Super Mario Strikers [GC]

It's tough to publish sports video games these days with Electronic Arts' stronghold on the industry. You can try something radically different, like when Sega priced its NFL 2K5 game at $20 last year. Then there's Nintendo, which succeeds by doing what it does best: Integrating its colorful, cartoony cast of characters into a familiar genre, making it easy to play, and adding twists and bonuses to make it stand out. Keeping its recent efforts on baseball, tennis, and golf moving forward, Nintendo's prepping its own treatment on the world's most popular sport: soccer.

While Super Mario Strikers won't challenge EA's FIFA franchise -- it won't include realistic "footie" action with many of the world's best-known teams and players -- the Mario spin on soccer with a lot of fantasy elements makes for an arcade-like contest that'll appeal to all ages.

At its core, Strikers offers smooth five-on-five soccer with such notable characters as Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, and Waluigi. Though the ball isn't glued to the dribbler's foot, there's not a lot that you have to do to keep it under control, because the game's designers have strived to make it simple, so anyone -- soccer purists and sports-game newbies alike -- can pick up the controller and play with little effort.

Keeping it on your foot, however, isn't easy in the scope of the game's design, for a number of reasons. On a basic level, defenders can initiate standard sliding tackles to get the ball away from a dribbler. But the field is also ringed by a fence, so there's no out of bounds or throw-ins -- and the defender can slam the ball carrier into it with shocking results.

The hockey-like checking is just a portion of the fantasy handling of the sport. Players can take advantage of typical Mario-game power-ups that enable such actions as dropping a line of banana peels to slow down charging defenders or rolling a giant shell down the field. The subsequent graphic effects render the "pitch" a constant battlefield. If you hit a player without the ball, though, you're punished by your opponent receiving an item to help them.

All this maintains the action at a frantic pace, but also enhances the competition -- and the subsequent trash talking. The short game played by a couple of Nintendo's Strikers team quickly went from a straightforward product demo to a battle sprinkled with "oohs" and "aahs" that punctuated the back-and-forth grind. Best of all, unlike the traditional soccer video games, which reward patient, strategic play and a solid knowledge of all the game's intricate controls, Strikers ends up like a comfortable grab-a-controller-and-go party game.

Nintendo has taken a page from EA by emphasizing great moments in the game, such as EA's "Gamebreakers." If you initiate a "perfect pass," the action slows to stretch out the magnificent play that's to come. Though the play might result in the AI goalie diving to smack the ball away from the net, for those few seconds it seems like the participants all move to the edge of their seats and tune in that much more.

To take the concept to high fantasy, the ball carrier can charge up a shot -- specifically, a "super strike." Though it leaves him more vulnerable to a defender, if the character ends up in the clear, it results in a Matrix-like show, in which the player is highlighted against a charged background, followed by a high-speed blast of the ball at the goal.

As is the norm in Nintendo's Mario sports titles, there's plenty to keep you occupied in a variety of ways. Strikers offers head-to-head Grudge Match contests, as well as a career-like Super Cup Battle that progresses you through a series of tougher matches. Four difficulty levels enable you to keep the AI competition challenging, and there are loads of unlockables and milestone rewards (for hitting certain stat achievements) to push you. The multiplayer component is also diverse, with the ability to play four against the AI, two-on-two or three-on-one.

Without a doubt, Super Mario Strikers is a refreshing take on soccer. It doesn't dumb down the game, but rather streamlines it and adds fast-paced action to make it engaging. Check back in early December for our final review.