I’ll be honest, here. I’m talking full-out, cards on the table honest. I’m going to bare my very soul to you, my noble and informed readers. I was really, really excited about Mario Golf: Advance Tour. I really enjoyed Mario Golf’s N64 iteration, and Toadstool Tour offered hours of enjoyment, so what could be better than golf writ portable? I’ll maintain that there is only one thing better, but we won’t get into that today.
Let’s get conceptual for a minute here. Think of any golf game you’ve ever played, be it Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004, or Links 2004, or what have you: Pick what you will; chances are that it’s fairly impersonal. You have your golfer - a computer-generated avatar in pleated shorts, a system of dials and meters, and the course. You swing, and the ball goes somewhere. If you win, you get to pat yourself on the back.
Not so in Mario Golf: Advance Tour. Dubbing itself a “Role Playing Golf” game, MG: Advance Tour is one of Nintendo’s grand Shelley-inspired experiments, in which they release the unholy lovechild of two disparate genres and hope it works out. It may come as a surprise, but the resulting abomination is surprisingly supple and lifelike.
In the game, you play as either Neil or Ella, two hotshot students of Kid, one of the most legendary golfers to have ever graced a fairway. Kid drops our two protagonists, and their rivals Buzz and Helen, at the Marion Clubhouse where, after a whole lot of talk, the adventure begins.
Gameplay is very similar to that in Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, in that the course is laid out, you press a button to start your back swing, then press B at the height of the swing, then press a combination of B and A to achieve special technical shots. The whole thing works out fairly well, but the button response is far duller than on the GCN, so the timing never quite synchs up. This is especially prevalent when precise putting is essential – there is nothing more frustrating than a mechanical failure causing a loss. Other than that, the controls map very well to the Game Boy Advance.
The game takes place on a sort of enclosed world map, with pathways to be explored, things to search, side games to play, and tournaments to conquer. The tournaments themselves come in two varieties: singles and doubles. Singles is a sublime experience – just you against the course, hoping your score will beat out all the other contenders. The courses are well designed, and some are even diabolically difficult. Each of the five courses has a different theme – you have your basic green course, your tropical course, your desert course, your northwestern-styled course, and your… Mushroom Kingdom course, each trickier than the last.
Every victory, be it a tutorial, championship, match play, or mini-game, earns you experience, which you can divide between both Neil and Ella, or, if you don’t ever plan to play doubles, pump right into Neil. At each level up, you can pour stats into Drive distance, shot height, fade/draw, impact/control, and spin control. I’ve found that modifying one affects the others over time, so the game is a constant process of adjusting and tweaking until you have the character you want.
Doubles is, to put it lightly, painful. Think of it as playing cooperative golf with an idiot, without the ability to smack the dullard upside the head. The only saving grace of this in match play is that the AI of your opponents is so deplorable that it all balances out in the end. Each player takes turns from the last’s shot, which makes it an exercise in frustration as your partner, even if you have leveled each character equally, will refuse to reach Par 3 greens in one shot, will miss simple shots, and will even (and I swear I have seen this) shoot the ball in the wrong direction. A brass button goes to anyone who can tell me how I, your average meathead, can consistently drop the ball within a yard of the pin, while an equivalently - if not more - powerful cretin can forget which direction he or she is supposed to be aiming?
Moving right along before I get any more bile on your carpets at home, there are a variety of sub-games to be found across the world map, and all offer some substantial challenge, as well as a nice break from full-on tournament play. My personal favorite is the mini-course – three short holes that must be completed as one within a certain number of shots. It’s a huge challenge that offers a number of different avenues of attack. Other good ones are the club slots and the challenging gate course (think ring challenge).
If the story mode doesn’t float your boat, there are matches, tournaments, and “fun games” that you can play with your favorite Mario characters (unless your favorite is Toad, in which case you’re out of luck). There are also a load of connectivity features between Toadstool Tour and Advance Tour, which can unlock new challenges in Toadstool, and new characters and experience building games in Advance. There is plenty of replay value to be had with this, but, as is the trend with Nintendo’s big-name games, you need to be willing to hook up.
Every screenshot I’ve seen fails to do this game justice. The graphics are surprisingly clean, even on the courses (which are simply 2D images put on a slant, like the world map in Final Fantasy VI when you’re in the airship), and the animations are just as lively and vibrant as you’d expect from Nintendo. The audio is a little tinny and repetitive, and I found myself tuning it out after a while, but it is still clean and expressive coming out of the GBA SP’s speaker.
Much like Sword of Mana, Mario Golf: Advance Tour is a good game that is partially done in by really, really bad AI. Luckily, doubles mode isn’t a necessary part of the game (unless you’re one of those obsessive types who likes to unlock everything in a game), so it’s not a joy-killer like that turnip SquareSoft saddled you with in Sword of Mana. Unfortunately, the poor AI (which caused the system to chug as it engaged in what I laughingly call “thinking”) makes competitive Match games laughably easy if you have any kind of skill at all. If you enjoyed Toadstool Tour and need a golf game that will stay relatively fresh as it entertains you for a decent period of time, perhaps Advance Tour is worth a look.
