This is Super Rush’s big idea, the main change it makes to the entire idea of video game golf, but golf is fundamentally a game where it makes sense to take your time – and the fact is that sprinting after your ball is not very fun. Most of these modes involve dashing around the courses on foot, managing a little stamina meter at the bottom of the screen. The rules change every few rounds – there’s speed-golf, where strokes are as important as the time you take running around the course cross-country golf, where you have to work around weird hazards such as giant angry clouds and chip the ball around the course in any order in the desert, you have to finish the course before your water runs out.īetter when you’re playing multiplayer … Mario Golf: Super Rush. The solo mode is a cute golf adventure, in which you take a little Mii avatar through a series of tournaments to learn the ins and outs of the game and unlock all the courses. You can play Mario Golf either with button controls or by detaching a Switch controller and swinging it like a golf club, which is definitely more fun when you’re playing multiplayer at home. But on more traditional nine- or 18-hole courses, Super Rush’s embellishments to the rhythm of golf feel forced. This is fun, and matches can turn around in seconds, like a good round of Mario Kart. Battle Golf, the most madcap game mode, has you competing in a neon stadium with nine holes, where the first person to sink three shots is the winner. It’s all geared towards upping the competitive stakes. Doing any of that down the real-life course on a Sunday would, at best, get you politely removed from the premises. This month’s Mario Golf: Super Rush is a mad cartoonish caricature of the sport played by Nintendo characters in fabulously camp outfits, where you have to sprint after your shot as soon as you’ve hit it, ride tornadoes up cliffs to find the ball, and try to avoid the tackles and explosions that other players send your way.
In 1999, Mario Golf was just normal golf with Nintendo characters. It is a question that would make even less sense now. Why not just play real golf, he asked, which to me seemed a bit like asking why you didn’t just become a Premiership footballer instead of watching football on TV. I hoped that this might be a potential bonding moment where our worlds temporarily collided, but after patiently watching me play a few holes as Luigi, he failed to see the point. M y first memory of Mario Golf involves showing my dad – who, like many Scottish dads I know, is a steadfastly committed and resolutely mediocre golfer – a round of the Nintendo 64 version when I was a child.