Mario Tennis: Power Tour

"Mario returns, with more than just a hint of familiarity in the air"

It's the tennis game with a difference. That difference being Mario - the tubby plumber who seems to be adept at more than just stomping on Goombas these days.

We'll jump straight to the heart of the game: the story mode. It's this part alone which makes the portable Mario sports series' worth owning. You start off as one of two characters (Max or Tina) and quickly begin your journey towards superstardom. Well, the Island Open championships, anyway. Which is the Wimbledon of the Mario Tennis world.

The start of the game is actually quite dull. There's a lot of unnecessary blab to hammer your way through before you even pick-up a racquet. A group of "masked players" turn-up at your academy and challenge Alex (of Mario Tennis GBC fame) to a match. You're later informed that if you want to find out just who these guys are, then you'd best get to work and win the up-and-coming Island Open. That's some incentive!

After a few hours of banter, you're finally left to your own devices and get to explore the academy. Your ultimate goal is to work your way up from junior to senior level, then to varsity and eventually the Island Open itself (in singles, doubles, or both). Besides playing ranking matches, however, you can also visit the training courts to learn some tricks of the trade, accept challenges from other students or visit the technical training area which is home to a couple of tennis machines designed to help with your movement and shot placement.

There's another section to this area which opens-up later, and it's littered with mini-games. Most of them are actually very fun and the idea's a great addition to the series. The treadmill sees you tapping B to run whilst hurdling obstacles (bananas and barrels) with the A button. Another has your player pumping a huge weight to pop balloons floating across the screen. You have to be gentle or heavy with your lifting to burst the high-scoring balloons, but being too gentle will crush your character under the weight, while a pump too many will see it hit the spring on the roof and slam to the ground - again, flattening you. The actual point of these games is to earn you points in various attributes (speed, muscle, etc) which in turn give you Power Shots related to that area of expertise.

Yes, Power Shots are back. Love them or hate them, they're an unavoidable part of the Mario Tennis story mode. Personally, I didn't get along with them in the GameCube version, but here they're a lot less annoying. String a rally together and your racquet will glow. This is your cue to hold R and press A for a super, near-unstoppable smash. Or B for a life-saving defensive shot (if you go for an out-of-reach ball with A, it'll automatically select the defensive shot instead). The animations don't hold the play up for as long as they do in MPT, and since it's in 2D, there's no disorientating camera-angle switching.

Power Shots were my main concern in the build-up to this game's release, but I'm relieved to say they work alright.

Outside of story mode you have your everyday exhibition games. You can play as an array of Mario characters or one of the story mode players you've unlocked. Unfortunately the list of Nintendo mascots is fairly small, and many of the more "exotic" characters such as Fly Guy, Boo, Petey Piranha and Wiggler didn't make the cut.

In terms of gameplay, this version is a lot closer to the console Mario Tennis games than the GBC version was. Drop-shots are no longer unstoppable touches of doom, and the curve some players put on the ball has been made a lot more realistic. Character movement and ball speed/placement are almost identical to Mario Power Tennis.

The game is pretty-much everything I expected it to be. It offers bucketloads of fun and the RPG mode is of a decent length (although not terribly difficult), but I feel there's more than just a shade of laziness being shown with this release. The storyline has been almost completely recycled from the GBC game. With the exception of cameo appearances from the old crew and your visit to the mini-game centre, you've seen everything here before. You even know exactly how it ends.

If you've never played the GBC version then tack an extra point onto my final score. You're in for a treat. As for series veterans, well, there's more than enough gameplay refinements here to warrant a purchase. Just don't expect much in the way of a challenge, or anything startlingly original from the story mode. This is same-old, same-old. But it's also terrific tennis.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/28/05