''Mario Sports Superstars'' is a

sports video game A sports video game is a video game that simulates the practice of sports. Most sports have been recreated with a game, including team sports, track and field, extreme sports, and combat sports. Some games emphasize actually playing the sport (s ...

developed by

Bandai Namco Studios is a Japanese video game development, video game developer headquartered in Kōtō, Tokyo. Its offices in Malaysia and Singapore, Bandai Namco Studio Malaysia and Bandai Namco Studios Singapore, are based out of Selangor, Malaysia and Infinite St ...

and

Camelot Software Planning (doing business as Camelot Software Planning) is a Japanese video game developer established in 1990 under the name Sega CD4, but quickly renamed to Sonic! Software Planning. Named after Sonic the Hedgehog, they were closely involved with Se ...

and published by

Nintendo is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produce ...

for the

Nintendo 3DS The is a handheld game console produced by Nintendo. It was announced in March 2010 and unveiled at E3 2010 as the successor to the Nintendo DS. The system features backward compatibility with Nintendo DS video games. As an eighth-generatio ...

. The game contains five sports minigames:

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding tea ...

tennis Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball ...

golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping wi ...

, and

horse racing Horse racing is an equestrian performance sport, typically involving two or more horses ridden by jockeys (or sometimes driven without riders) over a set distance for competition. It is one of the most ancient of all sports, as its basic p ...

, and was released in March 2017.

Gameplay

The game consists of five sports –

, and

. Despite the number of sports contained, they are not

mini-games A minigame (also spelled mini game and mini-game, sometimes called a subgame or microgame) is a short game often contained within another video game. A minigame contains different gameplay elements, and is often smaller or more simplistic, than th ...

, but rather, full-scale recreations of each sport. For example, the soccer part of the game contains eleven versus eleven gameplay, the same as is standard in the sport. Each individual sport contains single player tournaments, local multiplayer, and online multiplayer game modes.

Development

The game was first announced during a

Nintendo Direct Nintendo Direct is a series of online presentation or live shows produced by Nintendo, where information regarding the company's upcoming content or franchises is presented, such as information about games and consoles. The presentations began i ...

on September 1, 2016. The title was co-developed by

and

, with the latter having developed games in the ''

Mario Golf There have been numerous sports games in the ''Mario'' franchise. Although originally a branch of the Mario sports games, the ''Mario Kart'' series is not included in this list, as it has since become a stand-alone series in the Mario franchise. ...

'' and ''

Mario Tennis ''Mario Tennis'' is a 2000 sports video game developed by Camelot Software Planning and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64. Following ''Mario's Tennis'', it is the second game in the List of Mario sports games#Mario Tennis series, ''Mari ...

'' series. tri-Crescendo assisted on design. While Nintendo's '' Mario Sports'' line has featured stand-alone entries in soccer (''

Mario Strikers ''Super Mario Strikers'', known in Europe and Australia as ''Mario Smash Football'', is a 2005 sports video game developed by Next Level Games and published by Nintendo for the GameCube. The game's developers had worked on ''NHL Hitz Pro'' before ...

''), baseball (''

Mario Super Sluggers ''Mario Super Sluggers'' is a sports and adventure video game for the Wii developed by Namco Bandai Games and Now Production, and published by Nintendo. It is part of the ''Mario Sports'' series, and the sequel to ''Mario Superstar Baseball'' fo ...

''), tennis (''Mario Tennis'') and golf (''Mario Golf''), they had never featured horse racing, or compiled all these sports into one compilation. Additionally, all of the sports except tennis had previously been featured in minigames in the ''

Mario Party is a party video game series featuring characters from the ''Mario (franchise), Mario'' franchise in which up to four local players or computer-controlled characters (called "CPU (gaming), CPUs") compete in a board game interspersed with mi ...

'' series. The game was released in PAL regions on March 10, 2017, in North America on March 24, 2017, and in Japan on March 30, 2017. As with Camelot's previous ''Mario'' sports games, the soundtrack was written by

Motoi Sakuraba is a Japanese composer and keyboardist. He is known for his numerous contributions in video games, such as for '' Tales'', ''Star Ocean'', ''Mario Golf'', ''Mario Tennis'', '' Golden Sun'', and ''Dark Souls'' series, as well as several other ani ...

Reception

''Mario Sports Superstars'' received mixed reviews according to

review aggregator A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

Destructoid ''Destructoid'' is a website that was founded as a video game-focused blog in March 2006 by Yanier Gonzalez, a Cuban-American cartoonist and author. Enthusiast Gaming acquired the website in 2017, and sold it to Gamurs Group in 2022. History ' ...

called it a "lazy experience, one developed solely for the purpose of selling what are basically ''Mario''-branded Topps cards."

Nintendo Life Gamer Network Limited (formerly Eurogamer Network Limited) is a British mass media company based in Brighton. Founded in 1999 by Rupert and Nick Loman, it owns brands—primarily editorial websites—relating to video game journalism and other ...

stated though that as a single player experience, it was "totally functional yet painfully lifeless". By May 2017, the game had sold over 92,829 copies in Japan.

Notes

References

;

External links

* {{Mario sports games 2017 video games Association football video games Camelot Software Planning games Bandai Namco games Baseball video games Golf video games Horse-related video games Mario sports games Multiplayer and single-player video games Multiple-sport video games Nintendo 3DS eShop games Nintendo 3DS games Nintendo 3DS-only games Nintendo Network games Racing video games Tennis video games Video games scored by Motoi Sakuraba Video games developed in Japan Video games that use Amiibo figurines