The number of sports that haven’t yet been turned into a Wii video game with Mario’s name slapped on the box is rapidly dwindling. The latest to fall victim is baseball, in the form of “Mario Super Sluggers.”
In “Sluggers,” you are thrust into the same sports-obsessed world you find in every Mario sports game. Mario and friends are vacationing on an island that is best described as a baseball wonderland. Bowser invades the island and the task is to reclaim it stadium by stadium, unlocking new areas, characters and minigames as you progress.
The controls aren’t difficult to figure out ““ throwing, pitching and baserunning translate naturally to the motion controls of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk attachment. The real intricacy of the game lies in the game design, which heavily emphasizes strategy and team building.
Considering most Mario sports games embrace the “pick-up-and-play” ethos of arcade games, “Mario Super Sluggers” has a surprising amount of depth. Players select a captain and 10 players from a pool of 71 characters, each with a unique combination of more than 30 abilities that fit certain field positions.
For instance, Yoshi is a good shortstop because he can use his tongue to lasso fly balls from a distance, and Donkey Kong can clamber up the sides of stadiums as an outfielder to snag would-be home-run balls.
On top of all this, certain groups of characters have “chemistry” when they’re placed near each other on the field, and two characters with chemistry can activate new abilities in conjunction. The game places a lot of importance on this mechanic ““ even avatars created in the Mii Channel and added to the game are randomly assigned their own chemistry ratings with other characters. Choosing the best lineup and assigning the right field positions is truly half the battle.
It is a mind-boggling level of complexity, especially in a game that has “for all ages” printed on the box, and “Sluggers” deserves a lot credit for still making the game easy to pick up and play. Gamers can ignore team-building mechanics, field a random team at the push of a button, and still have a hectic good time. After all, you don’t want to waste too much time on strategy when the opposing pitcher can simply hold A and B to throw an untouchable fireball.
And though the time and effort put into the game design is evident, this isn’t the case for the visuals.
“Sluggers” has the same over-the-top art style as previous Mario sports games, but the execution is positively threadbare. The grass textures in the baseball portion of “Wii Sports” are more graphically intense than the pixelated green mats in “Sluggers.”
The stadium design is especially disappointing. For instance, “Peach’s Ice Garden” is a smooth blue field with three blocks of ice on it, and the cheering crowd in the backdrop is just made up of hokey 2-D sprites.
And even with such dumbed-down graphics, the game is plagued by load screens ““ something extremely rare to see in a Nintendo game and often indicative of lazy programming.
“Sluggers” just doesn’t look like a game with a $50 price.
But you’re probably not even listening to what I’m saying, because your purchase of this game is a forgone conclusion.
Most already know that “Super Mario Sluggers” is just another derivative Mario sports game, but they are still going to buy it.
Because no matter how many Mario sports games Nintendo releases, it’s still going to be a lot of fun to hit a friend with a bomb while he’s trying to catch a fly ball, and then howl with laughter as he claims that your friendship is over.
But at $50 for a game that looks as if it should cost a fraction of that, eBay may be a better option.
““ Frank Shyong
E-mail Shyong at fshyong@media.ucla.edu.