Sports games aren’t popular with collectors because everyone thinks they suck. But there are some hidden gems out there to enjoy — and their lack of popularity means you can pick ’em up pretty cheap, too! Let’s explore this unloved genre!
Mario Tennis for Nintendo 64, originally released in 2000, is the best Mario Tennis game. And revisiting it as part of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack offering has only confirmed this feeling that I’ve had for a long time.
The trouble with more recent Mario Tennis games — particularly the most recent entry, Mario Tennis Aces for Nintendo Switch — is that they overcomplicate matters. Mario Tennis Aces is a great single-player game if you take the time to get to know all its unique special mechanics — but the actual process of getting to know all those mechanics takes time.
Perhaps most crucially, it’s very difficult to quickly explain all those mechanics to a newcomer if you want a quick local multiplayer match with a friend. And if you don’t explain those mechanics, you’ll absolutely dominate the person who doesn’t know the game.
By contrast, Mario Tennis for Nintendo 64 is exceedingly simple to explain: move with the stick, hit the ball with either of those buttons. Done. Anyone can understand that; most people can even probably be quite good at it without needing much practice. Back when I had an original cartridge copy of this at university, it was a fixture in our regular “local multiplayer rotation” of games that we played when we were avoiding writing essays. And it was great!
The biggest strength of Mario Tennis for Nintendo 64 is its arcade-style simplicity. From a modern perspective, it’s quite easy to feel like this means the game is “light on content”, as today’s parlance has it. And perhaps it is; it even felt a little that way back in the day, particularly when compared to its (also excellent) Game Boy Colour companion piece. That, after all, included a full single-player “tennis RPG”, in which you took your custom character from rags to riches as you trained them in minigames, competed against a variety of opponents — and only got to even see classic Nintendo characters after some quite significant time playing!
But this is also a good thing. It means that you can boot up Mario Tennis for Nintendo 64 at any time, and it’s ready to play without any preparation required. There’s no grinding to unlock things, the characters are already balanced, there’s no faffing around. Pick a game mode, pick a character, play. Simple, straightforward, effective.
And this arcadey simplicity carries across into the in-game action, too. As previously noted, the actual basic controls for Mario Tennis on Nintendo 64 are really simple — but the beauty of the game comes in how you apply those controls in various ways. Hit the ball with a single well-timed tap of the button; charge up a shot by pressing the button in advance; deliver a hefty thwack with a double-tap of the button. It felt at home on the Nintendo 64 controller, but it would also have felt great on an arcade cabinet’s console.
Mario Tennis on Nintendo 64 always felt like it took heavy cues from Sega’s Virtua Tennis, which had first appeared the previous year. And this was a good thing; when Virtua Tennis first hit the scene, it was widely praised for being a sports game that didn’t suck, offering some satisfying gameplay action and plenty of things to do, whether you were playing solo or against friends.
But Mario Tennis had a unique appeal that Virtua Tennis didn’t have; for all the excellent gameplay that Virtua Tennis offered, it was still a realistic-looking sports game, and that was enough to put some people off trying it. Mario Tennis, meanwhile, was a colourful, vibrant, cartoony game filled with good-natured humour and silliness — and that in itself made it a whole lot more accessible. There was no sense that you needed to be a “tennis fan” to appreciate the game; all you had to do was pick a character who appealed, and just enjoy.
Mario Tennis for Nintendo 64 features a variety of ways to play. For the single player, there’s a tournament mode that takes you through a series of increasingly difficult short matches against the various opponents in the game, though this likely won’t take you too long to beat. You can also play exhibition matches against the computer, and here you can choose the length of match: from the 2-game, 1-set matches that form most of the single-player tournament mode, right up to a full-length match.
Exhibition mode can, of course, also be played in multiplayer, and that’s where the majority of our playtime was always spent back when we had our original copy of it. It’s a simple, pure multiplayer tennis game with some satisfying mechanics and good presentation, and it’s an absolute hoot with friends.
Alongside these two modes, there’s also a “Bowser Stage” mode which can be played in single or multiplayer mode. Here, you play a relatively conventional tennis match on a platform that is suspended over a pit of lava; the platform tilts as you move from side to side, and there are also Mario Kart-style item boxes around the net area. These can be used to mess with your opponent in various ways, making for enjoyably silly matches that probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Single players can also take on some challenges that are designed to help you improve your skills, but which are actually rather fun arcadey-style minigames in their own right. The Ring Shot challenge, for example, tasks you with rallying the ball back and forth against a partner while hitting it through as many golden rings as possible; the smaller the ring, the more points it’s worth. Meanwhile, the Piranha Challenge allows you to practice returning various types of shot as several Piranha Plants sat behind your partner repeatedly spit balls at you — your aim is simply to return as many as you can out of the fifty that come flying at you.
And that’s it, really. The original Nintendo 64 version of Mario Tennis allowed you to use the GB Transfer Pak to import your save data from the Game Boy Colour version of Mario Tennis and unlock some additional characters, but at the time of writing we’re not sure if that’s ever going to be implemented into the Nintendo Switch Online version of Mario Tennis. Even without that side of things, though, Mario Tennis for Nintendo 64 is a great time — and one of many reasons that the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack is an eminently worthwhile investment for those with nostalgia for this distinctive era of gaming.
