Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour

The Mario Golf series has always been a bit of a strange concept to get your head around. Platforming superstar Mario, usually happiest when leaping across chasms, taking out Koopas with his posterior and generally zooming about like nobody’s business, placed into a sport that is anything but fast-paced. Generally slow, methodical and somewhat relaxing, golf is not the first sport you’d think of if you also had Mario in mind.

However, since its humble monochromatic beginnings on the original Gameboy, Mario Golf has come a long way. Very successful GBC, N64 and GBA updates aside, I was looking forward to this new Gamecube version for a while. What I got for my money came as something of a surprise, like much in Toadstool Tour. The famously cutesy characters all make an appearance, from Mario and Luigi themselves to Donkey and Diddy Kong, but even though the introductory movie and game options were much as I expected, but I most certainly didn’t expect the play mechanics to be as deep as they are.

In their simplest form, golf games are all about control. If you can’t hit the ball with a fair degree of accuracy, then you’re pretty much heading for a Mulligan every time. Toadstool Tour provides exactly what you need, with backspin, topspin, overswing and impact points all easy to control and in most cases, portrayed in an innovative way. Overswing (hitting the ball with more power than you usually could whilst still being in control of your swing), is controlled by the use of “Power Shots”. You start with a pre-determined amount of these power shots, which are activated by a quick tap of the ‘B’ button before you swing. Fluff it and you lose a power shot, but should you play the shot well, the game won’t remove a shot from your count, which in essence means that you could drive 18 power shots from the tee and still have 6 left at the end of the round. In my opinion, this is much better than the usual “accelerated power bar” affair that comes into play in other golf games.

Topspin and backspin are controlled by a double tap of a button when you’re about to hit your shot. Start the swing, set your power, then double tap ‘B’ for backspin or ‘A’ for topspin when the gauge hits the sweet spot. The closer you are to the sweet spot, the more spin you’ll get on the ball. Again, easy to use and very powerful. The d-pad controls your club’s impact point on the ball, allowing you to change the trajectory of the ball to a certain extent, which comes in very handy when you’ve mishit your drive and you’re staring down the business end of a small forest or mountainous chasm.

For me though, the single most innovative feature of Toadstool Tour is the ability to use “Autoswing” whenever you want to. Should you be a beginner at Mario Golf, or golf games in general, the swing bar can be very difficult to get used to and master at first. With autoswing, you begin the swing, press ‘A’ to set your power and then the game takes care of the rest – albeit without the option to put spin on the ball. When you feel confident enough to take full control of the game, just switch to using button ‘B’ to set your power level and you’re away. No menu options, no mucking about to make sure each player has the swing setup that they want, its all on the fly, which is an excellent addition when you think about multiplayer games. How many times have you not bothered with a game because one or two players just don’t get the control system or play mechanics’ With Toadstool Tour, that won’t really be an issue.

For single players, all manner of tournaments and challenges are available to play, with more unlockable as you complete the earlier ones. The first couple of tournaments will make you wonder if you made the right choice in buying the game, since they are so mind-numbingly easy to beat that there is nothing to make you want to carry on. Do persevere though, and from tournament number 3 – the Shifting Sands Classic – you’ll be fighting for every birdie and praying that the bogeys don’t start racking up (tee hee).

Graphically, we’re looking at a classic Mario affair. Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour contains some stunning courses in ever-more unlikely locations. Playing golf in Donkey Kong’s treetop hideout is something to be savoured, as are the unlockable Mushroom Kingdom tour courses with their warp-pipes, bunker-guarding Chomps and the like. There are some nice touches on display too, such as the “comet” effect that comes into play when you hit what the game deems to be a “Nice Shot”, and the trail of fire on your backspin and topspin shots. Nicely done.

Two things niggle me with Toadstool Tour unfortunately. The first would be the sound effects and character voices. On every shot (barring putting), the character makes exactly the same noise when hitting the ball, and when you’re looking at about fifty or so non-putting shots in a round, it can become annoying, fast. Secondly, the putting itself can be far too deceiving for my liking. The greens play far too slowly, even on the desert courses, and despite the greens being covered in a nicely implemented undulation marker when you come to putt, they are incredibly difficult to judge. If the speed of the ball doesn’t get you, the break most certainly will, and it can be heartbreaking when the ball stops less than a foot away from the cup, just because the green is running slow.

And this is what stops Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour from getting a higher mark, simply because putting is such a large part of the golfing experience. A great game is there to be had by all, but the putting system really does let it down somewhat. EA’s Swing Away Golf (PS2) and Sony’s own Everybody’s Golf (PS/PS2) are both games of this type that have a superior putting system. However, they don’t contain the instantly recognisable characters and truly wacky courses that Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour does. The choice, as always, is yours…