Mario Golf: Advance Tour E3 2004 Preshow Impressions

The Mario Golf series will come to handhelds in June with Mario Golf: Advance Tour for the Game Boy Advance. But unlike previous big-console entries in the series, which let you immediately play as and against popular Mario characters on wacky golf courses, Advance Tour will place you in the role of a young boy or girl and then send you off through what strangely amounts to a golf RPG.

Indeed, the big focus of Mario Golf: Advance Tour is building up your golfing stats as you play. You'll gain experience points by playing through both 18-hole golf courses and golf-related minigames, and, as your levels increase, you'll gain bonuses to various abilities, such as drive and swing. The game presents all this action in a pretty typical RPG format, since you'll control your character in a townlike setting in which you'll talk to other golfers. Moreover, you'll move around on a sort of world map to access various courses and other challenges.

Of course, Mario and friends have to figure into the game at some point, so once your skills increase to a high enough level, you'll catch their attention and will head off to the Mushroom Kingdom for some serious golf. The Mario courses will contain all sorts of crazy obstacles, such as pipes that your ball can land in or piranha plants that'll gobble up your ball right off the green. You'll also be able to get some Mario-flavored specialty golf clubs, such as the "pow" club, which will obviously let you hit the ball extra hard.

Mario Golf: Advance Tour is undergoing localization from the recently released Japanese version and will hit stores in June. We'll bring you more on the game soon, so, for now, check out our previous coverage of the game.