Review: Mario Sports Superstars for Nintendo 3DS

Mario Sports Superstars

We received two download codes for Mario Sports Superstars so that we could play with, promote and review the game. Opinions are 100% our own.

Back in 1989 I made a road trip from Massachusetts to Florida with my best friend and his family. I had worked much of the summer toward saving for a Nintendo Gameboy. I finally got one and it was with the primary intention that we both have Gameboys to play with on the ride to Florida. Back then in order to play head to head you had to use a tether wire to connect your devices. You also had to have a copy of the game and if you wanted to play more than one sport you had to have multiple sports games. You also had to have a huge supply of AA batteries with you so that you could play the whole way there and back.

I think that if I had a Nintendo 3DS and Mario Sports Superstars then I wouldn’t have believed how much I could have done on that one trip. We wouldn’t have needed a tether wire. We could play locally with each other, wirelessly. When we got bored playing tennis we could then play baseball, golf, soccer or even horse racing. When we mastered all those games then we could make things more interesting with amiibo cards and work with those. There is so much that Mario Sports Superstars has to it. Oh and we wouldn’t have run out of batteries because we would have invested in car chargers, too.

Mario Sports Superstars amiibo packs

My kids have it so easy. I told them about being a kid looking at a screen tinier than my phone for hours on end, in the car and it didn’t even have color, unless you could tinges of green. I keep threatening to break out my original Nintendo NES for them to play instead of the games they are playing now like Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. The advances in gaming that Nintendo has made in my lifetime are incredible.

The kids enjoy playing Mario Sports Superstars. Andrew likes to “kick butt” in Golf and he truly is really good at it. We played a couple of rounds today and he beat me handily each time. He was well under par in both rounds. I was not as good. Eva is good at horse racing, probably Andrew’s least favorite game because he doesn’t win. He likes to win in video games and we are teaching him about being a gracious winner and loser. Eva likes soccer and tennis as well. She had a great time playing those. the only game we didn’t play much of was baseball because we had used up all our time playing the other four games. That is okay, it just means that we have something else to enjoy in this game.

Horse Racing

The game also works with new amiibo cards. I posted a video about them yesterday and these cards even work with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There are 90 cards to collect and they can range from simple character cards to enhanced characters like a metal Mario or a pink gold Princess Peach. Each card does provide the opportunity to increase certain values for a character by leveling them up so that adds added challenge as well.

Overall this is a fun game with lots of challenge and great replayability. Being able to go head to head makes for more fun competitions between friends and family.

Here is the official description of the game.

Mario Sports Superstars is the latest entry in the venerable Mario Sports series, and it offers five sports for solo or local- and online-multiplayer play. What’s really cool is, while beloved games like Mario Golf and Mario Tennis have actually appeared as standalone games before, Mario Sports Superstars actually offers five full-featured different sports in one game. Kids can play Soccer, Tennis, Baseball, Golf and, for the first time in the series, Horse Racing, as one of their favorite Mushroom Kingdom characters like Mario, Bowser, Peach or Wario. (Personally I’m a Waluigi man, myself.) The game also features amiibo integration, including new Mario Sports Superstars collectible amiibo cards. The physical version of the game even has an amiibo card packed in, for a limited time!