"twenty-seven arguments for and against cartoon baseball":
super mario stadium: miracle baseball
a videogame published by nintendo
developed by namco
a review by tim rogers


When I was a kid, I played baseball.

Then, gradually, I came to not want to play baseball anymore. What were the reasons for my having played it in the first place? I guess it was because I liked watching baseball on television, which I suppose I did because I liked collecting baseball cards, which I suppose I did because my dad found it a clever way to get me into baseball.

I gave up baseball for karate, I suppose, when I realized that baseball was only, at its best, a simulation of an epic struggle, and that whenever a baseball game escalated into what seemed like a real, honest-to-goodness epic struggle, it only did so because lots of adults were thinking too seriously about things. Baseball is a sport with three "bases" where runners can be positioned, though only if they're capable of hitting a speeding, heavy, 108-stitched horsehide ball thrown by a pitcher. They have to run to the base before one of the nine players on the opposing team can retrieve the ball and throw it precisely somewhere where it is needed. Karate was a more direct means of simulating a human struggle -- by placing two padded people opposite one another and making them start punching. It pleased me on different levels. Baseball is like a simulation of the paper-pushing phase of a world war; karate is a simulation of one soldier bayoneting another.

I quit karate because of an emergency inguinal hernia operation when I was twenty-one, and never really started back on it, which is a shame. I have, however, come to gradually appreciate baseball as a kind of adult men's statistical fantasy. The Japanese began to love baseball after their status as a warring nation was neutered by the American-written post-World-War-II constitution; the acceptance of baseball perhaps also had something to do with the worldwide piling-up and acceptance of literature, which portrayed the sudden deaths of so many memorable characters as something we'd rather not have happen. Men, especially Japanese ones, didn't mind that samurai swords had been outlawed, because literature of the time proved that the era of those swords was brutal, full of men killing other men on rainy nights for scary causes. They grew to like baseball for the same reason, I suppose, the real adult me grew to like baseball: in this world, there is no real glory, only the glory we forge in the realm of games. That the players on the baseball field have names, and faces, and ethnic backgrounds, and scandals involving alcohol and womanizing that can be read in Japanese weekly tabloid magazines only lends depth to the viewing of the sport. The Japanese will talk about friends and acquaintances, defining their personality traits by using the names of famous baseball players, the way peasants in the Edo Period would describe their family members as resembling certain famous samurai swordsmen.

So it's curious, to say the least, that though Japanese children are grown up being told they want to play baseball, grown up playing catch in the middle of a dead street in a back alley in Minami Senju on a locust-screechy August night, that whenever they pick up a baseball videogame, the players on the field in the television usually have huge, cartoon-like heads with beady little eyes. Why is this? I can think of more than a few good reasons: the Japanese children who desire to grow up, one day, to find their own glory on the field of baseball don't want to place themselves in another player's shoes, per se. Having a "hero" you "look up to" is so 1930s; the average Japanese child of the year 20XX has to be careful with what he aspires to do, lest he start getting compared to the hero in a comic book. It's shameful to be compared to heroes in comic books, because they're usually the kinds of people the author crafts while thinking of famous samurai or baseball stars, and no kid wants to be a copy of a copy. You know what they say about copies of copies -- they're fuzzier than the original.

Konami's Winning Eleven series doesn't use the real names and likenesses of players, either, though there's more of a legal reason for that. It has something to do with Electronic Arts' owning all the names. Typical. The average Japanese Winning Eleven player (and by that, we mean the average really obsessed Japanese Winning Eleven player) will simply not stand to play the game as his favorite team until he's gone through and appropriated real names and faces to all the players via the built-in edit mode. Meanwhile, Namco's Family Stadium baseball series has real names and real teams, only the players are dumpy-looking, fat-bootied, huge-headed, beady-eyed cartoon monsterpieces. The players don't complain; players of baseball games in Japan, by nature, are not the sort to complain. For the most part, they're only playing baseball games because there exists no other kind of game they'd want to play. Players of Winning Eleven, on the other hand, need not even be fans of soccer, though it's possible non-soccer fans can obtain a deep understanding and love of the sport only through a few video bouts; hell if a non-lover of baseball can be bothered to play a baseball videogame in the first place.

This is because soccer and baseball are very different in how they treat the spectator. Soccer is in constant motion. Though each of the eleven players on each team has a specific position, to a casual spectator, such things don't matter when the game is constantly in motion. The soccer spectator will entertain thoughts of going out and playing the game himself; the baseball spectator will entertain thoughts of how good each player is at his respective position, and how he compares to other historical players of that position. Baseball is ordered; the entire game waits on the edge of its seat for the pitcher to throw the ball. Everyone gasps as the ball sails through the air -- the batter swings, and misses. The ball thuds against the catcher's mitt. Everyone relaxes as the catcher returns the ball. The pitcher readies to pitch again. Everyone holds their breath. The ball sails through the air again, and there's a crrack -- the bat has connected. The ball flies at a sharp arc. The playing field is alive with motion for a few seconds as the ball bounces into right field, the batter speeds for first base, the right fielder fields the ball on a bounce as the runner rounds first base, and throws it toward second base just a second too late. The runner has decided to be satisfied with second base. The crowd relaxes. The next batter steps up to the plate.

Americans have grown to accept baseball as a sport with many static moments, because Americans love delayed gratification above all other gratification, and they especially love delayed motion, if you know what I mean; the latter love makes acceptance of soccer preposterous. The Japanese have trained themselves to love it for the same reasons. Part of this training involved giving "baseball" a Japanese name -- "Yakyuu" (?? = "field ball") so as to make it seem like something the Japanese might have invented themselves. Their baseball leagues' rulebooks follow the rules of the American and National Leagues down to the letter, so that their statistics can be stacked up against American statistics, though I reckon if a Japanese player were to ever best Mark McGwire's one-season homerun record, the American authorities would shrug it off with a comment along the lines of "The only Japanese pitchers McGwire ever had to face were the ones good enough to come to America." We'll speak no more of such politics and ethnocentrisms.

Instead, let's talk about cartoon baseball. Soccer is a wonderful sport to imagine cartoon characters playing, because soccer is always bubbling with motion, just like the best cartoons. Basketball works for cartoons as well, for the same exact reason. Cartoon baseball, though -- that's a curious idea. A sport as reliant on silences, pauses, and delays as baseball -- baseball, a sport that can be over in as few pitches as twenty-seven and as many pitches as infinity -- a sport with as many, well, smaller than life qualities as baseball just doesn't have any business being played by cartoon characters. The greater portion of the game is spent staring at a pitcher's face while he stares at the catcher, as they silently agree on how hard to serve the ball to this particular batter. Cartoon characters can't play baseball without making a mockery of this facial-ticking exchange. We've seen it happen on The Simpsons before, with Coach Burns doing the most ridiculous dance-like third-base-coachings.

Well, Namco's Super Mario Stadium: Miracle Baseball, which stars cartoon characters, doesn't aspire even once to farce, and for that, it scores one RBI (Run Batted In) on a base-hit to left field. (I wouldn't dare call it a "homerun.") The characters, for the most part, conduct themselves like gentlemen and gentlewomen; they stand in place on the bases, they hustle toward the ball when it's popped up in the infield, they pitch, they catch, and they hit. Each player has some kind of special ability -- like Mario's fireball fast ball -- that recalls what kind of person this character is in all of Nintendo's old videogames. Each character speaks in some high-pitched, god-awful voice, though thankfully the voices are not as noisy as they are in Camelot's Mario Golf. The rules of the game play, for the most part, like baseball, with the "fun" and "videogamey" additions of "stars," available at irregular intervals throughout the game, which allow you to use abovementioned special abilities whenever you need to, perhaps, throw a pitch that can't possibly be hit. To use the special abilities, you hold down the "R" button while pitching or hitting. If you're playing two-player versus mode, and you're pitching, for example, the other player will have no clue you're about to throw the imposso-pitch (unless he's got a thing for staring at your right index finger) until the ball is in the air. I observed that it seems the only way to reliably always hit a homerun is to use the R-trigger bat swing and (most impossibly) connect with an R-trigger super-pitch. This is fair enough -- individual pitchers' super pitches, though impossibly at first, can be learned with as little ease as a bullet pattern in a 2D shooter.

What they've done with Mario Stadium is make a baseball game that aspires to be no more than a videogame. This is good enough. The theory is that anyone who's ever caught a snatch of a baseball game on television can sit down and play this game, without worrying about which teams are the best or which players can hit homeruns with greater regularity than others. Mario Stadium trusts that the players know what baseball is, while also being able to tell the difference between Mario and Baby Mario. The rest is all common sense, and common enjoyment. When "Star Chance" comes up, giving either player the chance to earn a Star that will allow them to use a super-move when they see fit, any player with common sense of enjoyment should know that the way to win the star if you're the pitcher is to get the batter out, and the way to win the star if you're the batter is to get on base. The game flows, before players who grasp the few simple rules, much like a real game of baseball, only without the beer advertisements (which would raise its ESRB rating to AO HAR HAR HAR).

There are mini-games, because, I suppose, any sports game involving Super Mario characters needs to have something outside the sport, much like Super Mario World had ninety-six exits to the various levels in the game, just because nintey-six sounds like such a real, not-made-up number. ("One hundred" would just sound so fake.) The minigames in Mario Stadium are kind of stupid. There's a "block-breaking" mode, where a machine pitches you balls and your chosen character hits the balls toward a wall (sitting so it bisects both the first-second and second-third baselines) of colored Super Mario Bros. bricks. If you hit a yellow brick, and there are yellow bricks adjacent to the yellow brick you hit, you will eliminate all of those yellow bricks, and get extra points. Same goes for yellow or blue or brown bricks. The pitches are always of the green-light variety, so where you hit the ball depends on how you tweak the bat. You do that by, roughly, pointing out a direction with the Control Stick. After a few rounds, though, breaking bricks feels like work. You might be playing it with three other friends, and if that's the case, I'd recommend that at least two of you are thoroughly drunk before calibrating your Wavebirds.

There's a Pirahna Plant Shot mode, too, which is -- well. Pirahna Plants of differing primary colors pop up out of pipes, and you have to throw balls at them to score points. Supposedly, if you throw a red ball at a red plant, you get maximum points. When the plants get angry at you, they spit fireballs, which you duck under by pressing down on the control stick. Getting hit with one results in loss of points. Whichever player of four has the most points at the end wins, though what he receives as his reward, I have decided it is best not to type here. Though I suppose you could say I did type it here, with the attitude of that last sentence.

There's a "fireworks" mode, which works like a homerun derby, though since the game places homeruns on such a short leash, none of the balls you hit (you're actually hitting Bullet Bills) are actually going to be homeruns. Rather, once the ball reaches the peak of its arc, it explodes into fireworks relative to how many meters the ball would have flown if it had been allowed to continue without exploding. I'm curious as to whether the designers consider this mode more or less rewarding to players who used to wait for the timer to click down to a number ending in "6" before jumping for the flagpole in the first Super Mario Bros. It took me, myself, a good twenty hits into a fireworks session to remember Mario's tenuous history with fireworks.

Last, and certainly most, is the "Toy Field" mode, where four players play hardly-defined, ever-shifting positions on a spacious, metallic field littered with buttons that looks like spaces on a Mario Party board. One player pitches; the batter hits the ball. The ball hits a button -- say, maybe, "2B Hit" for a double -- a token is put on the second-base position of the field diagram, and the batter is allowed to bat again. Should one of the two players in the field, or the player who'd just thrown the pitch, catch the ball before it hits a button, that player becomes the batter. This continues for thirty turns, during which players are rewarded coins for seemingly arbitrary actions. The sound effects and glowing presentation are reminiscent of old Nintendo games; the goal-orientation is jarring and loosely defined, and kind of creepy. Again, should you be four college-aged men, please proceed with much -- no, scratch that, very much hard alcohol. This sort of thing, a reduction of the sport of baseball to a videogame, and then a reduction of the rules of videogame baseball into a setting that resembles a board game -- was not invented to play alone, or even to play in a group, even a group that consists of you and three balloon-breasted bisexual sorority girls, without being wasted. The night I first played Mario Stadium, I had a dream where I was playing the toy field mode alone in my old childhood bedroom, and my mother barged in on me, and screamed, "It's time for dinn--what are you doing? Oh my god!" and then quickly stepped out and closed the door with her fingertips touching her forehead. Three minutes later, the game and the television screen had vanished; I was, instead, masturbating, and when the door opened again, it was my mother, this time wearing a big Italian handlebar mustache. "It'sa me!" she screamed, and I woke up with a start.



Who will buy Mario Stadium? Is that question even necessary? If you recall my Mario Golf review of years back, you'll remember it begins with a chat-interview of Chris Kohler, a large, large man with "Teen Wolf" sideburns, who wrote a book with a cover image portraying a pixilated 1up mushroom from Super Mario Bros. In my hands-off, before-he-was-famous interview, Kohler expresses interest in wanting Mario Golf, and he says the reason he wants the game is because he is curious to see if anyone has made a golf videogame he doesn't "hate." I hypothesize that he hates golf videogames because he never plays them. I wonder if he never plays baseball games, and hates them for roughly the same reasons.

I still stand by that review, by the way. I kind of like it. That, and Kohler, you never write me anymore. Drop me a line or something!! We can talk about the music in Castlevania or something.

This is the part where I review Mario Stadium as a Mario game. I'm not going to be childish or petty here, I promise. I'm just going to state facts, facts of that magic variety of facts that are facts only because they occur int he storyline of a videogame. Mario and Luigi are playing catch one day when they receive a flyer. It's from Bowser! He says he's having a baseball tournament, and that Mario and Luigi need to play against him OR ELSE. So of course they play. Here's Argument Against Cartoon Baseball #23: Bowser has not set the stakes; if Mario and Luigi had to best Bowser at his Mushroom Kingdom Series (I can't wait for Mario Football, with its Bowser Bowl) so as to rescue Princess Peach from his clutches, that would be another thing altogether. (It would also raise the ESRB rating from E to T, for violence against women, then from T to M for insinuating that blondes are ditzy and vulnerable, and then M to AO for portraying gambling in the context of sports.) However, Bowser has not kidnapped Princess Peach, for one crucial reason: if he'd kidnapped her, players wouldn't be able to select her as a character.

Here's how the game works: there are no teams. Say we're playing two-player mode. You select one character, and that character is your pitcher. Your friend (again, hopefully he's drunk) selects another character as his pitcher. Characters fall into three categories -- Balance, Speed, and Power. There are six characters in each category when you first start the game. You continue selecting characters until you have nine on each team. The team name is decided by the pitcher you selected. You might end up with the "Mario Fireballs," for example. This is lighthearted enough; the game plays and flows well enough for this to be fun. Though I personally long for just a little more time after a play has been settled before the screen jumps back to the batter vs. pitcher view; I don't know, enough time to throw the ball from first base to third base, and then from third base to the pitcher. SNK's Baseball Stars on NES offered precisely so much time, and it made all the difference. Mario Stadium will snap back to the pitcher an instant after a runner is declared safe or out. It starts to feel a little lonely, like baseball is less about enjoyment and more about seeing who has the higher score at the end.

Also: why does the catcher never throw the ball back to the pitcher? That's a little jarring. Most baseball games don't show the ball traveling back from the catcher to the pitcher, though heck if Jaleco's Bases Loaded didn't do it; Namco's Family Stadium, for which Mario Stadium is a wallpaper, doesn't show the ball going back from the catcher to the pitcher, which somehow makes more sense in that game. In Family Stadium, the iconized, identical-looking on-screen characters are nearer to abstract representations of baseball players than human beings (or even animals) who play baseball. The sphere-headed, round-bottomed, beady-eyed chump-thing is a named, uniformed abstraction of a real man who plays real baseball in real life. Super Mario, on the other hand, is playing baseball as Super Mario, at a challenge from Bowser, no less. It's like watching our old friends play softball one weekend in the future. We're sitting there drinking a can of Mountain Dew, working on a sunburn, and suddenly it hits us -- hey, why isn't Jimmy throwing the ball back to Bobby? Where are all the balls going? There's no stack behind Jimmy, and . . . Bobby just keeps producing balls and throwing them? What the hell is going on here? We stand up, turn around a few times, drop the Moutain Dew onto the bleachers, and suddenly we're living the premise for a Stephen King novel.

. . . Where was I?

Yes, the characters. We build our own teams, then, out of characters Nintendo trusts us to know and love, in addition to liking them enough to make them play baseball. This avoision of a team-based structure is clever, in that it makes every character on the field, at all times, an icon we remember by name. Though it also has some unwanted side-effects. For example, some of the characters are none too memorable. We have That Fat Guy and Some Skinny Dude from Super Mario Sunshine, you know, the island natives. Being caught remembering their names would, again, feel like being caught masturbating. When characters like these are on the screen, and when we feel kind of sheepish about them because we might not remember them as well as Mario and Luigi themselves, it casts a rain cloud over the field. We wonder, why don't I remember this guy so well? I played that game, didn't I? Is it a problem with me, or with the game, that the character isn't so memorable? Look at him, though . . . he's kind of cute. Shiny enough, round enough, bouncy enough.

AND THEN THERE WAS GOOMBA.

Goomba, a little brown mushroom with feet, was the first character outside yourself you saw when you played Super Mario Bros. He was the first thing that approached you, and the first thing that could kill you. What the heck is he, really? A brown mushroom with feet. A brown mushroom with feet! That's all! He has feet because there needs to be a reason for him to be able to walk toward you. He is a brown mushroom because brown is one of the colors the game was able to handle, given hardware restraints. He is otherwise a nobody. To kill him, you jump on him. He flattens, as he is merely a mushroom. To be killed by him, let him touch you. There is not even the merest suggestion of what he does to you. He touches you, and you die. This is all well and good; Goomba is less of a personality and more of an obstacle. What he does is not so important as where he is, that is, where the game designers have seen fit to put him.

The game design planning phase of Super Mario Stadium seems to have taken place in one day, around one large table, at Namco's office. The man in charge of the Family Stadium series walked in with a big envelope of money and dropped it on the table. "Nintendo wants us to make a Mario baseball game. Give me ideas." He wrote the ideas down on a legal pad as his underlings, all people who had played Mario games, fired them off. At the conclusion of the meeting, he begins to read it aloud: "Mario's in it, Luigi's in it, Princess Peach is in it, maybe in a little skirt. The game can, will, and must involve playing of baseball to wretched samba music and screeching helium voices. There's a Donkey Kong Jungle stadium, with a crocodile-infested river running through the outfield and barrels that come rolling out across everything, knocking you down when you're trying to field, thus giving the runner an advantage that would be deemed unfair in real baseball. We will include this kind of thing in the game because we are not making real baseball -- we are making cartoon baseball. However, out of respect for our sponsor's third-quarter earnings, we will include several stadiums without frustrations, stadiums where it's possible to play baseball, with Mario characters, and feel like you're having a fair contest." The big guy slapped his hands on the table and bellowed: "Meeting adjourned. This is all we need. No more and no less. Now get to it." A meek guy in glasses raises his index finger. "Sir -- what about the character roster?" The big guy scratches his chin and "Hmmm"s. "Well. We need at least eighteen." He begins counting on his fingers. "Mario. Luigi. Princess Peach. Princess Daisy. Bowser. Donkey Kong. Yoshi. Uh, Birdo? Magikoopa? Koopa Troopa? That Mummy Koopa from the Ghost Houses of Mario 3 and Mario World? Two throwaway characters from Super Mario Sunshine? Baby Mario? A Boo Ghost? Uh -- shit. I guess Wario and Waluigi, too. (Damn.) And . . . it don't seem right. We need two more." At this point, someone said, "How about Goomba?" The reply was, "If we have Goomba, we need Para-Goomba." "Well, if we have a Boo Ghost, we need a Boo Ghost with a crown, too!" Et cetera.

It's worth noting that, on the field, the characters outside Mario, Luigi, the Princesses, and the Wario Brothers don't carry gloves. They field with their character traits. Birdo, for example, sucks the ball up in his/her snout. Yoshi grabs the ball with his tongue, and spits it to the base where you tell him to throw it. Donkey Kong, big giant ape that he is, punches the ball with a boxing glove on his left hand as opposed to using a bat. None of this, however, makes sense when you put Goomba up to the plate.



Goomba, a brown mushroom with feet, with an upside-down grin with little upside-down vampire fangs, stands at the plate with a brown baseball bat. As he is a brown mushroom with feet, that is, with feet and no hands, how does he hold the bat? The best answer is the simplest one, and the simplest one is: he just does. The bat is floating outside his head. Press the A button, and it swings around his body. That's all there is to it.

Maybe the tenth time an incarnation of Goomba came up to bat during my first experience with the game, I asked my friend Nick, "What the heck? How does he hold the bat when he has no hands?"

Nick's reply was non-threatening and a little sanctimonious. That's his style:

"Well, they couldn't just give him hands for this game."

This prompted me to scream, a scream that upsetted a girl,

"Then they can just leave him out!!"

We brainstormed -- what could Nintendo have done to avoid Goomba's crime? That, and why can't I let Goomba's crime slide? Why can't I just say, oh, he's a cartoon character, and grin, and forget about it? It's because of baseball, this game with rules that man invented. Things need to make a certain amount of sense, or else chaos comes in and overcomes all.

"Maybe they could make teams populated by Mushroom People or Koopa Troopas with distinct characteristics that mirrored historical baseball players? A Babe Ruth Koopa? An Ichiro Suzuki Mushroom Retainer? Give them all personalities, and statistics? Make the Nintendo characters team captains?" This suggestion was not five seconds finished when I realized why it failed: it'd have been too much work.

It occurs to me, just then, everything I know about Nintendo: they got started selling Hanafuda cards, which is trivia so obscure that everyone seems to know it these days. What most people don't know is that Hanafuda cards are and were popular amongst the more gambling-inclined members of Kyoto's elite yakuza. Nintendo, under the leadership of third president Hiroshi Yamauchi, opened plenty of hourly hotels and pachinko parlors all over Kyoto, until this thing called videogames presented itself. They tried to make one and failed. Then Yamauchi's friend's son Shigeru Miyamoto, who may or may not be descended from famous swordsman Musashi Miyamoto, who was, come to think of it, born in the same part of the Kansai region, comes in with a design for a telephone and says, how about this telephone, and Yamauchi says, how about you make me a videogame? Miyamoto threw together Donkey Kong with the same virtuoso that would later produce the likes of Goomba, Para-Goomba, Micro-Goomba, Little Goomba in Paper Mario, and bat-swinging Goomba in Mario Stadium. Miyamoto is a heartbreakingly, gorgeously creative genius; he simply has no imagination. Or maybe he has no motivation. Nintendo is rumored to pay him a mere secretary's salary, after all.

What I know about Nintendo is enough to deduce that Goomba is here, on my television, swinging a baseball bat, because no one could bear to leave him out. Because Nintendo, historically, will never refuse, nor pass up the chance to use something that belongs to them. The decision-making process is always as simple as looking at a list of names on a legal pad or a computer database. I assume the company president's duties in picking character rosters for Mario sports titles is as difficult as Hiroshi Yamauchi's decisions for real estate acquisition must have been in the golden age before Taito's Space Invaders came along and inspired makers of pachinko machines to craft interactive means of dispensing cigarettes. "Sir," an underling says, sliding into the office, "we've acquired a dumpy old building in the former licensed quarter. It has suffered three arsons and stinks of stale water. Awaiting your commands." Speaks Yamauchi, "Is it in a hotel district or a pachinko district?" The reply is quick: "A pachinko district, sir." Yamauchi closes his eyes for sixty seconds, and then opens them. "Let us make it a pachinko parlor." In the rare event that the building sat on a public street in view of a train station exit, the decision was more difficult, though Yamauchi, whose company would go on to portray a platonic relationship between a tall blonde woman and a short, pudgy, porn-star-esque mustached Italian man for over two decades, ever restrained about sexual content, decided to flood train-riding citizens' eyes with the sight of a pachinko parlor. This kind of Japanese thinking gave birth to many pachinko parlors in view of many train station exits. Prime real estate, when handled by two-bit, thug-like businesses, usually gets turned into really big pachinko parlors, with multiple floors, and even more cigarettes.



At E3 2005, Nintendo had a press conference wherein they did not introduce anything anyone there wanted to see. Me and my friend Persona were sitting in a place where we could see the back side of the screen from which Company President Satoru Iwata was reading his address. "This Fall, Nintendo is proud to present five new games starring everyone's favorite plumber." Beneath this text were the bracketed words "[THIRTY-SECOND PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE]." I think the applause lasted five seconds. The new games turned out to be Mario DDR (oh, shit -- don't even GO there), Mario Superstar Baseball, Mario Party 7, Mario Party Advance, and something else. I'd look it up if I wanted to.

What I want to say is that it's just too much. My friend Nick bought your game, even though I've never heard him talk about baseball before (maybe he likes it, though, I don't know; we just tend to talk about other things, such is life). I think he wouldn't have bought it if it didn't have Mario characters in it. Admit it, Nick, on the forum if you can. I'll admit, here -- I wouldn't have played it with you if it didn't have Mario in it.



Yet what does this say about us, as people, as adults, or as gamers? That Mario has become our ice-breaker for playing games together that we otherwise wouldn't play together? What does it say that the most entertaining of all the minigames in this game is the plant-shooting one, which has nothing to do with baseball? Does it say more about us as gamers, or the game as a moneymaking device? It's a little unsettling; when the Sunshine characters are bobbling around the field, I am seized by this depressing feeling that none of the characters in the Mario universe have ever, ever been interesting. Mario is ugly. Luigi is his uglier brother. Wario is an ugly parody of an ugly man. Waluigi is an ugly parody of the uglier brother of an ugly man. I remember when Camelot designed Waluigi, for his debut in Mario Tennis. I remember reading some patronizing comments from top brass at Nintendo: "Yeah, we like the character. He fits into the game universe well. It's amazing they were able to make a character that fit into our lovingly crafted aesthetic!" Oh, fuck that -- your characters suck. You're going for this simple, 1930s-style Disney feel, though, is that right? Well, I got news for you: the 1930s are over, and Disney won. Aping Disney is never going to make you famous outside the people who took the time to, as children, play your games and fall in love with them. And you know what, Nintendo? I don't love Super Mario Bros. 3 because I think Goomba is cute and seeing him with wings for the first time was just too much to bear -- I love that game because of its execution, its planning, the care apparent in the placement of each obstacle and bottomless pit, and the groove I fall into while playing the stages that challenge me the most ingeniously. All Mario Sports titles do is remind me of my strong connection to those previous, great, beautiful, enriching pieces of computer programming, while making me realize more and more each waking year that the people who created my earliest memories, from the beginning, since long before I was born, even, were heartless, two-bit thugs. In other words: knock this shit off. Cut the shit, Nintendo, and make me a new damn Mario game.



In closing, this game is kind of fun. If someone lends it to you before hopping a Greyhound Bus on a long journey out west, by all means, play it. It plays like a classic NES baseball game, only with airbrushed 3D graphics. The voices are not as annoying as in the last two Mario sports games, though the music is certainly ludicrous, appalling samba stuff that sounds like a Brazilian children's television show. If you play this game with surround sound on, and girls walk in for long enough to hear the Mushroom Mayor, at bat with his scepter, charge up a power swing with a little questioning yelp of "Hi-HO?" you will never live it down, even should you murder those girls and bury them in a landfill. If the same girls come in when you're at bat with Goomba, who levitates his cylinder through apparently pyshic powers, though, who knows. They might think he's cute. So long as you keep the television muted, you'll be fine.

--tim rogers, 08172005

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tim rogers will return to review grandia iii