Mario Paint isn’t really a game, although it did have a game of sorts in it. It’s more of a rudimentary multimedia production tool. Since it would be difficult to make a drawing that doesn’t look like it came from an unskilled Etch-A-Sketch user, it was packaged with a mouse and mousepad.
There were three basic activities you could do, drawing, animating, and composing music. At its most basic, you can use the assorted pens, fill tools, geometric shapes, and 16×16 pixel ’stamps’ to create your own scenes or to simply color a few existing pictures. Or, you could edit your own set of stamps to provide an extra level of detail in your drawings, or even to animate.
To animate, you pick from either three, six, or nine frames of animation, fill in the frames accordingly, and choose a path on your crafted scene for the animation to follow. You can optionally play a musical score.
Your music composition options are fairly limited: you can compose in either 4/4 or 3/4 time, can play up to three notes at a time, and can only place quarter-notes on the staff. Different instruments are represented by some of the stamps from the drawing-mode. Mushrooms and hearts provide some percussion, Starmen provide high-pitched xylophone-like sounds, and then there are the baby faces, cars, and geese that make sounds that those things don’t really make in real life.
And if you could somehow get bored creating all of this glorious multimedia, you have the option of playing the bug-swatting mini-game, Gnat-Attack. In Gnat-Attack you have to swat 100 bugs of varying degrees of deadliness with naught but your handy flyswatter. After you’ve swatted the 100 little bugs, you get to swat the giant mechanical fly that takes significantly more swats to dispatch (just like in real life!). Then you get to proceed to levels 2 and 3 that are slightly more difficult, and then it loops back to level 1.
Although I can in no way be considered an artist, I played around with this thing extensively. So much so, in fact, that I ended up wearing off a good deal of the textured surface of the included plastic mousepad.
[...] game was pretty nice in that it supported the Super NES mouse, you know, the one that came with Mario Paint. In fact, I understand that if you had four mice and a multi-tap you could all four use mice at the [...]