EricBall's Tech Projects - GCN - Mario Golf

RSS Bot · July 7, 2006

My five-year-old son picked this one out from the local video store ($5/7 days each or three for $10), I think mostly based on Mario (and Chomp) being on the cover.

I have mixed feelings about this title. When I first read through the manual, I realized that MG is more of a golf simulation with Nintendo characters than a Mario Cart or Mario Party style golf game. I was really worried that my son (and wife) would have real difficulty playing with the complicated control scheme. Fortunately, I discovered that the Automatic mode is reasonably easy to use (press A to start the swing, press A again to complete the swing) and the auto-aim works well enough (with some notable exceptions). I never tried to use the Manual mode, although I often adjusted my aim point and sometimes the club.

However, putting is, IMHO, much harder than it should be. It's far more difficult to make short putts than it needs to be; even after I realized you could hit A when the power meter returns from maximum. I think there should be an option so once you get inside a certain distance the putt is automatically successfull. You also need to manually adjust for slope and wet greens (rain). Again, it would be nice if there was an option to make this easier / more automatic.

But, I will say that the three of us had fun playing a couple of rounds of Skins. Which brings up one big plus - it's possible to play all four players with a any number of controllers, even only one (although if a player has their own controller they can taunt the other players when it's not their turn). Skins play is great because there's no stroke carryover between holes, so if you have a bad hole you're still in the game. Ties also tend to even out abilities.

Minor gripe - music. After playing a game or two I had to turn it off. It's far too repetitive, with the same short song played throughout the entire course. The voice (yes, actual English speech) is also repetitive ("Nice Shot", "Nice On"...) but I didn't find it annoying (unlike BP in NASCAR64).

Major gripe - Tournament play. First, in order to unlock courses (including the fantasy ones with Chomp in the bunkers, which really should have been open to start with) you have to play and win each new 18 hole course. For some reason Tournament is only open for solo play (Why not for any number of players? And, thinking of it, why stop at 4 players for any of the modes since you can share controllers?), and you are facing a large number of players (many not selectable for normal play, unlockable maybe?) whom you never see play. And in order to win you have to be under par over the course. Take an extra stroke getting to the green, or three-putt and you drop down the leaderboard. Mario Party had a better system - simply playing a complete game on the easier boards unlocked the next level of difficulty, with the top board only being unlocked once you had played all the others.

I should also mention that the courses get difficult fairly quickly - like the DK Jungle course where an over or under hit gets you an OB penalty as the ball falls out of the trees, or the Desert course where the small patches of fairway are surrounded by sand, rock, OB and tall cliffs blocking the direct path.

Oh, and although it's a golf simulation at heart, I question whether 1W should be used on the fairway, or the rough.

Definitely a try before you buy title. I can't see buying it, and probably won't rent it again; although my son might.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=1696