Barrel Batter is a minigame which appears in Mario Superstar Baseball. It takes place in the Donkey Kong Jungle stadium. An Adobe Flash port of the game titled Mario Sports Complex: Barrel Blast was formerly available on both the Mario Superstar Baseball website as well as on Camp Hyrule.
Gameplay[]
The player's character has to hit the ball into the barrels in front, as doing so earns them points. There are three rows of barrels, each with five in them, so a total of fifteen barrels can appear at a time. Barrels come in red, yellow, and blue varieties, although Whenever there are adjacent barrels of the same color, hitting one of them causes all of the barrels to break. Each time a barrel is hit, another one automatically falls from the top to replace it.
Aside from earning points, breaking the barrels gradually contributes to the barrel gauge on screen. When it is filled, a bonus barrel appears on screen, and if the player hits the bonus barrel, all of the other barrels are destroyed, earning them about 860 points. If the player misses the bonus barrel on that turn, it becomes a regular brown barrel.
There is not a clear indicator as to where the baseball is sent to upon being hit. However, the uppermost row of barrels can be hit by tilting the Control Stick upward while swinging. Similarly, the lowest row of barrels can be hit by tilting the Control Stick down while swinging. The timing of the hit affects which column the ball swings off to, with an early swing causing to hit a column closest to the character, i.e. the leftmost column for left-handed batters and the rightmost column for right-handed batters.
Barrel Batter is generally a single-player game, but on the Special level, two players can compete in Barrel Batter.
