Mario Sports Superstars
Mario Sports Superstars is a 2017 sports video game developed by Bandai Namco Studios and Camelot Software Planning and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 3DS. The game contains five different sports: association football, baseball, tennis, golf, and horse racing.
Gameplay
The game consists of five sports – association football, baseball, tennis, golf, and horse racing. Despite the number of sports contained, they are not mini-games, 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 on September 1, 2016. The title was co-developed by Bandai Namco Studios and Camelot Software Planning, with the latter having developed games in the Mario Golf and Mario Tennis series. tri-Crescendo assisted on design. While Nintendo's Mario Sports line has featured stand-alone entries in soccer, baseball, tennis and golf, they had never featured horse racing, or compiled all these sports into one compilation. 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.Reception
Mario Sports Superstars received "mixed or average" reviews from critics, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received weak approval, being recommended by only 18% of critics. Destructoid called it a "lazy experience, one developed solely for the purpose of selling what are basically Mario-branded Topps cards." Nintendo Life stated that while the game offered five games in one it failed to offer a definitive version of anything adding that "as a multiplayer title it could be fun to climb the ranks online, but as a single player experience it's totally functional yet painfully lifeless." concluding that "Sports Superstars laid out the groundwork, but just needed to take a few more risks".By May 2017, the game had sold over 92,829 copies in Japan.