On Saturday, August 27th we hosted our 14th and 15th tournaments on a single night, our first time hosting more than one tournament at a single event. Immediately following the 2016 Rio Olympic games which featured the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appear in a Mario costume, our Mariolympics event featured two Gamecube classics: Mario Power Tennis and Super Mario Strikers.
Both games were emulated with Dolphin 5.0, played with Xbox 360 controllers, and ran beautifully on Machu Picchu’s 120″ projection screen. If you haven’t played these games, they are true classics which hold up extremely well over a decade after their original releases in 2004/05. Both tournaments were run separately, with one winner for Mario Tennis (Vas) and another for Mario Strikers (Kevin). Brackets for both of those tournaments are below.
If you haven’t tried Dolphin (a Gamecube and Wii emulator) before, definitely check it out. Of all of the emulated games we’ve played at CGF events, Dolphin has been by far the most reliable and the most visually impressive. In the case of both Strikers and Tennis, these games look much better reproduced through Dolphin than they do played on actual Gamecube hardware (due in part to the upscaling which Dolphin performs).
We noticed that during our Mario Kart tournament there were dozens of participants who had grown up with the game through its various iterations and knew it well. Interestingly, this was not the case with either Mario Power Tennis nor Super Mario Strikers, where a number of participants hadn’t played the games before. Both games’ remarkably accessible fast-paced action quickly won over newcomers though, as the Strikers tournament was won by someone who had never played the game before the day of the tournament.
Congratulations to Vas (who won our highly competitive Mario Kart tournament) and Kevin.
Mario Power Tennis Bracket
Super Mario Strikers Bracket
