If you’ve played any of the Mario sports titles to date, you’ll know that they take quite a few liberties within the sport to ensure the fun factor remains high. As a result, basketball in Mario Hoops is something of a contact sport, and players can score in the region of 50 points with a single basket, but it’s this sort of high energy gameplay that makes the game really fun. Players choose three players from the roster of ten initially selectable characters (there’s quite a few hidden players); each of the players has his or her own special dunk, as well as the usual unique attributes (DK is strong, Yoshi is fast, etc.). After selecting a court to play on, the game begins.
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Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!
There was a bit of worry abound when it was announced that Square Enix had decided to make Mario Hoops stylus driven, but they’ve been kind enough to include the option to play using the d-pad and face buttons. Some purists might argue that the stylus controls give players greater control as a whole, but it’s really just a matter of preference. The game is played from a third person perspective looking up the court. A number of question mark boxes are distributed around the court; running over these and speed dribbling will give your player coins and the occasional special power-up. Collecting coins adds to the number of points your team receives when you earn a basket, so expect some ridiculous scores.
Mario Hoops can be quite easy to begin with; we romped through our first handful of matches with massive winning margins. Once you get to the Star level cup and face off against the Final Fantasy characters, the difficulty steps up to a considerably more challenging level. The game’s presentation is one of its most outstanding features – Square are proving themselves to be quite proficient in producing luscious 3D visuals on the DS, and the music is quite good, although it may be an acquired taste. We didn’t have an opportunity to play the game in multiplayer mode but understand that the game will not be supported by Nintendo’s Wi-Fi service. Instead you’ll be limited to playing local wireless play, although the game’s single cartridge play option is fully featured, so there are no compromises.
Since we went hands on with the Japanese retail release of the game, we feel that there’s a pretty big chance that nothing is going to change between now and the release of Mario Hoops in PAL territories. It’s an enjoyable game that should prove to be a good compliment to the already diverse range of Mario sports titles. PALGN will have a full review of Mario Hoops: 3 on 3 in late September.
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