Think of it like the service meter in a tennis game. Here you have to hold the button and then, as a ticker moves from one side of the meter to the other, hit the B button to try and land it on two thin green strips. In Soccer Slam you'd try and position a player on a glowing star having teed the ball up. The better and more spectacular option is similar to Soccer Slam's, whereby you hold down the B button and a meter pops up. This gives the ball a fair old thwack, but it isn't going to work most of the time, despite the handy slow motion routine that accompanies it. First, you can lay the ball off to a team-mate, basically doing the old "A and then B" routine. The surprising complexity of the engine means it's possible to have the ball rolling across the goal-line, flying off at unusual angles, hitting posts and bouncing back to the keeper, and generally behaving with the degree of randomness we all want to see from the sport of football, and with the added mash-their-legs tackling system you can upset just about anybody's preparations to shoot.Īs you move toward goal, there seem to be a couple of ways of setting yourself up in a manner most likely to result in a goal. The goalie is capable of clubbing things away and fending off the brutality of your front-men, and although you can send some impressive arcing shots goalward, they won't always go in. The joy of it is that scoring isn't piss-easy. You can of course tackle and, using the C-stick, perform little spinny flair moves in a manner that's sure to have Electronic Arts reaching for their Big Book of Stupid Sports Trademarks in search of some random infringement. You hold the left trigger to run, which exposes you to easier tackling, you press A to pass and press or hold B to shoot. And, as far as rules go, that's about it you can clobber the hell out of people to win the ball and that, my friends, is where the frenzied fun is most acute.Ĭontrols are basic. The physics and collision detection are extremely impressive. The pitch is quite small and the ball can't go off it thanks to electrified boundaries. The rest are Koopa Troopas or Toad types. In the case of my demo we had Mario on one side and Donkey Kong on the other. Moving on to the game, then, it basically works like this: you have about five players a side, one of whom's a goalkeeper who can't leave his area, and one of whom's a familiar Mario series type. Well, if this continues heading in the direction it currently is, then it deserves to be bought by those of you who don't own Soccer Slam, which is the vast majority of you, so I'm not that bothered. Hopefully they'll decide to mark it up to show me up. All this anger has two goals: 1) to illustrate that Super Mario Strikers is pretty similar to SEGA Soccer Slam, a game with which it shared some dev team members as far as I can work out, and which was brilliant fun and underrated, and 2) to call bored reviewers' bluffs whenever it comes out. Do you know how many copies Soccer Slam sold in the UK? It was actually less than the number of games I own in total.Īnyway. And you know what would be really annoying? If they ripped into it because it's basically the same as SEGA Soccer Slam. And I bet it gets ripped apart by bored reviewers. Barring a catastrophe, this is going to be brilliant fun - especially in multiplayer. The same is about to be true of Super Mario Strikers. But, if you played it, you probably would like Soccer Slam. the feeble joke I thought of wheeling out there. Not least because I'd dig it out of a Friday night and my assembled chums would start, "Woah, woah. For example: SEGA Soccer Slam was brilliant fun, and its reception on GameCube and latterly PS2 and Xbox was downright maddening. Well, I have long since given up on sounding clever, so I'm quite content to say whatever the hell I like. Games journalists are often accused of championing silly little semi-mediocre games because they want to sound clever.
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