We’ve been playing the Mario Golf for the Switch. The guy likes it, and I thought, hey, I’ll play along, but I actually like it, too.
It’s sort of like an extremely fancy Flash game. If you don’t mess with the various clubs, it’s largely a one-dimension game: You hit A when the power meter is at the appropriate spot, and if you do that well, the ball will go close to the target. The way it gets there is satisfying to watch, and it is fun mechanic in the way that the mechanics of improvised physical games are.
It’s sort of an example of the power of “juice”. The game is basically a tiny bit of mechanic and ton of juice triggered by that mechanic. It’s surprisingly different from games that have a lot of cut scenes. In both, there’s a lot of watching in proportion to player acting. But in Mario Golf, the stuff to watch feels like it comes from what the player has done, whereas in the cut-scene-heavy games, the watching feels like it comes from something else.