Mario Superstar Baseball Review

DK serves up his Bananna Curve-Ball to Diddy Kong.

Well, they certainly pulled it off this time. Mario Superstar Baseball is an incredibly well-made game. The style of this game is Mario all the way, and each character has excellent animations to when the come up to the plate, strike out, walk the bases after a home run, make a big play, etc. They really went all out on making each character their own unique visual eye-candy.

The voices are excellent as well. The majority of the voices are right on, such as Birdo, Mario, Daisy, Peach, etc... But I still have grudges against Donkey Kong's voice... When will they get his right?

Aside from the basic Mario characters, they've thrown in tons of side characters throughout Mario's past, since every team needs a good nine players, they went all out on including other characters to unlock. Some of the side characters include: Goomba, Koopa Trooper, Shy Guy, Pianta, Noki, Dixie Kong, Hammer Bro, Petey Pirahna, Magikoopa, Toadsworth, the list goes on. Just an incredibly awesome cast of characters.

Of course, none of this really matters if the game isn't fun to play. It plays pretty much like any ordinary Baseball game, but they've thrown in Star Power. With Star Power you can hit a ball with a special ability or throw a pitch that's hard to hit. For instance, using up one of your star powers with Mario pitching makes him throw a flaming fireball that rips across the plate, and Waluigi throws a "Lier Ball" that splits into two and gives you a 50/50 chance of guessing which one's actually the ball. When hitting, Yoshi's swing will cause a ground ball to bounce in odd directions much like a football would, and Bowser slams a Bullet Bill into the outfield. Some pretty neat looking tricks, and a lot of fun to try to bat or pitch against. Since you don't earn a whole lot of Star Power during the game, no one can be cheap and just pitch with a fast ball for the entire game. It keeps them a little rare, and the game a little crazy.

Birdo's getting ready to slam a ball out of the park.

Besides playing in a standard baseball field, you can also play in some gimmick fields. Yoshi's field has Pirahna plants that can eat the ball and spit them somewhere else, and Peach's field has large ? Blocks in the sky that the ball can bounce off of. At one point, Jory's fly ball that would have been an out, bounced on the top of one of these blocks and it propelled it into a home run. (shakes fist) The music in the game is especially nice. Mario Power Tennis has some terribly lame music, and this game really makes some nice arrangements of old Mario tunes.

The single player mode isn't as much fun as multiplayer, and that's to be expected. There's so much more excitement when I'm playing against Jory than against a computer that might be cheating because it knows exactly where a ball will land. The one player mode consists of you picking a dirt-awful team, and walking around on a small world map, playing against other teams and trying to win over their characters. Once you've assembled a nice team of nine, you can then challenge Bowser's team.

There's also a kind of sub-mission to the one player mode of trying to turn characters into Star Characters. By completing certain tasks that are listed for each character, you can change that character into a more powerful Star Character anywhere else in the game. It was pretty fun at first when the tasks were things like, "get on base with a bunt" or "get a double play". But pretty soon those tasks turned into "get a grand slam with Mario when Peach is pitching" and "pitch a shut out against the Bowser team on the hardest difficulty". Yeah, right. So we got three of the characters stars, but not much else seemed very likely to be done. It wasn't like we couldn't do it, but more of chance. All we could do is hope we were put into some of these situations. It was too random than skill.