Mario Superstar Baseball Review

Mario runs, Mario swims, Mario dances, Mario plays soccer, Mario plays golf, Mario plays tennis, Mario Parties… Mario does it all! I’ve seen so many Mario games and sometimes it seems like it’s just too much! But every time I do play a new Mario Game, I am hooked on it for some reason that I can not explain. I guess it’s because Nintendo knows how to make a great game. People like Mario, (and so do I) and it’s for this reason that his games sell like hot cakes.

Lately Mario has been involved in all sorts of games. Mario Strikers and Dance Dance Revolution, the new one with Mario, come to mind, but in this latest game Mario does something else we wouldn’t expect him to do. He plays baseball! But why have Mario play baseball when we get all of those incredible baseball games from other companies, especially EA? Here’s why.

This game was developed by Namco who seem to have very good relationship with Nintendo right now. Namco wants its games to sell a lot on Nintendo’s consoles and Nintendo gives them the opportunity to do that by using their most popular character! I mean, everyone knows Mario and his games sell at least a few hundred thousand copies if not millions of copies with each release. If that’s the case then they know that no matter what they have Mario doing it will always sell simply because he is a mainstream character that everyone likes.

But if you look at past Mario games (the ones that aren’t platform games) you will notice one thing they all have in common: they are all pick up and play titles. Each and everyone of them is very easy to get into no matter how experienced you are with video games and I think that’s the reason why they are so appealing. At the same time, they offer just enough challenge so that hardcore gamers can feel satisfied once they’ve completed the game, making this the perfect video game package for everyone.

I personally haven’t played that many baseball games this generation because of the fact that I am not a huge baseball fan. Since this one is from Nintendo, I decided to give it a try. So I bought it, put the disc in my GC and powered it on. As the game started I was shown a really cool FMV sequence like you’ve have seen in previous Mario sports titles. It shows a little bit about the game and also gives you a little idea about what the story mode is all about, though we all know that in the Mario universe the goal of the game is always to beat Bowser. So unless you lived on another planet for the last 20 years this should be of no surprise to you!

So once you get to the menu screen you have various choices. Since it was my first time with the game I decided to play the exhibition mode for a quick shot at the game and see what it’s all about. It was a fast 5 round match that lasted about 10 minutes and even though it was short, it was a lot of fun. I was able to do all of the things in the game easily and found all of the controls to be really intuitive. For some reason I knew how to do everything without having to read the instruction manual, that’s how easy it is to play this game.

Your team is composed of several characters from the Mario universe going back to the SNES and NES eras. Some of them you will be happy to see, some of them you will not be, especially the ones from Sunshine. As you start with Mario’s team, most of your characters are from Sunshine (except for 3) and they are all bad hitters and run really slowly! Of course, all of that changed when I started playing Challenge mode.

Challenge mode is the story mode of this game. It is somewhat short but it’s a nice little addition and it’s the only place where you’ll unlock new characters and special abilities for them. There are harder difficulty levels to unlock but each one of them takes less than an hour to beat, not taking into account all the time needed to unlock everything of course. Overall, even though I’m glad they’ve taken the time to include this mode in the game, I just wish there was more of it and I think it would have been a better idea to delay the title and really polish this mode. It could have been something more.

Bowser wants to challenge the best baseball players in the Mushroom Kingdom so he sends out invitations to everyone. Mario and his team as well as others like Donkey Kong and Wario want to show him, of course, that they are the best. So you start on your adventure by selecting a team and then going from stadium to stadium (a big 4 of them!) to beat all of the others. It is done by walking around on the map much like you did in Super Mario World on the SNES. Once you beat a team, you are able to use their characters so that you build a stronger team for yourself as each character in the game has different attributes. And once you’ve beaten them all you’ll be able to play against Bowser’s team to finish the game. There are however characters that you can talk to and when you do, you are then able to participate in mini games.