Mario Sports Superstars is a forgotten Nintendo 3DS game, and a home run hidden in plain sight.
Six years ago, I moved from the UK to Toronto. Since then, I’ve picked up a few local habits. I’ve learned to layer clothing in the winter, developed a taste for Tim Horton’s coffee, and, most surprisingly, fallen in love with baseball. The Toronto Blue Jays have become part of my life and a welcome summer escape from the plight of the English football team I support, West Ham United.
When the Blue Jays took the LA Dodgers to the wire in last season’s World Series, something clicked. For the first time in my life, I didn’t just want to watch baseball. I also wanted to play it. Digitally, at least.
The problem is that baseball video games on modern consoles are either painstakingly realistic or instantly irritating. Sony’s MLB The Show series is a technical marvel, but its complexity is about as inviting as the tax return I now complete every year. Super Mega Baseball 4 has accessible gameplay mechanics, but its visual design and horrific soundtrack make it feel like being stuck in a stadium with a hundred screaming mascots. I needed something simple, fun, or at least tolerable.
It turns out I already owned the game I was looking for.
Mario Sports Superstars is a Nintendo 3DS release from 2017 that bundles five sports in one cartridge: football, baseball, tennis, golf, and horse racing. On paper, it sounds like a mini-game collection. In practice, it’s closer to a greatest hits album, with each sport trimmed down slightly but with its core intact.
Baseball is the standout. Not because it’s a daring reinvention of the sport, but because it captures the relaxed tension, the rhythm, and some of the strategy beneath the bat and ball antics. The controls are tight, the AI is competent, and the action hits a sweet spot between arcade-style fun and tactical decision-making.
There’s no official licence, of course, so there’s no way to recreate some of last season’s classic games. But as someone relatively new to the sport, it gave me exactly what I was looking for. Super Mario is no Guerrero Jr., I suppose, but then Guerrero Jr. is no Super Mario.
The rest of the package follows the same philosophy. Football feels like a distilled take on Mario Strikers, with fewer modes and gimmicks but a faster, cleaner match flow. Tennis and golf keep things simple too, leaning on solid fundamentals with just enough Mushroom Kingdom flavour to stop them feeling plain.
Horse racing is the outlier, and the weirdest inclusion by far, but the mix of item use and stamina management makes it a fun ride in short bursts. Altogether, the set lands somewhere between full blown games and party sized diversions. There’s a refreshing purity on display, and in spirit it’s closest to Wii Sports.
The game also had its own line of 90 amiibo cards, one for each character in each sport. Scanning them boosts stats, unlocks gear, and enables a special mode. I picked up a few packs when I originally bought the game, but they’re long gone, and I didn’t miss them this time around.
Released in the dying days of the 3DS, just as the Nintendo Switch broke cover, Mario Sports Superstars never had the spotlight. Reviews were reasonably dismissive, and it came and went in the time it takes to throw a pitch. The game feels like the very definition of late generation filler, and was quite possibly designed as a vehicle to sell amiibo cards. Nonetheless, I’m quite taken with this modestly fun compendium that’s now largely forgotten among the more extravagant entries in Mario’s sporting catalogue.
There was no follow-up, no Switch port, and no legacy. Instead, Nintendo reverted to the norm with full-featured tennis, football, and golf titles for the Nintendo Switch, which ranged from the average to the fantastic.
A brand new all-in-one Mario Sports collection would probably be a hit, but Nintendo seems likely to continue with separate releases, one sport at a time. Mario Tennis Fever is out for Nintendo Switch 2 soon and, to be fair, it looks pretty spectacular.
It’s easy to dismiss Mario Sports Superstars, but there’s something lovely about playing a game that’s sat untouched for years, only for it to become exactly what you’re looking for. Sometimes, the best part of the backlog isn’t finding a game that ages well. It’s finding one that meets the moment.
From the Backlog is a semi-regular feature where we finally play the games everyone else finished years ago and see if they still live up to the hype (or at least justify that third time we bought them).
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