Mario's Tennis

Mario's Tennis is… well…  tennis but with Mario characters and in stereoscopic 3D, which makes it feel like you're looking into one of those videogame dioramas. It was the first entry of the Mario Tennis and one of the five launch titles, so it had one big job: show off what the Virtual Boy could do while being fun enough to make you forget your eyes were slowly crossing.

The game itself is straight up tennis, no fancy power shots or wacky courts like in the later Mario Tennis games. You pick from seven characters, Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, Toad, Koopa, and Donkey Kong Jr., then you jump into a singles or doubles match, or a whole tournament. The controls are honestly great, moving with the D-pad and hitting different shots with the two buttons feels tight and responsive. You don't fight the controls, which is a win. The cool thing tho, is the 3D effect. When you're serving, your opponent looks legitimately far away on the other side of the net, and judging the ball's distance as it comes over is way easier and more intuitive because of the depth. It actually makes the court feel real, which is the system's main trick and this game uses it better than most.

Your character and your partner in doubles are nicely drawn sprites with fun little reactions, they'll smirk or look bummed depending on the point. The backgrounds try to keep things from being boring, with different scenes like hills or pipes behind the court, and Lakitu floats there keeping score. The music is classic beepy Mario-style tunes, it switches up often so it stays fresh.

Where the game feels a bit thin is in the content. With only seven characters, the tournament mode is over in a flash. Doubles adds some chaos since you're relying on a CPU partner, which can be fun or frustrating. Also, the whole deal with the Virtual Boy being a flop meant a bunch of planned stuff got scrapped, including this link cable that was supposed to let you connect two consoles for multiplayer. Games like Mario’s Tennis were actually built with it in mind, but since the cable never officially released, that feature just vanished, but turns out, a person digging through the game's code discovered that the multiplayer modes were never fully removed, just hidden and left unfinished. He managed to patch two of the three planned modes back to life, letting two players or a player and computer team up against another pair. The third mode is too buggy to fix easily. The wild part is that it supposedly runs on 3DS! That means real 3D gameplay and no eye strain!