User Rating: 8.8 | Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour GC
By MikeL2u | Review Date:
Lookout Tiger, Mario is after your job, again. The plump little plumber we all know and love is back and with yet another iteration of the Mario Sports genre that started back on the original NES. The life Mario is beginning to sound like a broken record. With every new Nintendo system comes yet another update to the Mario sports genre. It started with the original Mario Open Golf on the NES. Then with Mario Golf on the N64 followed by Mario Tennis. Now we get the 3rd version of Mario Golf; Toadstool Tour. What follows is another great update, and quite possibly the best Mario sports game ever made so far. An update to Mario Tennis is slated for release sometime this year, but Mario Golf is here and that's what we are reviewing. Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour is a complex yet newbie-friendly game. It offers a great amount of realism for the sim fan and just enough arcade elements that make it easy for the young generation to pick up and play. Graphics are simply stunning, you'll notice the touch of Shigeru Miyamoto when you look at the "wind" that "wakes" the sky. The same effect can be found in Mr Miyamoto's other high profile game with cel-shaded graphics. All the familiar faces are back for this next round of golf. Start off with Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Daisy, Yoshi, Koopa Turtle, Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Wario, Waluigi, Birdo (from Mario Bros. 2) and King Koopa himself, Bowser. What? No Toad? Hmm... There a a considerable amount of hidden characters to unlock. The Hammer Bros. and a Bomb-omb to name a few. Sound is really great, some really classic tunes. However the music does begin to get old and does linger on when you go on from hole to hole. For the most part the music is the same throughout the entire level, and after about 18 holes, your ears may begin to bleed. It does change when you go on the next course, but it's still the same music for 18 more holes. A way to change the song or to have random tracks would make it more enjoyable but this is a minor gripe. Control is also a great thing. It's so good infarct I'm not going to even talk about it. My biggest gripe however has to do with the difficulty. For one, there is no way to change the difficulty, it's just one setting for the entire game. For myself, I would rather have it be set to a harder setting. You can tell Nintendo was trying to make it easy enough for a young child to play, as the setup for each hit has been automatically well thought out so precisely that at most times no change is needed to the longitude and latitude of where the ball will land. I found myself making more birdies by just hitting the swing button and letting her rip then if I were to adjust them prior. When zooming in you can see that your character has already chosen the best club to use and has lined up the whole precisely. This takes a lot of fun out of it as it the computer has already planned out the best course of action, making it most of the time unnecessary for you to set the settings yourself. Another gripe is the inclusion of an Auto hit swing. Again Nintendo must have been thinking for children, as this auto hit feature really destroys the game in such a way that it feels more like the computer is playing and all your doing is giving it some advice. At least there is a manual use too when hitting the B button. However, the inclusion of the auto-swing is just making the game too easy. I would have liked this to be an off/on feature in the options rather then a button press, as for me I don't choose to use it but I do sometimes by accident because you have to push buttons fast to get the correct swing. All in all a great game, it does offer some good gaming, however it may at times become repetitive, annoying and at times just too easy.

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