DigitalSandbox

• Publisher: Nintendo
• Genre: Sports: Golf
• Rating: http://digitalsandbox.us/wp-content/esrb-everyone.gif” alt=“Rated E” />
• System: http://digitalsandbox.us/wp-content/gamecube_small.gif” alt=“GameCube” />
• Score:

First off, don’t let that 3 out of 4 rating fool you. I love this game…a lot. It is so much fun to play. I only lowered its score because of a couple of minor details that should have been cleared up. But this is a great game that everyone can enjoy.

First, let’s talk about the good things and we will finish off with some things that could have been improved. Mario Golf offers everything you have come to expect from a Mario-branded game. The game is really fun to play and offers easy starting and more difficult mastery. The graphics are great and offer just the right blend between Mario cartoon and golf game graphics.

The game offers both an auto swing mode and manual swing mode depending on your skill level. The auto swing mode allows even the most inexperienced gamer (e.g. The Wife) to have fun playing the game. You simply tap the A-button once to start the swing and again to set the power. The computer will select a timing setting at random (nothing too crazy so your shots will be pretty good). For those that are more experienced and/or control-freaks there is the manual mode that allows not only control over the timing, but control over your spin (top-spin/back-spin) as well.

The graphics, as I said earlier, are great. The courses (more on them in a minute) are detailed and well crafted. You get the feeling you are playing any of those other golf games until you see Mario (or whoever you choose) at the tee box. You get two courses to try out at first. A traditional style 18-hole course and a 9-hole par 3 course set in the canopy of a forest. Both courses are fun to play. They did a really good job capturing the feel of a real golf course with the 18-hole course. There are a few holes where shot selection is key. You can unlock other courses by playing in tournaments and winning. Eventually you can unlock the courses that everybody buys the game for and play the Mario-style courses. These come complete with warp pipes, Pirahna Plants, adn Chain-chomps to add a degree of difficulty to the course.

There are also a wide variety of game styles to play. You have your traditional tournament style play, stroke play, and match play. But you also get some fun variations of the game with a ring game (hit the ball through a sereies of rings) and a coin game (collect coins by hitting the ball near them). There is really fun version where you play a slot machine to determine which 3 or 4 clubs you get to play with o the course and games where you try to get nearest the pin.

So with all of these options there is a lot of replay value in this game. If you tire of regular golf try the ring or coin games. If the courses are getting too easy, try the club slots game to make it more difficult.

With everything this game has going for it, there are a few, unfortunate, drawbacks. The first one, and this a big one, is the courses. The courses are great, as I said, but you only get two to start with. That is really not enough starting courses in my opinion. The other problem is that neither of the courses are the Mario-style courses you want to play when you see the game in the store. In fact, you can’t play those courses until you have won five tournaments. So be prepared to play a few rounds of golf before you get there. Also, you really need a memory card (which I have yet to acquire) or you will never see any of the fun courses, unless you never shut your GameCube down.

My other problem, and some of you will probably think that I am picking nits here, is the weather. When you go and play a round of golf in real-life, the weather is more or less constant for that round. In Mario Golf, the weather is determined from hole to hole. That means you can go from one hole of sunny, low wind weather to raining on the next hole and back to sunny, low wind on the following hole, and sunny, high wind weather on the hole after that. I would like the weather to be determined for each round, not each hole, to maintain some sort of consistencies with what you would encounter while golfing for real.

Without a course map it is difficult to say if I am right on this next point, but given the weather model thay are using it wouldn’t surprise me. It seems that the wind is totally random. Ideally the wind should vary only a little in it’s directions and speed (unless it is a gusty wind) and should only appear to change direction with respect to the direction the hole is playing. If they fixed these few inconsistentcies and offered at least one Mario-style course to try out at first I would not hesitate to give the game 4 stars.

As is, this game is a ton of fun. You will spend many hours playing the many different courses and unlocking many special extras, including more characters. I would recommend this game for anyone, but golf afficionados who like to reminisce about old school video game characters (like yours truly) will find a special place in their hearts for this game.