This was the experience that I loved back on the Nintendo 64, and it has been preserved here beautifully. Mario Golf’s physics are arcadey enough to be accessible, making this as entertaining in multiplayer as Mario Golf has always been (and a better choice than 2K Golf, which loves nothing more than to punish you for daring to swing even slightly incorrectly), and the art and characters are Mario-colourful at its finest. You just take a shot, see where the ball moves, and the game “teleports” you to your next shot, just like every other golf game throughout human history has done. No time-limits, no Kojima-inspired wandering. Chose your favourite character, choose to play 3, 9, or 18 holes, and hit the links. Outside of the career mode, there were two modes that I will play exclusively going forward. I didn’t come to Mario Golf expecting Death Stranding: The Great Ball Hunt, and yet that’s what I got. I just didn’t love that where I wanted to play simple, “vanilla” golf, I was instead stuck traversing all these courses while trying to carefully manage a stamina bar, all while running to the ball to take my next snapshot. I loved the challenge of only being able to take a limited number of clubs to courses, and I loved the RPG-like levelling system. I loved everything about the career mode, from the narrative (which, again, is a beautiful homage back to humble little sports games that, to this day, I can pick up and fall completely in love with), to the aesthetics, right through to the equipment system. What starts out as a beautiful little 3D homage to the brilliant RPG-like mode in Mario Golf on the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance was quickly let down by the realisation that you’re going to have to run all over these courses, taking shots within arbitrary time limits, and while there’s certainly skill and management involved, it’s also busy work that I never wanted from my Mario Golf experience. With the above in context, it was disappointing that “speed golf” became the primary focus of the career mode. When Clap Hanz has been doubling down with the golf elements in its Everybody’s Golf and Clap Hanz Golf, Camelot’s been turning these things into powerup-hungry minigames that come as close to false advertising as it would be calling Mario Kart “Mario F1 Simulation”, and then expecting serious F1 fans to still get along with it (yes, I know Mario Kart happens to be good as a power-up bonanza manic party game, and these Mario sports titles tend not to be, but that’s beside the point that I’m making here). The more they have removed the technique and qualities of golf out of the experience, the more distracted and mechanically uninteresting it has all become. In the years since Nintendo and Camelot have become increasingly experimental with Mario Golf (and Tennis), and it has always been to its detriment. We didn’t need anything else back then, and we still don’t. When it’s focused on simply being a bright, colourful golf game, starring Mario and the gang, it is the best Mario sports title that we’ve seen in quite some time, hearkening back nicely to those days when, on the Nintendo 64, it was entertaining enough to see Bowser shank it into the deepest rough. Mario Golf: Super Rush is at its best when it’s not trying to be super or rush.
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