destination. This stage was originally one I was working on in the original Super Mario Maker but I never finished it because it just felt boring and cumbersome; there wasn’t enough I could add to the level to make it a varied experience. Thankfully things were different this time around.
4-4: Sierra Nevada-tan
Code: NY5-GVG-B9G
Description: “Definitely an appropriate idea for a course. If you know, you know.”
Summary: Both this stage and the track on Overclocked Remix (which is a real banger) are named after the same thing, and if you know… then you know. Just like what the level description says. If not this will just seem like a weird stage where you run around as Link slashing enemies with a sword for no real reason…
4-Boss: Mario’s Ring Fit Adventure
Code: VGS-LY9-9XG
Description: “Only someone who has mastered the four arts can take on Draga– er, Bowser.”
Summary: For those of you who haven’t played Ring Fit Adventure there are four “Masters” of the various types of exercises you can do: arms, legs, abs, and balance (yoga). It just so happens that the colors that represent these elements match the colors of pipes you can use in Super Mario Maker 2. My idea here was to make four “trials” based upon Mario demonstrating his strength in those four areas in order to collect a key and then fight Bowser using those same skills. The “arms” challenge sees Mario carrying and stacking “heavy” blocks, the “legs” challenge is a race to beat an exploding bomb so you can reach the exit, the “abs” challenge requires you to hang onto a P-switch while making tight jumps until you get to the end, and the “balance” challenge is of course a seesaw over a sea of spikes. What else would it be?
WORLD 5: COIN HEAVEN?
World Theme: “Coin heavens” have been a staple of the Mario franchise for a while now. You could argue that the underground bonus areas from Super Mario World and Land are “coin heavens” on technicality, but the first proper coin heaven appeared in Super Mario Bros 3; if you find a hidden pink note block (you know, the ones that make lots of noise in this game) you can jump on it and fly all the way into the clouds to collect some extra coins and sometimes a 1UP. Every stage on this map is focused around some kind of coin-based objective and also features the other optional stage of Your World SUCKS.
5-1: Mario’s Warehouse Job
Code: PS9-FXX-8MF
Description: “It’s a living I guess.”
Summary: This stage was originally going to be titled “Mario Gets a Job at Amazon” but it was re-titled at the last minute (and the Amazon logo removed) because we were streaming this on Twitch and I didn’t want to potentially piss anyone off. But that’s the joke here, Mario must climb to the top of an extremely hazardous workplace environment to collect his weekly pay. Most of this level takes place inside of a vertical stage that stretches to the game’s limit and features stacks upon stacks of crates and boxes and conveyor belts that must be navigated to reach the top. There are also hazards like an incinerator that must be climbed through and a giant forklift whose OSHA non-compliant bits need to be carefully avoided. Don’t forget your paycheck on the way out.
5-2: The T in Ship Stands for Tricky
Code: 6LC-03L-9TF
Description: “Think of it like the Treasure Titanic. Unsinkable.”
Summary: Can you collect 999 coins in a single stage? Sounds like Coin Hell to me and that’s exactly what this anti-treasure ship is. There isn’t a lot of leeway for missing coins in this stage if you want to hit the goal and doing so will require you to make a couple pit stops to treasure rooms to collect bonus coins; without them you’re not finishing the stage. The idea behind creating this level was to see if it was possible to take something traditionally seen as fun — a coin ship — and turn it into a proper challenge. Yeah, there’s over a thousand coins here but when it comes down to collecting them are you up for that challenge? I acknowledge that this stage is tedious in its own right so it’s entirely skippable, but still worth giving a spin.
5-3: Worldlink Video Upload Station
Code: 81L-XM4-WHF
Description: “The internet is out of control w/ nonsense. Destroy the propaganda machine!”
Summary: This stage seems a bit… unlike… the others in Coin Heaven because there aren’t really any coins to collect and the clear condition is to defeat two Bob-Ombs. The story of this level is not unlike “Mario’s Warehouse Job”, which you just played if we’re going in order here. Originally this was titled “YouTube World Uplink Center” and the goal was to essentially infiltrate Google’s underground base and destroy the master VHS tape-player thing running the entirety of the video sharing platform. It relates to the idea of “coin heaven” because YouTube is a soulless machine that just churns out money in a lot of dubious ways, though all references to YouTube/Google were scrubbed from the stage and instead it was re-titled to something slightly familiar to people who’ve played Vectorman.
5-4: Coin… Heaven?
Code: 031-6KS-3QF
Description: “No alarms and no surprises. – Thom Yorke”
Summary: Surely there’s nothing up my sleeve here, right? It’s a coin heaven from Super Mario Bros 3, standard fare. In fact, if you play your cards right you can collect at least 50 coins (the completion requirement) on just this first screen alone. Though, I guess by giving you that tip I’ve flashed my hand and let you know that there’s more to this level than meets the eye. Named after the world it takes place in, “Coin… Heaven?” makes you question if this really is the pearly gates or if there’s something more sinister beyond that ending pipe…
5-Boss: Super Mario World 64 for Genesis
Code: X5P-MKD-DKF
Description: “Just be glad there’s a pipe limit.”
Summary: Story time, for those of you not in the know, Super Mario World 64 is a real “game”; it’s a bootleg created by a genuinely unknown developer some time after 1996 for the Sega Genesis. The bootleggers’ attempt to port Super Mario World’s engine to the Genesis is questionable at best (small Mario cannot walk underneath a 1 block gap nor can he pick up a Koopa shell at any size or state). The bootleg starts off with your standard fare of stolen levels but then gradually slips into madness and before you know it you’re playing an ice level that features music stolen from Jeopardy. This is a real thing that exists. This stage is a “remake” of the final level of the game, truncated slightly because it is massive, and just be glad the “wrong” pipes aren’t ones you can enter; in the bootleg they send you back to the beginning of the fucking stage. (Super Mario World 64 was streamed on Gatorbox a while back and its video is HERE if you are interested. A romhack of Super Mario World that copies the levels over into a working engine was featured in our Extra Life 2019 marathon and that video is HERE.)
WORLD 6: DINOSAUR FOREST
World Theme: If you’ve been wondering where that goofy dinosaur Yoshi has been hiding this whole time look no further, you’ve found the forest inhabited by him and all of his friends! Every level in Dinosaur Forest stars our favorite, well, dinosaur with the exception of one… but there’s still a dinosaur in there on technicality. It’s Dinosaur Forest, not Yoshi Forest. In any case all of the stages here require Yoshi in order to get through various challenges and no you won’t need to make any sacrificial Yoshi jumps. What kind of sicko do you take me for? Most of the levels don’t require you to bring Yoshi to the goal post but having him will make the stages easier.
6-1: Yoshi’s Super Sushi Buffet
Code: XX7-LY3-8KG
Description: “ALL YOU CAN EAT DOESN’T MEAN EAT IT ALL!!!”
Summary: Yoshi’s got one thing on his mind and one thing only: fish. This dinosaur is about to bring his insatiable appetite to an all you can eat sushi buffet and put those poor bastards out of business. You don’t have to eat all of the fish to win, just enough to where your tab won’t cover the expenses the business will incur. Creating this level was a real experiment in getting rails to behave properly because thanks to geometry while the slanted portions are technically also 3 blocks long they tend to intersect and try to cross nearby tracks which screws everything up. The inspiration behind this stage was the Sushi Go Round minigame from Pokemon Stadium.
6-2: Here’s to the Night
Code: J10-QLR-5PG
Description: “You ever just go outside at night and look at the stars and say, ‘…dang’?”
Summary: Not everything contained in this Super World is some high-concept bullshit, sometimes I just wanted to make a standard little level based around a simple theme. This level starts out at “Yoshi’s House” from Super Mario World (or as close of an approximation as I could get) where you can pick up your friend and go for a casual nighttime stroll. There are a few hazards, and the Moon is there to help you with the enemies, but this one’s easy. The hardest part, if that, is finding the secret hidden in this level and if you pay close attention to the level terrain it’s kind of telegraphed as to where it is.
6-3: An Inconvenient Spoof
Code: 3MJ-XRT-NMG
Description: “Climate change is real.”
Summary: It’s another day at the shores by the forest. Suspend your disbelief, water was needed for this stage’s gimmick to work. Mario and Yoshi are having a cookout until… what’s this? The waves start hitting a little closer each time they pass. The sea level is rising! By golly, it’s a real life disaster movie! Grab your buddy and get to higher ground and see if you can do anything about the pollution while you’re on your way up there! The next BBQ you have will still be by the bayside, but it’ll be a lot further inland than you remember.
6-4: Fire Heart
Code: 81Q-X6J-GSF
Description: “True love can burn bright in even the coldest of places.”
Summary: While designing this stage I wasn’t aware that Red Yoshi was able to spit fire on command, I assumed that you had to eat a shell or enemy first. That realization kind of put a damper on this design as a whole (well, that and the fact that the Spike Ball turns into a fucking Snowball in this theme) but the idea behind it was still something that I felt I could accomplish even with these setbacks. The story behind this level is that Mario needs to guide the Red Yoshi back to her home where her love, Green Yoshi, is waiting. You’ll need to use Red Yoshi’s unique fire ability to navigate this level which actually has two paths; there is an easier path that results in a miniboss fight and a harder path that allows you to skip the battle. (“Fire Heart” is named after the levels from Puggsy which take place in snowy mountains inhabited by a fire dragon.)
6-Boss: (Robo)Birdo’s Gingerbread Castle
Code: 20H-B33-WHF
Description: “Birdo at least is here in spirit. (Please don’t eat her castle.)”
Summary: Based off of the Your Level SUCKS 2 Holiday Special, where we build a Super Mario-themed gingerbread castle that Birdo promptly conquered and took over, this is the only stage in Dinosaur Forest to not feature Yoshi. It does however feature Birdo and because she’s a dinosaur she gets in on technicality and I still get to name the map “Dinosaur Forest”. Birdo was sadly omitted from Super Mario Maker 2, though if you have the Super Mario Bros 2 mushroom power-up and trigger a miniboss sound effect an image of Birdo will fade in and out on the screen. That’s as close as we’re going to get to seeing her. In her place to defend her castle is a giant pink Mechakoopa, a loose homage to the Game Boy Advance port of Super Mario Bros 2 where Clawgrip was replaced with Robo-Birdo as a boss.
WORLD 7: SPACEWORLD 2015
World Theme: Five years ago a show was born from the sludge of crap submitted to a “do it yourself” Mario game: Your Level SUCKS. An instant minor hit, and the biggest to date for Gatorbox, there was almost immediately a clamoring of “if you’re so good why don’t you make a stage” from the peanut gallery in the comment section of every video. Throughout the production of the original season of Your Level SUCKS I’d toss out level codes and while I can’t say the stages were groundbreaking they did become a part of the series’ history. Spaceworld 2015, named after Nintendo’s own convention, features all of the season one stages that weren’t worked into any of the other maps. Most of them are 1:1-ish copies of their original forms with some quality of life improvements.
7-1: Bowser’s Bigger City
Code: QNQ-P4F-FXF
Description: “It’s like when George Lucas redid Star Wars, except I actually fixed stuff.”
Summary: Bowser’s Big City was one of the most contentious levels from the first season of Your Level SUCKS mostly because shortly after it was posted Nintendo pushed out an update to the game that adjusted how items spawn into levels and how certain items interact with one another, namely the trampoline. See, I used some sideways trampolines because they looked like skyscraper scaffolding and it added to the theme of the stage… but then that update caused the trampolines to activate against each other and they’d explode and ruin the stage which gave people free reign to take pot shots at me. Thanks, Nintendo. I’m playing with fire by making the same exact stage opening, but this time I made sure the trampolines don’t fuck with each other when they load in.
7-2: THE 45TH MONEY JAMBOREE
Code: VDP-HL4-4YF
Description: “This level is five years old. It has been formatted to fit your society.”
Summary: Formerly known as “Donald Trump’s Money Jamboree”, this stage features the exact same Cash Infusion Machineā¢ to charge up Mario except now rather than making jokes about Trump it’s time we turn this shitshow off. This is mostly the same stage but the “formatted to fit your society” joke refers to the subtle changes made to the level compared to its original pre-2016 iteration. Again, much like that time I wore a Chinese bootleg MAGA hat the original version of this stage was made when Donald Trump’s run for the presidency was being mocked from all angles (2015). We knew not the beast we were dealing with. Be sure to rip his hairpiece off while you’re here, I’ve let you know what’s under it if you do.
7-3: Don’t Go P… Again
Code: GQ1-TNP-GRG
Description: “Now with 100% MORE checkpoint flag!”
Summary: It’s simple, just don’t go P. This jumping-puzzle course was the only one of my stages to be categorized as “Super Expert” in Super Mario Maker, but it’s really not as difficult as that rating should make you believe. Just don’t do anything that’s obviously stupid. All of the 1UP’s are obtainable and none of them are traps, but collecting them will usually set you further back in the stage so as long as you’re comfortable retreading the same jumps afterward go for it. Some minor tweaks were made to this stage and it’s not a direct copy of the original. A few blocks have been added to aid in allowing Mario to gain enough speed to make jumps and the insta-death ceiling has been removed.
7-4: Every Evel Kinevel Jump Ever
Code: GVM-945-76G
Description: “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve all just seen my final jump.”
Summary: Hold onto your asses because this is the only (with one exception) standard course that was designed using Super Mario 3D World! I know, that’s wild! And I only did it because I needed the Koopa Troopa Car since Costume Mario is no longer a thing… meaning I can’t give you the Excitebike costume like I did last time. It’s the same joke though and the dash pads, admittedly, at least provide a sense of speed that the original level was missing so in that regard it’s even funnier because you really get to slam the throttle before trying to cross that chasm. You’ll still fail though, even if you try and cheat and bail from the car at the apex of your jump. I thought of that. Evel is meant to plummet to bottom of the canyon because that’s comedy.
7-Boss: Nintendo Hard(er): Bowser’s Fort
Code: XYF-F17-VHF
Description: “Since Nintendo’s given up on SMM2 maybe they won’t break this with a patch.”
Summary: Like Bowser’s Bigger City, which was based off of Bowser’s Big City, Nintendo Hard(er) takes its cues from “Nintendo Hard”, a level I created where I used only the stock pre-patch assets of Super Mario Maker to try and make a challenging serpentine castle where ultimately you face off against Bowser in an old school NES-style arena. The problem was that in order to get into the castle you had to ascend a “sideways trampoline sandwich”, something that stopped working as well as it used to when Nintendo patched the game. Like Bowser’s Bigger City I’m playing with fire here, but I believe the trampoline sandwich still works here, but just in case I added semi-solid platforms to catch you. The rest of the level has been remixed into a spike runner and frantic key hunt. The stage is significantly more playable, it even has some secrets, but I tried to keep in just the right amount of intentional jank and sin to keep players rolling their eyes. Although there is still one more world after this, consider this the “final” Boss stage.
WORLD 8: YOUR LEVEL SUCKS
World Theme: At the end of the day? Your level sucks, plain and simple. The final leg of Your World SUCKS pays homage to some of the most memorable moments of the series alongside the inclusion of the usual “Your Level Sucks: The Experience” stage… except this time around there’s two of them. Yes, two. Super Mario 3D World received its own dedicated “Experience” because it’s a special kind of suck that the other four themes can’t even dream of attaining. Information on the final stage is sparse, but I will say that 7-Boss was technically the “final boss” stage of Your World SUCKS. This is just a trip down memory lane with a proper sendoff for the future.
8-1: Blue World
Code: NRG-LTN-GKF
Description: “If this level were green you would die.”
Summary: During the original season of Your Level SUCKS we stumbled upon a level by “Mom” titled “White World”. It was designed in the Super Mario Bros 3 tileset and its gimmick was that the screen was covered with white semi-solid platforms. That’s it. The level went on to become one of the series’ most popular gags however because of the (hopefully) unintentional racial undertones the phrase “white world” has. I’m going to be straight with you though, there’s not a chance in hell I’m making a stage and calling it White World so I hope you guys like blue instead. Pretend it’s some weird unintentional nationalistic joke about that god awful Avatar movie or something.
8-2: Special Guest Appearance
Code: BGX-440-P8G
Description: “Please don’t crawl through my air conditioner again. Thanks.”
Summary: Early into the production of Your Level SUCKS 2, sometime during the cooler autumn/winter months, a green tree frog managed to get into my home likely by way of climbing through the window AC unit and somehow miraculously not getting devoured by the spinning parts inside of it. I glanced over and looked at the AC because the ambient frog sounds suddenly got a lot louder and there he was just chilling on the front of it. We stopped the whole show so I could catch him, show him to the camera, and then set him free outside far away from the air conditioner. This isn’t a level about journeying through machinery as a tiny amphibian (there’s not enough mechanical parts in the game to make something like that), but it is a stage that celebrates the inclusion of the Frog Suit!
8-3: YLS – The Experience II
Code: VG4-X75-5TG
Description: “‘Bah!’ – The Worst Sound Sample Ever Recorded. Period.”
Summary: No season of this show is complete without a stage that pays tribute to all of the terrible design tropes that we’ve seen throughout the production of the series. Back in the day we had “Your Level SUCKS: The Experience” and now we’ve got the sequel. I mentioned in season one that Super Mario Bros won out over New Super Mario Bros U as the level theme because of the chaos you could make with Costume Mario (plus “the tutorial” only looks “right” when it’s drawn in the original style), so I kept that in mind this time around and went with the road less traveled for this season’s Experience. It’s noticeably shorter than the original Experience from last season, but that’s because the next level is…
8-4: YLS – The Experience II (in 3D!)
Code: S5V-M69-5GG
Description: “The worst possible level enters the third dimension.”
Summary: Yup, not one but two “Your Level SUCKS: The Experience II” stages this season! Super Mario 3D World was so distinct enough of a style with the features exclusive to it that it wouldn’t be fair to go straight to 3D World and skip over the classic themes because that would be an easy cop out. There are so many terrible awful no good very bad things that you can add to a level in this theme that you will hate this stage. It’s such a tedious and mean piece of shit that I had to sacrifice the original clear condition in favor of putting a goddamned checkpoint flag in it. It could’ve been so much worse than this, and this is already astoundingly bad an annoying. Enjoy?
8-Boss: CLASSIFIED
Code: ###-###-###
Description: [REDACTED]
Summary: This level is for Super Players only.
And there you have it, all 40 stages of Your World SUCKS broken down and explained with some insight and tips where necessary. Feel free to pop in any of the level codes to go straight to a stage (in case you want to practice it, etc) but if you’d like to tackle the whole shebang in one go the level code to do so is: 8XG-LK9-8PF. Friends and fans who have completed it have told me it takes between 3-4 hours to finish which makes me feel confident in the fact that I’ve made a fun and challenging Super World. I know not everyone has time for an 8 map 40 level world — Lord knows I skipped over all of those during the Worlds Update special episode — so this was an effort largely made in secret for all of the fans of Your Level SUCKS.
I acknowledge that Your Anniversary SUCKS just might be one of the last times the Mario hat is worn on Gatorbox so I worked as hard as I could to make this anniversary stream something truly special. Like I said in the closing remarks before the credits viewership and interest in Super Mario Maker 2 was substantially lower than that for Super Mario Maker; the novelty has worn off. Many people saw this sequel as just more of the same and slept on it. Hell, even Nintendo would go a few months without remembering this game existed; September 13th was THE anniversary of Super Mario Bros and Nintendo’s own 35th anniversary special Ninji course wasn’t even ready in time. One level. Motherfuckers, I designed or finalized 40 of them over the course of a couple of weeks and I’m just one jackass with a Twitch stream. But getting back to my point everyone felt that gradual slide after the release of the game, the only difference is I kept with it because on June 29th, 2019 I made a promise and a commitment to all of you that we’d see this show through. One year — 52 weeks — with a stream every Saturday; barring some holidays and unexpected health issues we landed somewhere in the high 40’s. We did it. And I did it, all of it, for all of you.
I don’t know if there will be a Super Mario Maker 3, but if there is you have my word that I’ll get whatever console it’s on and I’ll dust off that ratty old costume hat (even if the foam starts to rot and I have to clean it all out and restuff it myself) and run the series one more time. For you.
But for now, I hope you enjoy Your World SUCKS. A lot of work went into this labor of love and not a single drop of it was spent on myself. Your Level SUCKS was a mixed blessing for me at first because while I am slightly ashamed of the early episodes I was able to pin the act down and build a new community within Gatorbox. As one terrible, terrible, chapter of my life was coming to a close and a lot of changes were happening, Super Mario Maker turned out to be the blessing I needed because it led me to all of you. A better community. One that is supportive of my desire to make right the wrongs of my past and be the best person I can be. And we all have fucking ROOT BEER GUY to thank for that because he thought it would be fun to slap a bunch of trampolines and shit down and submit that stage. That kid probably isn’t even aware of it, but the series his level kicked off saved a life.
“Well, with a name like ‘Root Beer Guy’…”
– Draco