Mario Tennis: Power Tour

Let’s finish on something much more realistic—a Nintendo-owned title that should have been on NSO from the moment GBA games were added. Mario Tennis: Power Tour is to tennis as Mario Golf: Advance Tour is to golf: a Camelot-developed game that renders the sport as an entire RPG.

It’s so important to stress for those who didn’t partake of the GBA era that these Nintendo sports games were nothing like the versions released today. Camelot’s recent Mario Tennis Aces and Mario Golf: Super Rush entirely lack the RPG wrapping that made these early ‘00s games so utterly delightful, and feel so lacking as a result.

Power Tour, however, remains a classic. You can play as either Clay or Ace, in a daft story about waking up in the Royal Tennis Academy, where everyone’s being challenged by masked tennis players who may or may not be Mario characters… It’s fantastically silly, as well as being a super-fun tennis game. And please, Nintendo, hand it over.