Mario Super Sluggers Review

Do you like the silly, shallow, pick-up-and-play stylings of Mario Party or Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games? Congratulations, Nintendo is happy to take another 50 of your dollars in return for another interactive experience that vaguely resembles an actual video game. My apologies for the vitriol, but I prefer games that take more than ten minutes to master.

Like the previous iteration on GameCube, Mario Super Sluggers has about as much to do with the sport of baseball as 52-Card Pickup does with high-stakes Texas Hold 'Em. There are bases, bats, balls, and gloves, but the gameplay is hardly more than a few extremely simple timing minigames. Once you master the pitching and hitting mechanics (i.e. ten minutes after loading up the game), there's nothing left but to repeat them until the random number generator declares a winner.

Using only a remote, the game does everything from run the bases to moving your fielders for you -- simply shake the remote to throw the ball when your fielder picks it up. The Wii even picks which base to throw to. With a nunchuk plugged in, you get more direct control, but the shoddy implementation makes the game play worse than it does if you just let your team do its own thing.

Multiplayer is amusing in that hanging out with your friends is fun anyway, but the single-player content is truly terrible. A series of boring one-off challenges punctuated by simplistic exploration and the occasional full game makes up Mario's quest to foil Bowser Jr. via baseball. Yes, it's as insipid as it sounds. Playing non-persistent exhibition games against the CPU is better, but still lame. Go do something fun with your buddies rather than wasting an afternoon with this crap.