Mario Golf Advance Tour is a good golf video game that tries with all its might to be stupid and crappy and annoying. In the end, luckily for us, it fails at that. In the balance, in the grand scheme of things, overall, it is OK. But imagine how great it might have been.

The Advance Tour box art boasts, in large friendly letters, of "Role-Playing Golf!"

"Woo!" you are shouting at this point. "Role-Playing Golf! Just what I always wanted! Wooo! Frickin' Woooo--ooo!"

Or rather, that is precisely what you are not shouting. For rarely in all of video gaming have we encountered an idea as breathtakingly stupid as Role-Playing Golf. It is the sort of thing a roomful of mean hipsters would dream up if they wanted to make fun of video gamers. That somebody with a real job in real video game development actually thought it was worth pushing to market should make us all sad and embarrassed.

What is Role-Playing Golf? It is very much like other kinds of video game role-playing, which is to say that it involves a long and mostly dull quest to improve yourself on a number of fronts, all of which are measured with arcane number schemes. Most role-playing games put you somewhere medievalish and magical, give you an old burlap sack to wear, and tell you to find your fortune. So you wander around a little town talking to everybody, and eventually someone tells you that the miller, who lives down by the river, needs help grinding some corn, and maybe he could offer you a job.

So you go to meet the miller and you work for him a while, and you earn a few coins, which you use to buy a sword or a bow and arrow, and then you go and kill a fox or a pigeon, and suddenly you are rewarded with "experience points." Collect enough of these and you move from something called "Level One" to something called "Level Two." At Level Two you are a little stronger and a little better at fighting, so you go adventuring further afield, where you earn more points and do more leveling up, until you either save the world or get bored with all the numbers and charts. All this is to say that "role playing" as currently practiced in video gaming involves no roles and very little play. So why stir it into a game about, of all things, golf?

As you first sit down with Advance Tour, you will wonder where Mario is. You will endure a painful, painful, horribly painful scene, in which you and your pals arrive at the Marion Golf Club, and then spend a very long time chatting to each other about nothing in particular. This would be bad enough all on its own, but here, "chatting" consists of scrolling lines of text, accompanied by a gratingly birdlike chirping noise. You will find it boring, and then you will find it irritating, and then you will find it infuriating. You will find that there is no way to skip it and move on to the golf. You will not find Mario. Apparently he is some kind of golf celebrity, and you will have to spend hours leveling up before you meet him. Arrrrrgh.

Eventually the chirping and the chattering give way to actual golf. This turns out to be pretty good, if a little straightforward and plain and bereft of the surreal charms that normally grace a game with the word "Mario" in its title. But it is fun and comfortable to swing a driver, and it is exciting to chip onto the green over water, and even the putting is rewarding and pleasant. It is dull but friendly, just as electronic golf should be.

From this point, the "Quick Game" option is available on the main menu, and you can use this to play golf as Mario anytime you wish. Alternatively, you can continue "Story" mode, which is more of what you have just been through: fun golf, tempered with boring conversations and engragingly idiotic role-playing. It you stick it out, the courses get nuttier and the game grows more generous with the silly tricks. But nobody will blame you if you elect not to stick it out.