PixlBit

Mario and the gang team up to play 4 all new sport games.

Mario sports has been expanding more and more over the years, this time around there's a few new sports to play. These sports include Basketball, Volleyball, Hockey, and Dodgeball, all of which in concept are a great idea.

Unfortunately only 2 of these 4 games were available for demo during E3. These games were Volleyball and Basketball. To start off I'll talk about basketball's ups and downs.

Mario Basketball was a very easy and fun game that everyone could play. This is great for family fun without having the need to build skill to play it. This is also a bad thing in my opinion. I would like to have some type of skill build up throughout the game that would allow for more in depth gameplay. This would keep my interest in playing the game over a period of time. If you have ever played Mario Basketball 3 on 3 on the Nintendo DS, it will give you a good idea on how the game works. Scoring is by coins rather than by actual points. I did not have enough time to learn how the coin system worked which also brings up some concern to me.

Mario Volleyball was much of the same. There really was not any skill involved in the game at all. I would have rather had this option like Mario Tennis and Mario Baseball games possessed.

There were a bunch of characters to choose from in the demo. The characters were Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Peach, Donkey Kong, Bowser, Wario and Toad. Each character had a different set of skills much like every other Mario Sports game.

These games seemed more like large mini-games rather than full games like many Mario games before. Overall I found these games to be fun and worth playing. I have concern with how long I could play these games before I got bored of them because of how easy the game is. If you are into games such as Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympic games and Mario Party then this is a great game for you.

This game will be available in stores sometime next year.