Super Mario Strikers

Mario and his trusty teammates take the field for the second season this year, but this time in soccer jerseys. The familiar cast is oddly aggressive, but if you found Mario Baseball to be a little slow, Super Mario Strikers dishes out fast paced gameplay and an extremely competitive edge.

Like all the Mario sports titles, Super Mario Strikers has simple but effective controls. Within minutes you should be gleefully performing midair passes, body checks, and bicycle kicks. Nintendo did a great job of giving you basic controls, but leaving plenty of room for creativity.

To keep the game moving at a non-stop pace, they placed an electric fence around the field to keep the ball and the players inside. And anyone knocked into the fence will get a temporary shock. Body checking is perfect for stopping someone making a drive for the goal, but if you take someone out that doesn't have the ball, they'll be rewarded with an attack item like a classic volley of red turtle shells. This brings a familiar level of chaos to Mario's unconventional sports gameplay, but if they get to be too much of a nuisance you can turn them off in the options menu.

Like other Mario competitions, there is a Cup system in Strikers you have to make your way through. Once you complete all four normal cups on any difficulty, you can tackle the Super Cup Battles, which cannot be played on the easy setting. The jump in difficulty from Rookie to Professional can be a drastic and aggravating transition.

Playing the computer is fun, and there are unlockables to aquire by doing so, but this game was clearly made to be played with other people. Up to four players can compete against the computer, or two on two. With so many ways to obstruct your opponents, there are sure to be some offensive words exchanged. Multiplayer is where Strikers really comes alive, even for gamers who don't know anything about soccer.

A trip to the Mushroom Kingdom is usually a happy experience full of love and friendship. The sports games have always brought a level of competitiveness to Mario's world, but in Strikers, most of the characters seem downright pissed off. Rather than good against evil, it feels like everyone is only looking out for themselves this year. Each character growls when you select them, and a few do some rather racy celebration dances. None of it is inappropriate, but it's still weird to see the happy-go-lucky characters from the last twenty years get angry.

The world in Strikers is a collection of stadiums that feel a little too similiar. Some of them are character inspired, and others are cold, metal structures that seem a bit out of place in the Mushroom Kingdom. Despite their appearance, all of these playing fields have relatively the same layout. Unlike Mario Baseball, which had tons of hidden surprises in each park, the soccer stadiums in Strikers are a little uninspired.

But the character animations, as always, are cute and expressive. Players slide, roll, stop the ball, twist, and kick their way through each match. The colorful cartoon graphics reach the same level of visual enjoyment achieved by every other Mario sports game on the Gamecube from Baseball to Golf. And if you missed an awesome goal, the game will show the replay from multiple angles to rub it into your face.

Strikers is also full of explosive sound effects that add to the comic craziness. Characters huff and puff as they sprint up the field and scream when they're checked into the fence and electrocuted. It's probably not polite to laugh at the Princess when she's shrieking in pain, but it's still really funny.

While the single player may seem like a chore to get through, the multiplayer is incredibly fun. If you have a Gamecube and a few sports fans to play with, Strikers is a must buy. It's a little discomforting to see the Mario characters try to offend each other, but Super Mario Strikers, like every other Nintendo sports title, is good, clean, and sometimes violently competitive fun.