Welcome to Switch Funday!
For today's game i wanted to try out the Game Boy Color game Mario Tennis. I've always wanted an arcadey tennis game that's more on the casual side and i initially went into this thinking it would be one of those games with popular #Mario characters, but right at the beginning i realized that Mario Tennis is not like that.
Even tho i had a Game Boy Color, i had the purple one, i never looked at the Mario sports games on them. i was more into Pokémon, racing, Loony Toons, and platformers. I knew of them, but never bothered trying them. i kept thinking i would play these sort of games on the GameCube. So i was really surprised as to what this game actually is.
And what it is is a super hard tennis game that i couldn't beat. i couldn't even beat the tutorial practice stages! I can't believe how difficult it is. it's like the "Dark Souls" of tennis games. the tutorial practice stages offer no hints how to play and when you fail it's the same canned response. playing against other players is also a very long battle against a CPU that seems to want to win even tho it's a practice game.
Mario Tennis is a Game Boy Color game and yet it feels built around a console experience. it's surprising that a handheld game would have such a long introduction and such long tennis matches without even mentioning if there are manual saves, auto saves, or even how to do it. When i found the save function under "Start" the only thing i could do was save and quit. i couldn't seem to find a save and continue function.
the two highlights for Mario Tennis are the graphics, except for the characters as there seems to be no design language as everyone looks different, and the music. Even the minigames weren't fun and that's what i ended the video with. Mario Tennis is the Dark Souls of tennis games and not one i would recommend to anyone other than people really into tennis and Dark Souls, if such a Venn Diagram exists.
