Gamers Evolved

Mario is a classic game that has been around for years and doesn’t seem like it will ever go out of style. The newest game, Super Mario Strikers, looks great, but there may be a few things missing that people love from the previous Mario games.

Super Mario Strikers, like all of the Mario-brand sports games, takes the wildly popular sport of soccer, and adds that familiar Nintendo flavor to spice things up a bit. The fields are smaller, the action is faster, and the rules are practically non-existent. Truly, this game bears little resemblance to the real-life version of soccer that we all know other than the most fundamental aspects of the game.

Each team you control includes three sidekicks and one team captain. The selectable captains are Nintendo mainstays: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, Yoshi, Waluigi, and Wario (and one unlockable team). The sidekicks that fill out your team are either Koopas, Birdos, Toads, or Hammer Bros. While the sidekicks have their place on the field, and can be effective in the right situations on both offense and defense, you’ll likely want the ball at the feet of your captain when the game is on the line.

The controls in Super Mario Strikers are, in true Nintendo fashion, very easy to pick up. On offense, the A button will pass the ball, the B button shoots the ball, hold L and press A to do a lob pass, press Y to juke, and of course, R handles your Turbo. On defense, A changes characters, Y cross-checks your opponent hockey style, B does a slide-tackle, and again, R is your Turbo.

On both offense and defense the X button activates your special attacks such as shells and bob-ombs. It’s a terribly easy game to play, and you can literally take any 4 random people and sit them down for some four-player action and chances are they will have a good time. Nintendo has made a name for itself by making its games consistently easy to learn, and Super Mario Strikers is no different.

But there is still something missing. This game doesn’t feel as “Mario” as other Mario-themed sports games. For one thing, the presentation is lacking in comparison. From the menu system (which is awfully plain), to the superstrike animations, to a lack of any real narrative beyond winning a succession of tournament cups, Strikers feels a bit underdeveloped. And while the character models themselves have a good dose of that trademark Nintendo charm, sometimes serious frame rate issues when playing in certain stadiums really drag things down.

The graphics in Super Mario Strikers are decent enough. Some people have complained about the frame-rate chugging in this game from time to time but we never saw this happen: it ran buttery smooth 100% of the time. Everything is colorful and extremely sharp. The characters are all animated well and they look as they should. All the effects look good too: the power shots look sweet (although they get old after you have seen them eleventy-billion times,) and the invisible electric fence effects are pretty cool too.

That being said, the overall package is rather underwhelming in the visuals department. It just didn’t seem as “Nintendo” as I would have expected from a Mario game. Maybe next time they’ll learn from their mistakes and make it better.