Super Mario Ball review

Mario has been shoehorned into some pretty bizarre roles over the years, but never has he been squashed into a ball and rolled around a pinball table. Until now, that is.Super Mario Ball is an attempt to combine two genres: adventure and pinball. The resultant mash takes place on multiple themed 'tables' - and all are linked together via doorways. Your objective is to gather up those trademark stars (which open up new doors), allowing access to more stars; and so it continues.Graphically, Super Mario Ball is sublime. Using a technique similar to that of Donkey Kong Country, everything is rendered with a 3D look, and techniques such as sprite-scaling flawlessly provide the illusion of depth. It all looks incredibly solid and believable, and the super-smooth animation seals the deal: this is the best-looking game the GBA has to offer. As you'd expect, the audio is exceptional. Those classic Mario FX are back and as pleasant as ever - indoor areas zing with echo effects, and the music is incredibly buoyant (with each tune fitting the environment). Instead of the screen scrolling - as in similar pinball titles - Super Mario Ball employs a tilted perspective that lets you see the entirety of each table on a single screen. These aren't particularly huge or compelling; most tables will merely contain a few enemies, an item box (containing a power-up), a couple of doors to the new areas above, and a switch of some kind.Each area contains a star, and it's up to you to determine what needs to be done to release it. This usually involves killing all the enemies (hitting them with the ball), but might also require that you collect a certain amount of red coins or solve a simple puzzle. Defeating the boss creatures will yield keys that unlock Bowser's castle (and thus open up more stars). Basically, there's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to be done while accruing stars and gaining access to new doors. It's a well-designed system that keeps things varied.Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the rest of the game. Control-wise, the game suffers from being too fast - the ball will roll over the flippers so quickly that you simply can't get any precision; no matter how hard or often you try, the ball will rarely go where you want it to. In fact, the ball physics can be so unpredictable that no amount of applied 'technique' (garnered from similar titles) will help.This inaccuracy presents a huge problem for the player - because failure to direct the ball will invariably lead to it shooting through doorways you didn't want to go through, hitting switches you didn't want to hit, or simply falling through the bottom of the screen (and into the previous room). This magnifies frustration tenfold due to the fact that all areas reset themselves whenever you leave and re-enter them; you'll end up tearing your hair out when you fall through a hole for the fifteenth time - and then have to redo the entire section again.Power-ups help things along, but only slightly: you can block the gap between flippers temporarily with a pipe, enlarge yourself with a mushroom, activate a multi-ball mode by releasing eggs onto the table, or wipe out all enemies with an instant death lightning bolt (completed by cutesy sound effects). But the final nail in Super Mario Ball's coffin is the way in which progress is saved. Gamestyle is at least thankful that you can interrupt the game at any time and continue (at which point the save is erased - a good system to prevent cheating), but we were mortified to discover there was no way of permanently saving your status. Indeed, if you happen to switch off your GBA (or should the battery die without warning, as we can painfully attest), your progress is completely lost because you hadn't 'quit'. You're then forced to endure the same tedious experiences again should you wish to continue.Aside from a dubious Time Attack mode, there's not much else to keep you hooked. Super Mario Ball is imaginative and meticulously-produced, but its flaws are too numerous to recommend over superior pinball titles. For a first-party Nintendo release, this is a poor showing indeed.