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One of the most apparently popular of recently released games for the N64 is Mario Tennis. You won't find any Andre Agassi or Anna Kournikova level playing here but you don't have to be a tennis expert to enjoy the game either. The first thing that catches the eye about Mario Tennis is the graphics. The 3D meshes of Nintendo's homegrown cadre of characters appears right at home on the court. Fluid motion, immediately recognizable personalities and well defined characterizations (more on that later), as well as its bold, aggressively bright and colorful look serve to draw the curious in, promising an amusing gaming experience.
Oddly enough, I had more fun playing Mario Tennis at the Nintendo 64 display at Toys R Us than I did at home. In retrospect, this seems to be the case with a lot of N64 games (the only real exceptions being Castlevania 64 and Pokemon Puzzle League), but since I was having such a good time creaming my opponent fellow shoppers on the virtual court, the thought that this would be another, say, Star Wars Racer never crossed my mind. So it was a bit of a shock to find that when I finally brought my formerly beloved Mario Tennis home, I found myself more than a little disappointed. Lesson One for the prospective Mario Tennis player: whatever you do, make sure you have someone to play Mario Tennis with. As a one-player game, it really comes up short, and proves to be not much fun at all. The two player mode is where all the action is. There's nothing wrong with trying to climb the ranks and win a championship, but it seems that you keep competing against the same characters each time. I'd like to compete just once without having to battle Mario or Luigi. Mario Tennis offers you the somewhat limiting choice of playing as your favorite (and not so favorite) Mario Bros. characters. If you're like myself, and your familiarity with the Mario Bros. series extends no further than the first 3 Donkey Kong and the original Mario Bros. arcade games, then let me be the first to inform you: a significant percentage of the characters you get to choose from in Mario Tennis will probably hold little or no appeal for you. Even if you go into this recognizing that this is essentially a children's series, on a system that bases its fortunes on marketing solely to the preteen market, you should find it rather hard to take irritating characters like Toad, Baby Mario, Peach, and surprisingly enough (for someone as out of touch as myself, anyway), Mario himself. Mario, in fact, turned out to be the worst offender of the bunch, between his whiny Mickey Mouse voice (and we all know Mickey Mouse is evil), annoyingly stereotypical Italian phrasing and outmoded catch words (come on, did ANY self-respecting Italian ever go around hollering "mamma mia" every 3 ˝ seconds? Is this supposed to be cute, or worse, amusing?). Worse yet, as if his voice and all the cheesy stereotyping weren't bad enough, the accent is done rather poorly, I might add, sounding more like some weird child's approximation of Topo Gigio (or Bela Lugosi, for that matter) than the Sicilian plumber Mario is presented as being. I found myself playing as the same 2 or 3 characters every time: the evil looking ghost Boo (whose most amusing trait is his release of what appears to be a "fart of victory", something like what happens when you suddenly let the air out of a balloon, after each winning serve or return), the strangely serial killer-inspired "Shy Guy" (some troll that runs around in a Jason mask), and best of all, the Snidely Whiplash-like Waluigi. I have no clue where the hell these characters come from, but Waluigi, with his flashing red eyes, evil snicker, and even the way he recites his own name like some sort of threat almost singlehandedly manages to save the game. If they ever come out with a game starring and based around the life and adventures of Waluigi, I'm there. And that's not to mention that he's one of their best (outside of that little prick Mario, anyway) tennis players! Speaking of Mario, one really bizarre and unrealistic feature of the game was how this (proportionately speaking) 3 foot tall, fat old bastard would somehow manage to jump 6 feet in the air to return serves that would blow past any of the other players in the game, scoot back and forth across the court at lightning speed to accomplish the aforesaid impossibility, hog the net, and absolutely destroy the game of any otherwise undefeatable opponent. This proves to be not only extremely annoying, but almost completely beyond belief (if we didn't know that the entire Nintendo franchise is built around this once amusing, but now incredibly annoying character, and that all the little kiddies playing this game are supposed to be fighting over who gets to play as Mario; Mario's the hero, we're all supposed to root for the unconquerable Mario, gee, I want to grow up to be a plumber someday, just like my idol Mario). The replay feature in the game is somewhat lacking, to say the least. While one would naturally expect it to replay the "action", it seems instead to be rather random, tending (more often than not) to show poor angles or emphasizing anything but what you wanted to see in the first place. In other words, instead of showing Mario get hit in the face with the tennis ball, you'll see, for example, Daisy jumping up and down, or a close up of an uninvolved character's face (when playing doubles, this happens a lot). One of the apparent selling points of Mario Tennis is that it offers several other games (in the creatively titled "Special Mode") in case the gamer (as is quite likely) becomes bored with the regular game. Why you would want to play any of these other games, however, is something that I'm not quite sure about. I may be out of touch, here, but I really fail see the point of playing tennis while trying to collect rings or hitting strange multi-coloured cubes that seem to break (and form new ones) to no apparent purpose. I particularly enjoyed how the computer would somehow, magically, cause lightning to strike me or a banana peel to appear in front of my dash to return its serve, yet I found it difficult or impossible to return the favor.
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