Mario Golf: Advance Tour is a handheld version of Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour for the Gamecube. As Toadstool Tour is one of my favorite Gamecube games, and I've really been hankering to play it again, I ordered the handheld version to complete my extremely extensive review of the handheld Mario sports games on the GBA. So how does it stack up to it's beloved console counterpart?
Extremely well! Advance Tour is a masterpiece of handheld sports gaming, and will be one of my most cherished GBA games forever, on a handheld that I truly love. I enjoyed the Mario tennis game quite a bit, but Advance Tour positively blew me away with its brilliance.
The gameplay is nearly identical to the Gamecube and N64 versions of Mario golf, in which you press a button to start the power meter, one to stop the power meter, and another to determine how accurate your shot will be. Anyone who has played a golf game like Mario Golf or Hotshots Golf will be very familiar with the mechanic.
One of the things I thought would be most tricky about the game would be the putting. The greens on the console versions are usually very complex, particularly on the more challenging courses. Rather than try to portray the hilly nature of the greens on the handheld version, Camelot wisely chose to simplify these greens, making the challenge less about reading the greens and more about timing. It can still be difficult to hit longer putts, though, making putting no cakewalk, especially since it lacks a view from behind your golfer to see where your ball lies. All in all, this is as good a putting system as I ever could have hoped for, and it works for great effect.
You can play on 5 courses that increase in difficulty. These courses are largely taken from the Gamecube game, although they are altered a bit for handheld play. A few of the courses from the console version are mashed up into other courses, like combining the Mushroom Kingdom course with the Bowser's Castle course. The courses are all beautiful, and have a lot of the fun, fantastic style that you just don't see in golf simulators, including tricky shots to the middle of an island to cut a par 5 course in half, or giant chain chomps that will eat your ball if you land too close to them.
The game is visually perfect. It has a really nice recreation of the 3D visualization from the Gamecube version during tee shots, enabling you to look at the beautiful courses and watch the nice swing animations. During other shots, you have a top down view that shows you the lay of the course and your shot path, with the ability to zoom in more closely on the area to which you are shooting.
The music is all excellent, and is again taken from the console version.
You can play the game with multiple players in hot seat mode, or in linked or wireless match play against another player with their own copy of the game. I haven't done this, being a solitary wretch by nature, but I trust that it would work very nicely.
So is this just a port of the Gamecube version, with minor changes for functionality? Hardly! The main draw of the game, and the meat of how you'll spend your time, is a fantastic RPG mode in which you try to become the ultimate golfer. You work on progressing through the tournaments at the difficult courses in your area, and try to become champion of each. You can also play a doubles mode, in which you alternate shots with your CPU partner, and there are separate tournaments for doubles play. You can also challenge golfers to play you in match play, in which you try to win more holes than your opponent. You can also play doubles match play, in a similar style. After finishing a match or tournament, you receive experience which you can use to improve how far you can hit the ball, how accurate your shots are, change your shot angle, and how much you spin the ball. This mode will take the meat of your time playing, and it's quite a delightfully long game. I've spent probably at least 20 hours just playing through the RPG mode and then trying to set course records to earn all of the unlocks.
There are also TONS of challenges and training exercises you can do, including a mini golf game, a par 3 course, and opportunities to improve in your putting, driving, and approach game. These are lots of fun, and finishing them all would probably add 10 additional hours to the game. And I may do so, with how much I enjoyed it!
It's hard for me to find any weaknesses in the game at all, but in fairness there are a few. I would have liked it if the Mario characters would have played a larger role in the game, as they play almost none. It would have been fairly easy to have a Mario character be the champ of each course, and to get to play them in match play at the end, but they didn't do this for some reason. The only time you can play against the Mario characters in match play is in the quick play mode, rather than in career mode. Having their presence in the game would have increased the "Nintendo feel" of the game, which would have been nice.
The game also has a perfect physics engine, unless of course you're trying to hit the ball up a slope while your ball lies on the slope. In this case, it's literally impossible to hit the ball forward at all. You'll just pop it straight up in the air, which is totally not like real golf at all. Eventually you'll learn to just shy far away from slopes, but this is just a silly addition that exists in the Gamecube game, too. Boo.
But try as I might, those small weaknesses were all I could find. It's a true handheld masterpiece, and a must own for any fan of golf games, Mario, handheld gaming, baseball, apple pie, and/or motherhood. And it's pretty cheap, too! I got my copy for about 10 bucks on Amazon, and it was well worth the price. I'll be circling back to this one over and over again, for certain. I'll give it a 9.8/10.
The next iteration of the handheld What I'm Playing series is teased in the image below, and only hardcore fans will be able to figure this one out...
-TRO
No comments:
Post a Comment