Mario Strikers Charged

Aug. 26, 2008

Today, for a special edition of my gaming, a lovely assistant is joining me to play a multiplayer game. She's not as much of a gamer as I am, so this adds an interesting perspective.

Category

Soccer

Pros

• Any sports game where beating the crap out of the opponent's team is encouraged is fun.
• Once you learn the basics of the game, it's easy to control.
• Game lends itself to a lot of complexity and strategy that would definitely seperate a bad team from a good team.
• Graphics are nice and solid.

Cons

• Game was
• Tutorial was slow and boring, according to my assistant. "I would have given up and stopped playing by now. I can't believe you have the patience to learn a new game every day."
• Game on normal mode, at least in the first tournament, was really, really easy. The megastrike meant insta-win, and the opponent rarely used special attacks. I wonder what "Extreme" difficulty would have been like.
• The tournament was long and tedious, we didn't even get to the end of our first one because it kept draining on and on.
• Without getting into strategy, the game gets very repetitive very quickly.

Verdict

I think the game has some complexity that went completely unexplored by me and my assistant. However, the game did not convince me that I really needed to go digging to discover this complexity. It seems an odd catch-22 - is it worth getting into this game so that you can get into the game? Since I have limited time nowadays, the answer is no.