"Gets old quick"

Super Mario Strikers is another attempt at a Super Mario sports game, and Nintendo made a good stab at it, but it wasn't quite up to par. Nintendo has prided their Mario franchise forever, it has been the bread and butter of the company, and Nintendo has milked it for all it was worth. Now I put up with Mario Tennis, Mario Baseball, Mario Party, basically all the Mario sports games. With Mario Strikers, avid Nintendo gamers just don't get the amount of fun they would be having with a normal Mario game (Bowser kidnaps Peach).

Basically, the game is soccer, you pick a captain (You can only choose from 9, which really irked me) and you choose your little support dudes (Again, only 3 to choose from, more irking). So, you have 4 people per team and a goalie, who is Krunk. Since everyone knows how to play soccer, I'm not going to go over how the game plays and all that jazz. What I am going to go over are the twists to soccer that this game adds. When you slide tackle someone who doesn't have the ball, the other team gets a random item and you can only hold 2 items at a time. So, for those of you who just slide tackle the non-ball carriers, you should stop. If your captain has the ball, you can do what's called a 'Power Shot' in which you hold down the B button until you have a 'U' shaped meter in which you have to get the cursor inside the green slots. Useful Tip: You only need to get the white bar in the second green slot, if you miss it in the first one, you can still make it in. But if you make it into the first green slot, the second green slot will get bigger. If you make it in both slots, or just the second, the ball will go in automatically and you get 2 pernts (yes, points). That's how the game works, pretty straightforward.

One thing that Nintendo has done so well with its past games was "disguising" the load screen with something else, like dialogue, a scene to watch, anything. In this game, Nintendo breaks its tradition and you just see a load screen. Pretty boring, huh? Another irker is that there are only 9 playable captains in the game, but there should have been at least 15. C'mon Nintendo, your games don't only have 9 characters. The one thing that drove me up a wall was the extreme lack of replay value. After you beat all the cups (all 5) you unlock all the cheats and BAM! you beat the whole game. Not much more to it, unless you want to hone your skills.

Don't get me wrong, this game wasn't all that bad, rather it was 2 over par if you will, which you probably won't. The one thing that can be fun about this game is that you can spend hours playing with your friends, 2v2. 1 player is good, too, but multiplayer is amazing because you just play with your friends. All in all, this game was could, but just couldn't quite meet its quota (look t up if you don't know what it means). I expect Nintendo to make more Mario sports games, but just better.

Final score: 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/08/06