Mario Golf: Advance Tour

"Golden Sun Tour"

From the moment the intro plays and you first hear your character's squeaky voice you can be sure that you have gone through the wrong warp pipe and ended up at some bizarre Golden Sun version of golfing, complete with reused graphics and sounds.

Game play 6/10
Right from the start of the story mode you are forced to enjoy some long conversations of annoying sounds and recycled emotion icons from Golden Sun that appear above your character's head. Once you get paired to your “partner” it's off to the course where you can either teach yourself the basics and gain some experience or head right into tournament play. There are single and doubles tournaments as well as single and double match play events as well as a few creative side games. If you just want to skip the RPG business there is regular old quick play mode, as found in Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour.

When out on the course there are many obstacles for you to deal with, but unlike Toadstool Tour, putting isn't one of them. There are cliffs, different terrains, and the more realistic water and sand hazards. Not to mention the usually unchecked wind.

There are numerous things that I found very frustrating when dealing with the game play, the main one of these being the minimum control that you have at the start of the game. This is not all the fault of the AI, however, since even the character you control does not do much better. The problem is that you can not reach the par 3's in one shot, or the par 4's in two. This problem continues to exist in your partner even if you have leveled them up many times. Your partner also has terrible aim for a while as well, driving you into the heath whenever possible.

Putting the AI problems aside, there are also many flaws existing in the blatant attempt to create a very unrealistic golf atmosphere. The thing that you see the most, and the thing I hated almost as much, was the way the courses had a mountain-like appearance. Everywhere you look you see random hills and cliffs jutting up all over. The insanity comes into play when you get stuck at the bottom of one of these things - even if you are in the middle of the fairway! I have never heard of hitting backwards from the fairway in golf, and when I watched my opponent do this in a tough doubles match, I was even more puzzled. (Trees will also make your opponent hit backwards from time to time.)

The next wrongly designed feature was the wind. I have never heard of the wind blowing your ball away from the green when you are 20 feet away. It just does not happen. When it does this to you, you can be assured it will be at least twice as bad on your partner. Not only is the wind stronger than it would be normally (2 MPH wind can easily blow you off course), you have to worry about if it is going to affect your ball or not. Some times, when you are teeing off, you may check the wind and adjust your aim accordingly. When you hit your ball, though, it will not head the way you intended it to, almost as if the wind is playing tricks with you.

Then there are the greens and their terrible representation of break. There are little green arrows that cover most, if not all, of the green's surface. The problem is that they don't really come into play very often on the actual courses. You can easily counteract their effects by hitting your ball harder than you need to. However, when you try to do the putting side games, you will notice they affect your ball much more. To me this makes the game seem unbalanced, I would like it to have been the same throughout. Besides the arrows being all confusing and what not, some of the greens seem to be shaded backwards as well. When the arrows show the green slanting down, the green is shaded where that part of the green looks like a hill, instead of a valley.

Control 10/10
No complaints here. Everything controls exactly like Toadstool Tour with the putting problem fixed where your character got in the way of your view. There are also two different difficulty levels for hitting. You can either hit “manually”, which involves more buttons and better precision, or just hit “auto” which only requires you to hit one button. You can only control spin on manual and there is the usual super and regular top-spin and back-spin.

Graphics 8/10
Obviously since these graphics are essentially recycled from Golden Sun they look really good. I was not very impressed by this, but they did the game some good.

The problem with the graphics comes when it zooms in on you before you hit some shots. The picture is highly pixilated and looks like something I was trying to draw in Paint. The overview can be a bit jagged at times as well.

Sound 6/10
Nothing can be more frustrating to hear the same old Golden Sun rip-offs, with a few songs being direct rips from those in Golden Sun. (At least in my ears.) Some songs are good and fit the game very nicely, but other will have you turning off the sound in no time - just in time to miss your characters babbling, too! In short, these aren't songs to download...

Overall 7/10
I was going to give it a 6, but I have really enjoyed this game and have played it a lot more than any other game I have bought recently. It is definitely worth the $25 I paid for it. I would have definitely given it a 10 if it were not for the game play issues I encountered. I really liked the realistic golf atmosphere of Toadstool Tour and wish it could have been used more the same in this game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/25/04