With its New Play Control! line, Nintendo is offering gamers the chance to play GameCube titles they may have missed out on with the new control system of the Wii. Last month’s release of Pikmin showed how a new control method can breathe new life into a classic game. This month’s release, New Play Control! Mario Power Tennis does the opposite, showing how a new control method can cause considerable harm to a game.

After the success of the tennis portion of Wii Sports, adding motion control to Mario Power Tennis seems like a no-brainer – after all, Wii Sports was once planned to feature the Mario gang. The problem is that motion control has not been properly implemented here – rather than the accurate swing calculation of Wii Sports, swinging the remote in Mario Power Tennis is a crapshoot.

The control system is far from intuitive, which seems to be the antithesis of what Nintendo has been going for with the Wii. The only bright spot of the new control system is that players have two main control options; playing with just the Wii Remote, where the game handles all character movement à la Wii Sports, or playing with the Wii remote and nun-chuck, which grants players full control over character movement.


Gestural control takes the place of ordinary button presses with unfortunate results. Players swing the remote horizontally for a standard shot, and can add top spin or back spin with a twist of the remote during the shot. Forehand and backhand shots are now determined by the player’s swinging motion rather than the position of their character, which can have some unfortunate and sometimes infuriating results. Lob shots and drop shots are performed with vertical movements of the Wii Remote, which seems very awkward when compared to the natural shot movement of Wii Sports. The accuracy of all of these control motions is shockingly poor, especially for a fast paced arcade-style tennis game which demands a wide variety of shots from its players.

A large degree of player control has been removed, which makes the game seem much shallower than it really is. Players are unable to determine the control of their shots; in the original game, one would have to hold the swing button down to wind up in order to make a power shot, but the New Play Control! version makes all shots at full power. More devastating than that is that players have very little control over the actual placement of shots, regardless of whether they are playing with the nun-chuck combo or the solo remote. On the other hand, players need to press extra buttons to perform the previous automatic dive shots.


It’s a shame that the new controls take a lot of the shine off Mario Power Tennis, because there’s a pretty damn good tennis game underneath. Mario Power Tennis follows the standard Mario Sports style of gameplay, providing options for straight up arcade style game types, or more ridiculous over-the-top or gimmick methods of play which add power-ups and rings to the court. Mario Power Tennis’ stuck pretty closely to the formula previously established on the Nintendo 64, but added power shots, character specific gimmick shots which would help save points or smash winners. It was a nice idea but has the unfortunate side effect of interrupting the flow of play and disturbing the gameplay balance - two of the game’s finer points. Luckily, they can be disabled.

Mario Power Tennis includes the usual selection of increasingly challenging singles and doubles cups, gimmick courts, special mini-games and stars from the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s all glorified Mario fan service, with courts based on then-recent Mario outings like Super Mario Sunshine and Luigi’s Mansion accompanied by mini-games referencing even the most obscure of Mario’s games, but it’s all in the name of fun. With four players, Mario Power Tennis was one of the best multiplayer experiences on the GameCube – sadly, the New Play Control! version just doesn’t stack up.


The only real positive of the New Play Control! version of Mario Power Tennis is that it has received a bit of a visual upgrade. The game now supports widescreen and progressive scan display modes, which are especially useful to anyone with a high definition television. The game stills looks reasonably good, particularly among its peers on the Wii. The opening CG cutscene may look a little dated, but Wario and Waluigi’s training montage never fails to amuse.

New Play Control! Mario Power Tennis highlights the potential problems which can arise when attempting to implement a new control system into an older game. Clumsy, inaccurate controls take a great deal of the strategy and depth of the title, and overshadow the game’s finer elements. It’s certainly not up to the standard we’ve come to expect from Nintendo’s games on the Wii – we can only hope that they’ve learnt a valuable lesson this time around. Players are honestly better off seeking out the original version and taking advantage of the Wii’s backwards compatibility.