Tag: Mario Golf

My Summertime Games

As this past week was the 4th of July, I thought it would be fun to write about the games that I associate with summertime. I have made a list of the games that always remind me of those childhood summer days where my brother and I would come back inside, typically from playing baseball in the yard, grab a couple sodas from the fridge and then proceed to play some games during the hottest hours of the afternoon. Beginning with….

All-Star Baseball – “America’s Pastime.” I’ve spent many hours on a variety of baseball games, starting with La Russa Baseball ‘95 on Sega Genesis as a kid and continuing all the way to present day MLB The Show games. It was difficult to name just one baseball game as my favorite, but my most vivid memories are playing the All-Star Baseball games during the summer/fall months on my N64. The games have improved by light years from the simple design of the 16-bit days, and the yearly offering of MLB The Show is still among the games I play most during the summer months. All that time spent playing baseball on N64(and backyard) is nearly inseparable from the idea of summertime.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater – Growing up in the 90’s and into the early 2000’s – before extreme sports games like skateboarding and snowboarding seemingly went extinct, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater helped bring extreme sports into popular culture. I first played THPS the summer of 2000 after a cousin brought a copy of the N64 version over and we spent the day playing. I remember begging persuading my mom to buy my brother and I a copy of the game which spent the rest of the summer obsessively playing. I remember waking up in the morning and my first thought was to try and collect more tapes and unlock more levels. I still have the PS1 version of THPS 1 & 2 that I’ll pop in and play every now and then; the camera and controls by now definitely feel their age, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a huge game for me during all those summers as a kid and I couldn’t possibly go without mentioning the legendary soundtrack and all of the licensed songs that were used for the games. I dare anyone to listen to ‘Superman’ by Goldfinger and NOT immediately think of THPS…

Mario Golf N64 – I dragged my trusty N64 into my living room a few weeks ago and Mario Golf was one of the first games that I popped in. I spent countless hours with my brother and our neighbor friend trying to unlock all the extra characters by besting them in an 18-hole Match Play, which proved far more challenging as anything else we were playing at the time. The three of us would take turns playing a hole trying to beat Metal Mario and…I don’t think we ever did? The music and sound effects from this game are still as charming as ever and evoke those nostalgic remembrances of summer afternoons(spent in front of the tv). While I’d probably consider the Game Boy Color version of Mario Golf to be the best one, the N64 version is my favorite.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – Man…I can’t even imagine the hours that were spent playing Vice City on Playstation 2. I had never played anything like it before. It was THE REASON my brother and I traded in several stacks of games and scraped all the money we had together so we could buy a PS2. Vice City took everything that made GTA III an instant classic and improved it. My friends and I used to take turns playing the game for hours on end, usually without even attempting to complete an actual story mission as we’d simply run around causing chaos in the tropical, neon landscape of 1980’s Vice City. The gameplay freedom, music, and chaos that Rockstar created in Vice City is still one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of video games in the summertime.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – See? I do actually have a game on this list released within the past decade. It’s been two years since I was able to get ahold of a Nintendo Switch and the easy choice of first game to go along with it was Breath of the Wild. I spent the rest of the summer completing shrines and gathering Korok seeds before squaring off against Calamity Gabon. I had been itching to play through the game all over again, so I started another playthrough over the weekend with the intention of completing every shrine and finding every Korok seed, along with finally completing the Master Sword Trial(possibly?). Breath of the Wild still stands as one of my favorite Switch games and a more recent game I associate with playing during the summertime.

Super Mario Sunshine – I’m unable to think of summertime video games without Super Mario Sunshine being one of the first games springing to mind. I fell in love with this game from the first time I played in on my GameCube in August 2002 and Mario’s vacation-gone-awry on Isle Delfino is still one of my personal favorites on the console. The exotic Isle Delfino is a dream summer destination(mostly?). The wonderful Koji Kondo soundtrack adds to the summertime mood as well. Despite the seemingly relaxed vibe of the game, it can be surprisingly difficult – some of the moving 3D puzzle-platforming stages found later in the game are notoriously challenging. While the camera is STILL one of the game’s biggest drawbacks, I still enjoy traversing Isle Delfino and consider it one of the defining experiences on the GameCube. Super Mario Sunshine remains one of my go-to summer games.

What are some of your favorite games to play over the summer? Or something you most closely associate with the season? Thanks for reading!

Mario Golf – N64

As we approach Labor Day, we have a chance to sit back over the long weekend and reflect on everything we did over the summer months. Labor Day is generally considered the final weekend of the summer as we prepare for school to resume and enter into the autumn season(probably my favorite). While I didn’t have a particularly eventful summer, I was however able to spend my time divided between work, and other leisure activities like playing video games or writing on my blog site. I made a while ago listing some of my favorite summertime games, and thought it would be fun to write about one of the games I mentioned – Mario Golf on N64

Mario Golf was first released on the Nintendo 64 in July of 1999 and developed by Camelot, the developers behind the Shining Force games for multiple Sega consoles, which would explain the RPG elements in scattered across Mario Golf games. Camelot had also created Everybody’s Golf that was released on the Playstation in 1997, which was the game engine that was used to create Mario Golf. Nintendo fans had been familiar enough with Mario in a sports setting as Mario and Luigi were the two playable characters in the 1991 game – NES Open. There’s also the seemingly forgotten Mario’s Tennis that was released on the Virtual Boy in 1995(no further explanation required…).

The gameplay represents a pretty straightforward Golf title where some of the intricacies of hitting the links in real life had been scaled down a bit, though there are still plenty of variables that can effect your shot such as wind, altitude, or length of grass in which your ball lies. Your swing is controlled by a meter in which you try to stop the cursor at two points, the left mark which affects the power of your swing and the mark on the right reflects the accuracy of your strike. You have a bag of 14 clubs, each showing the approximate distance you could expect on a full swing; a grid also appears in the distance ahead of you to show the landing area as you strive to steer clear of water hazards and bunkers. When putting, you are able to read the green with the help of a square grid that appears over the green to help indicate the slope to factor into just how hard to strike the ball. The putting in the game is probably my strongest area, and is similar to the putting while playing golf on Wii Sports(minus touch controls, obviously).

There’s a good assortment of game modes to play in Mario Golf, from basic Stroke Play where the player who completes 9 or 18 holes with the lowest strokes taken wins the match to Tournament, Ring Shot, Speed Golf, Mini-Golf, and a Training mode where you can select a specific course and hole to practice on. The game mode I spent the most time playing as a kid however, is Get Character, in which you play against a CPU controlled opponent with the character being unlocked and playable after beating them in an 18-hole match. The game has a generous list of playable characters – from Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, and Wario to other characters only featured in Mario Golf titles like Charlie, Plum, Sonny, or Harry with each character having a different average distance off the tee and ball flight – draw, straight, or fade. Mario Golf also made use of the N64 Transfer Pack where you could transfer several characters from the Mario Golf game for Game Boy Advance that was released several months after the N64 version.

There are 8 playable courses in Mario Golf(two of them are mini-golf tracks), ranging from the more traditional country club venues of Toad Highlands and Koopa Park all the way to the more challenging courses like Boo Valley or Mario’s Star – featuring holes that are designed to resemble a different character from various Mario games. You earn points for every round you complete while playing the game with the largest amount of coins being your prize for winning in Tournament mode. Once you accumulate enough points you can unlock the next course as Toad Highlands is the only courses that is playable from the start.

What I love the most about Mario Golf is the simplicity – Mario and friends playing golf, no other frills. There’s no special shots or other nonsense that makes it hard for me to like any of the Mario Tennis games other than the original; I certainly understand that I may be a bit of a minority opinion on that. It may not be as true to life as other golf sims like the Tiger Woods PGA Tour games, but it provides a nice middle ground between arcade-y and straight-up simulation. The music provides a nice warm, relaxing feeling out on the course without being too upbeat as to prove distracting and the controls work well and still hold up pretty nicely. Another favorite part of the game is by pressing any of the C-buttons you can “taunt” the other players mid-ballflight or on the green such as Luigi’s “Mama-mia!” or Wario’s “Hurry up already!”, this always provided tons of fun while playing with friends; of course you can’t use these while your opponent is teeing off…that would be bad golf etiquette 😉

For the many things that Mario Golf does well and I enjoy about the game, there are a few things that detract from it. There is a significant difficulty curve in getting to the point of being able to score par or birdie more often than not, part of this being that there’s not much forgiveness for mis-hits. If you miss your accuracy mark by a little too much and you will shank the ball straight left and only about ten yards out. The game certainly punishes any mistakes you make, along with the feeling that your yardages are very RARELY accurate. Also pushing gameplay to that of a golf sim is the many variables that you have to account for such as your lie, elevation, wind, or merely wetness of the grass. I spend a few hours playing the game over the weekend and while I still enjoy playing the game, it’s aged reasonably well with sound and visuals(aged as well as any 3D games of the era at least…), I feel it’s rather tough to recommend to someone that has never played any of the Mario Golf games before or simply playing solo. I may have spent the most time playing the N64 version, but in my opinion the best entry of the Mario Golf series would still have to be the Game Boy Color version that was released a few months after. The GBA release retains all of the positives of the N64 version, but the single player story has added RPG elements to it that create a little more interesting experience, due to Camelot’s work history with the Shining Force games for Sega. I encourage anyone not familiar with any of the Mario Golf games(or golf games in general) to check out the GBA version of the game.

That’s all for now! Have you ever played any of the Mario Golf games or any of the Mario Sports games on Nintendo consoles? What’s a game that you loved playing as a kid, but upon returning many years later hasn’t held up particularly well? Let me know in the comments below. I’m going to kick back and enjoy the rest of my Labor Day with my boy Dimitri and some more Fire Emblem: Three Houses!

Keep on playing…