If one were to add up all the hours all the gamers of the world have spent playing golf as Mario and compare them to all the hours all the golfers of the world have spent playing golf -- well, you'd have something pretty close to a balanced equation.
The very first golf game for the Famicom -- known only as Golf -- stars our husky hero. As does NES Open -- in which the little big guy is far more recognizable than Mickey Mouse. Every game by Nintendo with Golf in the title for any GameBoy system stars Mario. Some economists have theorized that Virtual Boy failed because T&E Soft's Golf -- of which I own two copies -- didn't star Mario. (Okay, so that's not true.) Mario Golf, too, for Nintendo 64, lets us play as Mario -- after some grueling unlocking, yes. Thank god for forethought: Mario Golf for GameCube lets you pick Mario right from the start, and play as him to your heart's content.
Let's see a show of hands: how many people would pick Mario, without even looking at all of the other characters' select-screen animations? Every character has one -- most amusingly Princess Peach: now wearing a tight pink mini skirt, she shifts her weight from right to left, humming the first six notes of the Super Mario Bros. theme Marilyn-Monroe-style. I'll admit it -- I didn't see that animation until one hour after booting up the game. I picked Mario, and started the game. It just seemed like the thing to do.
If your brain ticks differently from other people's, you might pick Wario, Mario's fat, repulsive nemesis. Or you might pick giant turtle-dragon-bad-guy Bowser, because you like punk rock, and he has spikes. If you're the kind of guy who always plays as a girl in these games, you'll have to rack your brain to pick between miniskirted blonde Peach or orange-hot-pants-endowed brunette Daisy -- or you could just pick Birdo, gaming's first gender-crisis-stricken bow-in-head bird-lizard character. You could pick Donkey Kong, if apes are your thing -- he's so hardcore, he swings with one arm -- or Diddy Kong, if you're into the smaller monkeys. If you're too l33t to look Mario in the eye, you might pick neglected little brother Luigi, and be on with it.
And maybe, if you like golf and/or are playing this game as a golf game, you'll look at everyone's stats, and pick them based on something technical. That works, too.
The characters themselves are bright and lively. They are smooth and cartoony representations of your childhood and/or adult-childhood favorites. Yoshi looks like Yoshi; his voice sounds just like Yoshi's voice in that dreadful Yoshi's Story game for Nintendo 64, and that's alright -- we still remember him from Super Mario World. When Yoshi hits the ball just right, a rainbow trails it as it arc through the air. Mario's shots turn into skinny fireballs. Bowser's turn into fat, screaming fireballs. The announcer cheers such fierce ball-hitting, saying "Nice Shot!" and sounding like a game show host.
The first course -- which I'm watching my brother play right now -- is a series of your standard "real"-looking fairways. It's green. Everything is green. The sky is blue. The clouds are white and fluffy. There's a lake on two holes. The grassy textures are real enough. Those look like leaves on those trees. It's all convincing. It's all golf.
And then you've got Mario standing there. Red hat, blue trousers, brown loafers, big nose, bigger mustache. It doesn't jive, aesthetically. And yet, at the same time, it's wholly not awkward at all. Mario is smooth enough, rounded enough, textured enough, shaded enough, and clean enough to be seen standing on this pristine golf course.
This is how all of the Nintendo 64 Mario Golf felt: like Mario, playing golf, in the real world.
The first course is called "Lakitu Valley." Lakitu, as you may or may not know, is the little turtle that rides on a cloud in nearly every Super Mario game. There's not a single Lakitu in sight for all of Lakitu Valley (okay, unless you hit the ball out of bounds, and then it's just a still shot of him), and that's almost enough to make me damn this game to hell for lying to me.
I don't do that, however. I even let "Cheep Cheep Falls," the second course, which looks very much like Lakitu Valley -- only with more water, and less Cheep-Cheeps (flying fish) -- slide by under my radar. There is to be no damning of these lazy, easy courses, because from the third course on, the game stands head and shoulders over all previous Hot Shots Golf titles in terms of course design.
The third course is "Shifting Sands." In the middle of a barren, wastelandish desert stand pyramids, temples, and even a huge sphinx statue. Somewhere between all this, you have to play golf. Expect harsh winds. Expect to scream once or twice when a well-placed drive hits into a pillar for some reason standing in the middle of the desert, expect to scream in triumph when your drive doesn't overshoot the top of the pyramid on the par-three fourth hole. Expect to marvel at your skills, as they increase.
The fourth course, a par-three called "Congo Canopy," takes place entirely on treetops in Donkey Kong's jungle. You'll have to hit between branches and leaves if you expect to birdie every hole.
Further courses will take you to Princess Peach's and King Bowser's castles. Expect creativity.
For all its large-polygon goodness, Mario Golf on Nintendo 64 commit many, many grievous sins. For one thing, you had to unlock Mario. In Mario's place, at the beginning of the game, you could only choose from a handful of generic Hot Shots Golf-ish characters with less collective personality than my guitar. For another thing, as has been mentioned above, the majority of courses reflected something you'd find either in a cartoon rendering of reality or else Hot Shots Golf. Not so, this time. This time, you'll find yourself face-to-face with the Bomb King from Super Mario 64, and brave bunkers inhabited by sleeping giant Chain Chomps. So it is that Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour has thrust the Mario back into Mario Golf.
Mario Golf for the Nintendo 64's other sin was its constant toying with us when it came to special modes. It was bad enough that you had to play so much to unlock Mario (yes, that's the third time I've mentioned that; no, I'm not sorry). It was an unnecessary insult to do what Camelot did with the Mini-Golf mode.
Basically, the "Mini-Golf" mode of Mario Golf consisted of nine putting greens, each one in the shape of a numeral from one to nine. Yes. Here, let's write up an unofficial strategy guide for the Mario Golf miniature golf mode:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
There, how's that? You read it here first. If you'd like to link to this guide, please be sure to link to the first page of this review, not directly to the guide.
Ahem.
This was the pinnacle of lame. I was choked up with anger at this lameness. I wanted a real miniature golf mode. Maybe a chip-and-putt mode. Instead of big clown heads or windmills, maybe I could be trying to putt into the mouth of a Bowser statue? I didn't get my wish. All I got was angry.
Well, Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour makes up for its predecessor's sin -- mostly. I believe I did complain to my friend, at the time, of Mario Golf, that "I'd rather have no mini-golf at all than this garbage." Well, someone heard me -- there is no mini-golf in Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour. There is, however, a "Ring" mode, where you have to hit the ball through rings, and then make par. The problem is, the rings are in places where any golfer in his right mind would never hit the ball.
Take, for example, the first hole of the Shifting Sands course -- titled "Phunky Pharoah" -- in Ring Mode. The giant sphinx statue to the left of the tee has a golden ring through his septum, like a big bullish nose-ring. You have to somehow get the ball through that, back onto the green, between three giant pillars of textured sandstone, and onto the green. It's a par five.
How the hell, though, are you supposed to do this? Well, you have to put a topspin on the ball, use your driver, and hit it at about 75% power, aimed right toward the sphinx's left cheekbone. If timed perfectly and hit spot-on, you'll squeeze the ball right under the ring, bounce it off his cheek, and send it back onto the fairway with anywhere between 262 and 251 yards to the pin. How you make par is up to you. It took me an hour of solid trying -- and what do you know? By the end, I felt good about myself. I felt like I'd genuinely learned something about hitting a golf ball in a cartoon world.
I'd also learned that I dislike the game's putting controls. A short putt -- maybe one foot -- is impossible to precision control. In reality, you'd just tip the ball in. In Mario Golf, you have to use the same power meter you use for a drive. The smallest increment marker reads "4ft." You tap the A button twice, hit the ball too powerfully, and sometimes -- yes, thankfully, only sometimes -- the ball pops out of the hole. You have to be quick in your tapping. And I'm sorry -- that kind of quick-tapping just doesn't belong here. Putting is a calculated thing. For shame.
Now, the art of putting a super-topspin on the ball, that's all about the bold, quick finesse. In a first for a Hot Shots game, you have some degree of manual swing control. Press A to get the meter rolling; when it's at the desired position, hit either A or B to begin the backswing. Hitting A puts you into automatic mode -- the game assists you with a perfect, spot-on, straight-shooting impact. Pressing B is like putting another five-dollar chip into the slot machine. Sure, you stand to lose more -- you could also possibly gain more.
As the meter heads back toward the ball, you make a choice. Hit A or B to the left or right of the impact point to draw or fade the ball. Hit A twice to initiate a top spin -- good for running the ball a little forward after its last bounce. B twice performs a backspin; the ball will spin backward while flying forward, and grind back when it hits the ground, minimizing bounce.
Now here's where it gets tricky: hit A, then B, for a super-topspin. Edging the top of the ball, hard, sends it flying forward when it hits the ground. B, then A initiates a super-backspin. With a super-backspin, a skilled player can overshoot the flag, only to see the ball roll backward fiercely, and right into the hole. It's really something else.
Fans of Hot Shots Golf will enjoy this manual control. It'll give you something to polish up, to make your skills more impressive. And -- you know what? -- the manual controls won't scare the beginners, either. My brother played Lakitu Valley four times, and now can kind of almost do a manual backspin.
I, for one, like this kind of on-the-fly decision. The meter is swinging down, and I think, "I should really put a backspin on this." And then I do, and it works, and I pump my fist like Tiger. And my opponent tells me, "Shit, dude, it's just a videogame."
Opponents are a good thing to have for Mario Golf. The one-player game is a lot like a lonely headache; a headache is a lot better when you have someone else to whine about it with. The competition can get fierce; or you can cooperate in a doubles round. You can play special "character matches," or compete in birdie shootouts. You can play the Rings, or you can have some serious fun in the Coin mode.
Ahh, the coin mode. There are two ways to play. Either see who can get the most coins in two strokes under par, or up the stakes and play the Cash Cup -- get as many coins as you can, and then sink a putt. Miss par, and lose all your coins.
The coin game makes for outright stellar two-player competition. Coins frame the shapes of 1up mushrooms, question-mark boxes, or even Fire Flowers. Red coins are worth ten. Blue coins are worth twenty. Red and blue coins are usually in the most god-awful out-of-reach places, making them particularly risky in the cash cup mode. The winner at the end of eighteen holes is the player with the most money. If you're playing one-player, well -- no one wins, no one loses. You can still try to beat a personal high-score or something.
Mario Golf is good at saving your high scores. It records everything nicely for posterity. It even graciously provides instant replays of all your best shots -- yes, including my ninety-two-yard "chip-in." I was honestly a little surprised with how many shots the game stores in its memory. I told a friend about it.
He couldn't believe it. "Doesn't it all, like, save to the memory card?" I told him, yeah, it does. "Do you have a regular memory card, or a big one?" I told him I had the big one. "I still don't see how it can save all those videos." I had to explain it to him -- it's not saving videos. It's merely saving configurations. Direction of aim, percentages on the hit meters, whether there was a topspin or backspin, the character used. There's no "video" going on here. It's simply recreating the shot based on a series of parameters.
My friend replied, "Well, what the hell is the fun in that?"
And I think: he has a point.
Mario Golf is a game that, with proper guidance and long sessions of thought before each stroke, can be played perfectly. You can play a perfect game without having any real skill at the game as a game. Hell, if you have a freakish eye for detail and the right FAQ, you don't even need any experience with golf real or imagined.
That's not what this game -- Mario Golf, and golf in general -- is about. It's not about looking back at that one perfect shot. It's about playing, over and over again and again. Playing with different characters against new people, in the company of friends and enemies alike. The only thing that remains constant is the Mario.
And the music. Right now, I'm having a relaxing birdie challenge session in the Congo Canopy course. The music is delightfully smooth: Korean punk band "No Brain" is covering Japanese punk band The Blue Hearts' song "Kimi no tame" ("For you"). Birdo -- gaming's first transsexual lizard, don't you know -- has just swung his/her club and soundlessly sent the golf ball toward the tee. Bilingual lead singer Sung Woo reaches the climax of the song, which he sings in Korean: "I love you -- more than anyone, more than anything -- I'm sorry -- I love you more than God." I sip my root beer. The song ends, and -- ahh, silence.
. . .
Okay, so I have my television muted.
Here's where I tell you how it is: for each of its graphical joys and gameplay triumphs, Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour commits two capital crimes against the ear of humanity.
I'm sorry -- I can't stay silent about this anymore. I'm serious here. The sound and music in this game suck transsexual lizard ass.
Each course has its own little music themes -- mostly remixes of pieces of pieces of music from other Mario games. Some music remains standard -- when you're in line for a birdie putt, expect to hear that Super Mario Bros. underworld music, sped up, sambafied, and too, too, too loud. I'll admit -- that music is kind of cool. I wish there existed an option to turn the music down to a minimum volume -- I'd also wished for this option with Mario Tennis, where I almost could have enjoyed the Super Mario theme that plays on the Super Mario Bros. court. Yet, in Mario Tennis and Mario Golf both, that option doesn't exist. You can either choose to leave the music on or off.
If you choose to keep it on, you shall forever drive and approach to the tune of loud, brassy tunes straight out a Brazilian infant's television nightmares. There is no tact in the boldness of the music. There is no kindness. There is no subtlety. It is a complicated, clumpy, noisy racket, and hardly background for playing any kind of golf, even golf of the arcade-style cartoon variety.
If you choose to turn the music off, that means you care to hear the sound effects. Well, lucky you -- Charles Martinet is around to provide a cornucopia of shrill, overacted, Mickey-Mouse-on-helium voices. Not to discredit the guy or anything -- he's got some crazy amount of talent to do what he does -- it's just really getting annoying. It's killing my ears. I'm going to be deaf before I'm an old man.
Mario and Luigi sound almost exactly the same. Wario sounds like a deeper Mario. Waluigi sounds like a higher Wario. There's a certain amount of subtle characterization behind each voice, and it's really something mostly awesome to hear the little differences in edge between Wario and Waluigi. I can appreciate the voices. I just can't stand them.
No, no, allow me to rephrase that: I can't fucking stand them.
Even Donkey Kong's apish hooting and bellowing runs razorblades down my nerves. Diddy Kong manages to sound both like a dumb monkey and an annoying-as-hell monkey. Princess Peach's voice is a bad dog-whistle joke.
When people diss Nintendo for being "kiddy," I think they might not know what they're saying. I mean, they're right when they say they have a problem with the games that keeps them from enjoying them. They're just not right about the kiddiness.
Director Hayao Miyazaki says his film Spirited Away was made for ten-year-old girls. That didn't stop it from winning an Academy Award; that didn't stop every respectable film critic on earth from giving it four stars.
It's not the kiddiness -- it's the manner with which it's carried out. And I'm telling you right now, it's getting to be too goddamned much with the Mario series.
Now, I love Mario. Let's get that out of the way, as we always do, and buckle down, and say: Mario, I don't like what's happening to you. We all used to wonder how old Mario was; some said he was in his forties, just because he had a mustache. Others, like me, were more optimistic. He's twenty-five, I say. As proof that this is possible, I, at age twenty-four, haven't shaved in three weeks, and have something of what someone might call facial hair.
Mario Golf caused a lot of schoolyard haters to stand up and take notice. Mario wouldn't play golf if he was under forty. No one under forty plays golf.
This is, of course, wrong.
Well, Charles Martinet, Nintendo: you're killing the schoolyard conversation. As long as Mario speaks, as long as he utters his living, breathing, Italian racial slurs mixed with Mickey Mouse stereotypes, there is to be no more creative debate. All we have to do is listen to Mario swing a golf club, and we know, for sure: there's Mario, he's four years old, and his mustache sprouted thanks to all the radioactive crack his mother was smoking.
We need to give it a rest. No more talking for Mario. Make him gaming's Charlie Chaplin in more ways than one.
Or at least offer me a god-damned option to turn the voices off in these games. Yes. That would be best.
Because I wouldn't mind hearing the ambient sound effects. Water tinkles. Wind blows. Birds sing. Vultures' wings flap in the desert. Club heads collide with the ball with a pleasant wood-knocking sound. The ball sails through the air with a swish. Rain falls, thunder gently rumbles.
The power meter makes a loud, exuberant "BSWOOOOOOOORSH" as you tap in a .91-foot putt.
"THE HELL?!"
Okay, so the TV gets muted. If only there were an option to turn off the voices, music, and game sound effects, and just leave the natural sounds of golf. That'd be nice. Then again, I guess that's like asking for an option to walk the courses and/or use your coins to rent go-karts.
I'd appreciate a more toned-down heads-up display, too. Sure, we need the power meter, and the ball lie indicator, and the wind indicator, and the map. Sure. Do we, however, need a big grinning sprite Mario face at the far-left side of the power meter? Do we need to see him give a thumbs-up when we hit the shot perfectly?
Do we fucking need to see a fucking Boo ghost fly by with hints when we don't hit the fucking ball for five fucking seconds?
If I were an evil man -- and I'm not, really -- I'd actually affix a score to this review, and give it a four out of ten, just because of the fucking Boo ghost that flies by when I wait too long. The things are god-damned persistent. If I spend three seconds using the C-stick to trace my ball trajectory, or gaze down the fairway lost in pondering my approach angle, if I hold the C-stick down for more than an instant to make sure I have the right angle on my putt, a Boo ghost will fly by with a sudden, nightmarish "GHYECKYEHYECKAH" cackle, pulling a hint on a banner with him.
PRESS "A" TO BEGIN YOUR SWING.
Sometimes -- I shit you not -- four of the god-damned things will fly by at once. FOUR. And they get increasingly bold, too:
PRESS "A" TO BEGIN YOUR SWING
PRESS "X" TO SEE THE MAP
PRESS "A" TO BEGIN YOUR SWING
ARE YOU GOING TO HIT THE BALL . . . TODAY?!
This is wrong. This is very, very wrong. That the game is simple enough for my brother -- who's never played a golf game -- to jump into and shoot par on the easiest course is one thing. That it's hard enough to cause me to scream during later stages of tournament play is another thing. That it lets player two vocally "taunt" player one during a two-player game is yet another thing -- a thing very much like something out of Hot Shots Golf. That these taunts are now accompanied with a red (negative) or blue (positive) word balloon filled with text the about-to-drive player might find his eyes attracted toward -- that's something horrendously, evilly wrong.
That the game itself will always, without fail, do this to us in the one-player mode; that's another thing altogether. Its sin is too much for words.
Of course, the Boo can be turned off. However, the way to turn him off isn't in the options menu. It isn't anywhere you can see.
That, my friends, is the very definition of "bad form." They call golf a "gentleman's game," and maybe with good reason. It's about men -- okay, adults -- playing a game wherein they take turns, independent of one another, competing most truly with their own self as they stand, club in hand, looking down the fairway, thinking strategic thoughts, feeling and smelling and tasting the wind. In this environment, there is shit you do not do. I don't care if you're playing golf for real, or simply making a videogame starring cartoon characters playing golf: cackling-hint-ghosts flying by, even when the television is muted -- it's some jackassly shit, is what it is.
Luckily, the rest of the game remains solid. It's fun with friends. It's fun in a group. It's even fun alone, when you live in a room with a window looking out on an acre of grass that isn't yours, and a big American highway. It's fun to chat about in the insert credit IRC channel. It looks good. It plays exceedingly well. Its cuteness level, perhaps because handled by Camelot, is a little out of balance; the opening FMV, full of bouncy-loud music and screeching voice-acting, drags on for approximately six minutes. Every person I've shown this game to has commented on the monstrous length of the intro, which features two company logos (the Wario-assisted "Nintendo" and the Waluigi-presented "Camelot"), a pre-title-screen, a sub-title-screen, a title-screen, a post-title screen, and a re-title screen.
When Yoshi is putting, his . . . nose gets in the way of the ball.
All we have to remember, however, is that we don't need to look at the ball to golf in this game. The heads-up display is enough. When we aim our uphill putts, we're looking at numbers more than images; abstracts, not concretes.
Hell. I should stop to listen to myself here. Mute the television? Don't even look at the ball? Either this game is something Zen, or . . . hell. Look at what it's come to. What number-crunching, assisted by superficiality. If golf is, according to Mark Twain, a "Good walk spoiled," what is Mario Golf, at its worst, if not "good number-crunching spoiled" by visual and aural quirks?
Oh, hell, look at what it's come to.
I like Mario Golf. I like it a lot.
Writing this, however, makes me want to play Ikaruga, or Rez, where sight and sound and gameplay are one. So that's what I'm going to do.
And then go to the driving range.
Okay, well, it's . . . three in the morning. Maybe I'll just keep playing Mario Golf.
Oh, hell. I'm going to Hell. And not just because I skipped my go lessons with that Chinese girl to swindle those coke-head frat boys.
Forgive me, Shigeru Miyamoto, for I have sinned.
--tim rogers albatrossed your mother last night
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