Mario Superstar Baseball for GameCube

There has been many Mario sports games over the years: racing, tennis and so on. This is the long awaited "Mario version" of the classic sport known as baseball.

The game plays like the regular sport, with some fun twists to it. For defense and offense: the main characters each have special abilities. For example, Mario and Luigi have fireball as their skill. When they bat or pitch, a fireball is part of it. So if you hit with the fireball bat, the ball goes flying and can sometimes set a player on fire. For pitching, the fireball pitch is a lot quicker and harder to hit. Other special abilities include better jumping for defense and various weird pitches.

As for the stadiums (look more like fields in the game): there is only 5 total to play in. This isn't a completely bad thing however, as they each feature different things. For example: the Donkey Kong field has barrels that roll at you, and the Wario field has Chain Chomps that attack if you get too close. The game would've been better if there was more stadiums.

The players to choose from in this game are all the regular Mario characters: Yoshi, Wario, Peach, Goomba, Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Donkey Kong and more. To go along with the players, there is a chemistry effect in place. Players will help out their friends by doing better, and in contrast: will do bad if an enemy is with them. This makes you think when you have to build your team for play.

Instead of a regular season mode, there is a 1 player Challenge Mode. In this mode, you start out as a pre-set team lead by Mario, Yoshi, Wario, Peach or Donkey Kong. Your goal is to defeat the other teams in games, while recruiting their players. To win this, you usually must beat all teams then defeat Bowser's team in the final game. Recruiting players is an interesting feature in the game. You must do certain in-game tasks to recruit the player, so they join your team. There is various difficulty settings for challenge mode, as well as several unlockables for beating them.

To add replay to the game, there is better versions of each character to unlock. These "star" versions are won, once you complete a set of tasks at different difficulty settings. The flaw with this is: you must win at mini-games for some objectives. This made no sense, as the star versions don't do anything special for the mini-games at all. The objectives should've been for actual baseball games only.

There is also exhibition mode, where you make up a team of your choice to face the computer or a friend.

There is another mode called Toy Field. In this game (which is somewhat similar to baseball in the Monkey Ball games), you play on a lit up field. You must hit certain spots to get hits and more points. Unlike regular baseball: this only has a few players in it. This is a lot of fun, because of the randomness. At one minute you could be in the lead, and the next you might not be due to a slot machine hit.

Besides those modes, there is 6 mini-games to play as well:

Barrel Batter: You must hit barrels that are lined up to get points. Barrels of the same color give you more points. While fun at times, it's very frustrating to time your hits in a certain direction for this.

Bob-omb Derby: Just like home run derby almost. You get a certain number of balls to hit. You get bonus points for hitting balls in a row. While fun, this is sometimes too easy.

Chain Chomp Sprint: You must collect gems around the bases, while a Chain Chomp sleeps. If he wakes up and sees you, you lose your gems. This is okay to play sometimes, but not something you will play all the time.

Piranha Panic: You throw eggs at various Piranha Plants. The egg color must match the plant, otherwise it spits at you. This is fun, but takes good coordination and timing.

Wall Ball: You throw a ball and try to break the music block to get the most points, while avoiding hitting the Bowser wall. This is fun once in a while, but the timing is hard to get down even with a lot of practice.

There is one other mini-game to unlock, but I won't spoil it for people that haven't played the game.

Overall, the mini-games are sometimes a good break from regular baseball games and that's about it. The other parts of the game could've been much better, if they left the mini-games out. It seems to be a standard to have mini-games in most Mario sports games though.


As for controls, they are simple to learn in this game. The A button is for hitting, and is also for pitching. The control stick or control pad moves the character, while the B button makes you run.

The graphics are decent, as it looks and feels like a baseball game. The game is very colorful, which makes the game shine. The characters look great, some of the best designs for them I've ever seen in any Mario game.

The sound is alright, with one exception. The umpire: Lakitu (the guy in the cloud) has a very annoying voice. It's high pitched and squeaky, and you'll want to mute the television after just a few times of him saying "strike!". This isn't a huge deal, as he doesn't talk throughout the game as a commentator or anything like that. The other characters say a few things, during batting and so forth. Their voices are fine, and not annoying like Lakitu's.


Overall, the game is quite fun and even has some humor added into it. It's pretty funny when characters get hit by a ball, strike out and so on. Each character has a special thing they do on a strike out and hit by a pitch. One example of this is: when Dry Bones gets hit, he crumbles into a pile of bones.

The game, however, has some minor flaws:

1- You only have a 9 player team, and can't substitute anyone out during a game. Having a bigger team would've added a little more depth to team making.

2- Objectives for winning star versions of characters (mentioned above in more detail)

3- No weather effects. Rain or snow could've been interesting in the game.

4- No season mode. While challenge mode is fun, an actual season would've been better. The characters in the Mario universe seem to be endless, so this could've been done to some extent at least.

5- No create-a-player feature. This would've been a fun and interesting feature for the game.

6- While not made to be a baseball simulator: the game having statistics for your team would be nice. Baseball is all about this, so even a Mario baseball game should have it.