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Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour Preview
Mark Simons
18/06/2003
How is this update of an N64 classic shaping up? Find out with our detailed preview...
We here at TVG place Mario Golf 64 near the top of the leader board of golfing games, taking the core gameplay from the wonderful Everybody's Golf series and placing everybodyâs favourite plumber and co onto the green. The N64 title offered some excellent golf in Mario's world, okay so it wasn't made by Nintendo, but Camelot managed to match the quality of Nintendo, probably due to some supervision going on, but got to give credit to the developers, most of their games are excellently made.
Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour should be a welcome sight for GameCube owners who are still craving for more golf. Given how good, more importantly fun and accessible, the last Tiger Woods game was, it remains to be seen whether Mario Golf can challenge it. Admittedly Mario and Tiger don't seem to be going after the same market, but you could argue that they are, given how big Tiger is as a brand these days, and how many golf games there are on the GameCube, Camelot have their work cut out.
At first glances Mario Golf: TT offers much the same as the last one, with substantially improved graphics - a nod to EA perhaps... However underneath the surface lurk some changes; beginning with the control system. Camelot has stuck with the tried and tested tri-click system that has, until recently, been the uncontested way of doing a golf game since time began. You have a meter, click to start it going, click again for power, the bar comes back, you click again to decide how cleanly you hit the ball. A good system, however the wonderful implementation of the swing system in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003 and in the forthcoming Links 2004 has shown another way of controlling a golf swing, and done it well.
On the Toadstool Tour you have some little refinements to the tri-click system that could offer more depth to the aging control scheme; instead of just using the A button to decide when the meter goes up and down, you have the B button available to control top and back spin.
If you use the B button to stop the meter when you decide the power then when it snaps back down you can do a number of things to change the style of your shot. The trick is to quickly press combinations of A and B to change the spin. AA for top, BB, back, AB, super top, BA, super back. This should make applying spin harder than it is in Tiger Woods, in which, as good as the control scheme is, it can become a little easy to hit tricky shots with lots of spin. The system in Mario Golf seems to require a little more in the way of reaction and timing to pull off tricky shots than Tiger asks of you.
Taking a step back for a broader view of the game, the Toadstool Tour sees you travel to various locations from the Mario universe; instantly recognisable places with little details, sure to raise a smile for the fans. There are also some more conventional courses for the golf fanatics, but the most interesting thing is the courses set in the Mario world; these have features like warp pipes, and chained up chomps that actually have an impact on the game - land a ball inside a warp pipe and see it pop up somewhere else on the course, land in a bunker and expect to see your ball disappear into those sharp teethed chomp-chomps. Thoughtful level design implementing these features should set Mario Golf: TT apart from the more realistic golf games; as well as offering even more reward for trying crazy shots and more punishment if you don't have the skill to pull it off. Bwuaahahahahha as Bowser would say.
The usual suspects are available for players to select from, all with their unique voices, technique and attributes. Just a wild stab in the dark here but we guess that Mario will be an all-rounder, Peach not powerful but accurate and Bowser will be the man, erm, by that we mean powerful but with less accuracy then the others, but in the hands of a master...
Perhaps Mario Golf's unique selling point on the GameCube will be the way it interacts with the GameBoy Advance version of the game. Take your character from the big version of the game and develop them on the pocket tour, then put them back in the GameCube version. This is a nice way of getting continuity between the games, as well as being simply sensible in our opinion; one of the most basic implementations of the GameCube / GameBoy Advance link up but simple is so often the most effective. We would also take a guess that there will be unlockable features that require both versions of the game, however we couldnât possibly know what lies in store.
