Strikers? Well, I was stuck when I first picked up this game.....
User Rating: 6.4 | Super Mario Strikers GC
Soccer has never before appealed to me. I find the game boring, over-hyped, and plain idiotic. Fortunately, Super Mario: Strikers did manage to keep my interest. It certainly was more fun than watching soccer (partly because I knew more of the characters in the game than in real soccer). However, that is about where the fun ends. One of the problems with this game is that it is entirely too drawn out. In some of the later "special" cup battles, you need to beat each team three times. The issue with that is that each game is at least 2 minutes long, so there is a total of 36 minutes of total soccer drudgery. Also, at some points of the game, there was a noticeable "rubber band effect". In the begining of some of the matches, you can mop the floor with the CPU player, only to be owned by them less than thirty seconds later. Further, the character animations after a goal become annoying after about 30 minutes of gameplay. The visuals aren't bad, nor are the audio effects, but nothing really to write home about. However, the biggest issue that I had with the game was that I really had no drive to play the game. For a Super Mario game, the unlockables available were not only scarce, but also weren't of much use in any modes other than exhibition. For example, there is only 1 more team available. 1 MORE TEAM! Not only that, but the team that was unlockable was a team of robots that the series didn't even introduce! Unfortunately, this game felt like a demo in the sense that it took such little time to complete, and left the player wanting to know where the rest of the game was. Were the game a twenty-buck-chuck title, I would have given it a higher score, but a game that costs a full 50 bucks for the experience equal to that of a $3 rental at your local video store is pure robbery. Let it be known that I really wanted this game to be good because I love Nintendo, but the game was too poor. This game had potential, but was unable to live up to it. 
