Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour

Overview

Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour is a golfing game featuring Mario and his friends. It is also the only appearance of Mario Golf on the GameCube. It uses the same traditional 3 click swing as many other golf games, and it was met with mostly favorable reviews. The main part of the game is competing in single player tournaments to unlock additional courses. You can also challenge characters to unlock their star versions, which are able to hit farther than normal characters, but at the expense of accuracy. There are a total of 16 characters in the game, including: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, Yoshi, Koopa, DK, Diddy, Wario, Waluigi, Birdo, Bowser, Bowser Jr., Boo, Shadow Mario, and Petey Piranha.

Courses

There are several different courses to choose from in Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, each taking place in a fairly unique location throughout The Mushroom Kingdom.

Lakitu Valley

A rather generic and fairly easy course, Lakitu Valley is the first course available in the game. The course generally features a handful of trees, straight and wide fairways, and infrequent sand and water hazards. Overall, the course design is very similar to a more realistic, life-like golf course, and it has very few "Mario-related" elements in its design. Despite having the moniker "Lakitu Valley", there are no Lakitus to be found.

Cheep Cheep Falls

Cheep Cheep Falls is the second available course in the game, and features a design that is very similar to that of its predecessor, Lakitu Valley. Just like Lakitu Valley, Cheep Cheep Falls is a "realistic" course with many trees, open fairways, and various water and sand hazards. The course is more challenging than Lakitu Valley, though, with more prominient bunkers, less forgiving hole locations, and trickier greens.

Shifting Sands

A major departure from the first two courses, Shifting Sands is set in the midst of a vast desert and is much less of a "realistic" course than Cheep Cheep Falls or Lakitu Valley. Featuring a myriad of different obstacles -- including large sand bunkers, rocky surfaces and impediments, ruined structures, pyramids, and even a stone Sphinx or two -- Shifting Sands is a more challenging course than either of the two preceding courses.