Mario’s Tennis (Virtual Boy)

For the rare few who got a Virtual Boy around its launch, Mario’s Tennis was likely to be their introduction to the console, especially since it eventually came as a pack-in with the system in the United States. Even if you’re looking into getting the Virtual Boy now, Mario’s Tennis is the cheapest and most available title. Even other games like Wii Sports that served as a pack in for most but not all Wiis might not manage the same attach rate as this game, mostly because the Virtual Boy’s poor sales and small library mean it didn’t really have the chance for things to pan out differently. That does end up putting Mario’s Tennis in an interesting spot. How does a game most everyone who’s touched a Virtual Boy has played actually do to show off the console?

Surprisingly, even more than a game like Mario Clash which was clearly conceived to play to the Virtual Boy’s 3D visuals, Mario’s Tennis feels defined by the 3D on offer. That is because tennis itself is a sport pretty reliant on consistently strong positioning and reactivity. In Mario’s Tennis you need to be standing in the right spot and swing your racket at the right time, although the game does seem to be a bit nice in that sometimes if you miss your first swing you can back up and swing again if the ball isn’t flying too swiftly. You do control an on-screen character meaning this isn’t first person tennis, making the positioning something you can more easily manage and without any potential nausea the system was said to cause, but since the timing of your swing is usually pretty crucial, you do start to treat every incoming ball closer to the real life sport rather than a video game simulation. There is no marker on the ground to help you, no special effects, it’s just your eyesight playing its part in determining the distance and speed of the ball as it comes towards you, essentially tapping into the enjoyment of the actual sport but in a more manageable manner.

 

Mario’s Tennis is a rather no-frills version of tennis though. It is trying to be fairly close to the real sport, no crazy superpowers or items factoring into this sports tournament in the Mushroom Kingdom despite some more fantastical backgrounds and the fact you can play tennis against a dinosaur or turtle. Your options for hitting the ball are pretty limited on paper, the A button hitting the ball back normally while B will let you do a lob for extra height, although positioning and which part of the racket you use can be crucial to altering it further. While Mario’s Tennis is nice enough to let you hit a ball so long as your body is generally close to the spot the ball is means you don’t need to track things like whether your character should swing to the left or right, hitting the ball with the edge of your racket will often cause it to drop slow and low on the other side of the net. If you manage an overhead swing that activates automatically based on the ball’s own position, you can slam it to the opposite side of the court with greater strength. It takes a tiny bit of learning to figure out when alternate swings might trigger but it’s not too difficult and there’s pretty much always a risk in attempting any hit that isn’t the standard A button swing, meaning you think more about how you try to get the ball past the opponent since you might whiff your attempt or hit the ball out of bounds if things aren’t set up properly. You do have some influence over the area of court you’ll hit the ball towards as well, so while there will be a fair few volleys where you’re waiting for a moment where you can spot an opening, you can work towards them gradually and try to get things set up for when you make your move.

Unfortunately, the solid straightforward tennis is not supported well when it comes to content. Mario’s Tennis only has seven athletes, Mario, Toad, Luigi, Yoshi, Donkey Kong Jr., Princess Toadstool, and Koopa. Characters do have different advantages in terms of speed, strength, racket coverage, and other small details, but they are mostly cut from a similar cloth so your choice is not too important. However, one nice touch is all the characters are pretty expressive, your character often turning to look back at you after a volley to show their reactions. A character like Toad actually cries a little if he lets the opponent score, Donkey Kong Jr. can look rather angry after a failure, but others like Yoshi look positively overjoyed. Even standing in place can be a little interesting for some characters, the princess unable to stay still as she waits for the ball to come her way. These are cute touches and it’s fun to see the small range of reactions characters have, but it doesn’t feel like there’s so many that adding more characters to the roster would be work intensive. In a bit of an embarrassment, if you choose to do a 2 on 2 doubles tournament, the game can’t even populate the entire bracket properly, one team represented as the odd character out teaming up with a mystery character who is eventually just replaced with someone from one of the losing teams.

 

Besides playing single matches against AI opponents, the two tournament types are the only real activity to be found in Mario’s Tennis, the multiplayer option scrapped from the game due to the console’s poor sales. You can play in either singles or doubles, each tournament taking three matches to clear, and there are three difficulty levels in Easy, Normal, and Hard. Hard can definitely be challenging, especially since it requires you to line up your racket better than usual and even removes the helpful feature of having a ball be visible even if your character would otherwise block your view of it, but the game controlled opponents still can be outsmarted and don’t have any cheap tricks. The tournaments do sound a bit short initially, but the format used involves needing to win 6 Games to earn a single Set, Game in this case being the tennis term for winning a round of volleys by successfully getting your ball past them four times. There are the expected rules in place for things like Deuces, Tiebreakers, how Outs are judged between Singles and Doubles, and so on, but the minimum of 6 games for a set does feel like a setting that would have been nice to let the player adjust with since it can lead to some lengthy games.

THE VERDICT: Mario’s Tennis offers pretty standard 3D tennis for the most part, but the 3D being such an important part of the play at least makes it work for that purpose. It is far too light on content, 6 Games to a Set making it technically last a touch longer but three difficulties across two tournament types isn’t really that time intensive to shoot for. The actual play requires some good set-ups and remains active and competitive, but despite having some expressive characters to give the game a little more energy, Mario’s Tennis feels too straightforward. It gives you decent sports action, but there’s not much that makes it special besides it being on the Virtual Boy.

 

And so, I give Mario’s Tennis for the Virtual Boy…

An OKAY rating. A lot of sports games can probably earn an Okay rating by being a decent enough no-frills facsimile of their sport, and Mario’s Tennis makes up for a drought of content to support its sport by having its fundamentals works well. The 3D really feels like a crucial part of the experience here, the game actually likely to play worse if you didn’t have the extra depth perception. The Virtual Boy does justify itself in this case, giving some life to the match play because positioning yourself to reach the ball is never an entirely automatic effort. You always have to work a bit, not to the point it becomes tedious or stressful, but like a true sport, you’re engaged with it constantly as you figure out little things to ensure you not only stay in the game, but can eventually shift things in your favor. There’s a little bit of mercy present so you don’t need to be spot on, that making it an easier game to jump into, but there’s still a tiny bit of depth to pulling off the non-standard shots. It is still a bit too basic, the focus on making the gameplay closer to the demands of the real sport means there is little wow factor, and as fun as seeing a few characters’ reactions is, generally the game would have been better served by a broader cast and one with greater differentiation.

 

Mario’s Tennis definitely isn’t a game worth getting a Virtual Boy over, but it is a bit of a decent showcase for what the game system can add to a title, even a straightforward sports adaptation like this one. It might actually be a touch more interesting than a run-of-the-mill tennis video game because the perspective you have on the court compared to other games, but Mario and his friends aren’t bringing much special with them for this competition. As mentioned near the start though, if you do end up playing a Virtual Boy, you’ll probably end up giving this a bit of a whirl, and while it’s lean in terms of the breadth of its offerings, it is at least able to provide perfectly playable tennis on the strange system it’s tied to.