I liked the Gamecube original, I can't imagine this being worse.
Although I've heard negative remarks about the controls not being responsive, but I guess our preview that will be up later will delve into it more...

As long as the controls are at least as good as Wii Sports, how can you say anything negative about them?

I might actually get this.  I've never been fond of the Mario Sports titles, but Wii Sports Baseball is just so much damn fun.

I am totally sick of "Mario and friends do this activity" spin-offs but I really like Wii Sports baseball.  The only problem is it suffers from non-game syndrome in that it's too damn simplistic to hold my interest for any length of time.  But if you take that batting control and put in something with full length games and important baseball stuff like fielding and stealing bases and stuff you've got a winner.  I can make an exception for the Mario milking if the core game is as good as I hope this is.

Though I want to have the option to play something resembling real baseball.  I will completely lose interst if any extra bells and whistles like power-ups and such cannot be turned off.

I think Nintendo is very capable of making fun arcade style sports games though I think I would prefer them without any sort of franchise characters thrown in and more focus on just providing a fun videogame representation of a sport without too many sim elements to overly complicate it.  For example I like Mario Tennis because it's an awesome tennis game, not because it has Mario and a whole bunch of themed courts and power-ups and such.  The problem is that might not be what the target demo here is looking for.  There's a big difference between MARIO! featuring sports and SPORTS! featuring Mario.  I'm the guy who bought DDR Mario Mix solely because it was a DDR game on a console I actually owned.

I would be considerably more interested in the Mario sports games if they were a completely different franchise.  The characters would be the "Nintendo sports" characters and they would appear in every game to tie them together.  But I don't this is what most present-day Nintendo fans want.  I complain that Nintendo has gone way too franchise crazy but that's like an old geezer Nintendo fan complaint.  Anyone who has been a fan of Nintendo for "only" the last ten years or so would have a completely different view of what Nintendo is supposed to be about.

Have you tried becoming a PRO at it, though? Baseball becomes surprisingly hard because once you keep going up the ranks the AI becomes harder. They start throwing some very tricky balls and barely miss catching the ball.

Its simple, I agree, but becomes hard once you decide to master it.

It's not an issue of challenge but rather of depth.  All Wii Baseball is is pitching and hitting.  All the fielding is automated.  Hell it doesn't even let you play a full 9 innings.  THAT is why it doesn't hold my interest.  It's basically a tech demo of the future Mario Super Sluggers control scheme.

I've been a Nintendo fan for over 10 years and I LOVE the Mario sports spinoffs, so speak for yourself Ian.  :P

A little disappointed that this was Nintendo's "surprise" announcement. They showed video of the game back in October.

This was the surprise? If you are talking about the surprise game Reggie mentioned a while back I thought that was going to be revealed at E3...

It's a surprise to Nintendo cuz they didn't know there were other games coming out this year besides Mario Kart.

The E3 surprise is different.

RIQA RETURNS

Oh...Still, I never even knew the media summit would yield a surprise announcement.

Yeah but isn't there an embargo on information? So couldn't there be something else we don't know about?

Mario Golf sales = millions
Wii Love Golf sales = hundreds

So yeah, you are in the OVERWHELMING minority with this, so don't expect it to change. They tried "Mario Golf without Mario" and it became the single lowest selling Wii game in Japan.

By the way, Baseball is the most hated game out of Wii Sports in my experience. You almost never hit and when you do it's almost always an out. We've had so many matches end 0-0 or with one player winning with a single lucky shot it's just completely stupid. Sure, hitting a straight ball can be done (about one out of three throws end with a hit) but noone's stupid enough to use those, all you do is give your opponent free points.

Whatever, me and my friends played more Wii Baseball than any other game in the Wii Sports package. I used to be pretty good at hitting and getting home runs. I don't even play any of the Wii sports games any more, I never liked it that much to be honest.

Baseball has produced some of the most bitter, spiteful and epic Wii Sports matches I've been involved in. Trash talking. Chaos. Cheap tactics. Violence. Its what professional sports is all about.

You need friends who will win at all costs, because its one of those games that requires you to think outside the box. For example, stand behind the batter, throw the pitch and then tackle the batter so he can't swing properly.

Its hard to pull this one off twice but if you do it at the right time you can win.

I think Baseball is the least popular Wii Sports title of all my friends. Sure, we never play Golf, but Baseball is the only game we ever stop playing because the fun runs out. Usually, everyone thinks they can beat me at Tennis (they can't) so that goes on until we're tired. It's the same with boxing.

Anyway, even my non-Nintendo fanboy friends see Wii Sports as Tech demos for future Mario Sports titles, which surprises me.

LOL

Had they tried "Mario Golf without Mario say ten years ago it might be different.  Of course I'm in the minority because this is a significantly different Nintendo than the one I became a fan of and it has created a significantly different group of fans with different expectations.

Nintendo has been about milking the crap out of a franchises for so long that that's what people associate Nintendo with.  Odds are there are a buttload of Nintendo fans for example that will ONLY pay attention to games associated with established franchise characters.  That's why stuff like Pikmin doesn't sell as well even though it has the gameplay and style of a classic Nintendo game that one would assume every Nintendo fan would go nuts over.

Though I'd argue this is a problem with videogames in general.  Sequels and franchises have been milked so much that original IPs typically struggle with any fanbase.  When I was a kid there were very little videogame franchises older than me.  Pac-Man is only a year older.  Donkey Kong and Mario first appeared the year I was born.  Compare that to someone ten years younger and characters like Mario or Mega Man never didn't exist.  I think that really changes one's perception.

I don't buy the Mario sports games because they have Mario in them, I buy them because they're quality games. I'd still buy them if they didn't have Mario in them, but I know that people are more aware of them when they have Mario in them and they sell better that way, and I have no problem with Nintendo putting Mario in them for that reason. I don't care if a game is a sequel or "whoring out" of a franchise, I care about fun and interesting gameplay. If a game has that I don't care what setting or characters it uses.

You know what, those have been my exact sentiments for years. I don't consider it "whoring out" Mario, the games just have a certain flavor to them and they all started as Mario, so why bother rebranding them with a different character set?

Generally speaking, I have little interest in sports games, but Mario games change it up enough to garner my interest. Count me in for this one if they didn't change the last game's structure much and dumb down the fielding too much.

I completely and adamantly 100 percent disagree. You can say they are good games on their own, but they have all kinds of power ups and extras NOT typically associated with a regular sports game. How many sports games have power ups that work like the Mario sports games?

I do not think they are bad games and honestly enjoy a few of the sports games, but NOT as sports games, AS Mario games. Even the people I know who are ONLY into sports games think the same way, they are good games, but take away the unique Mario attributes and they are just really wacky sports games that do not make any sense at all.

I actually agree with Ian all the way on this, if say Mario Strikes had just bee a regular Soccer game made by Nintendo and the draw would be funky power moves that most other Soccer games did not feature, then people would just point to the unique power moves as the main draw to the games and there are already a few non-Nintendo sports franchises that have funky power ups and stuff they Nintendo games likely wouldn't stand out as much. They *need* the Mario name to sell those games.

NOT that they are bad games, but most people DO buy them BECAUSE Mario and crew are featured. If Super Star Tennis came out on GC and lacked any recognizable characters that die hard fans would eat up the game would have sold less than half of what it ended up selling. Golf on it's own without Mario would have had to compete with Tiger Woods and some of the more established titles and without Mario and gang would not have stood out.

I don't think you understand what Ian said. He enjoys them a lot less because Mario and the gang are in them and thinks it would be a good idea to make the games without them, the exact opposite of what you are agreeing with.

Maybe I was taking something else away from his post. My actual reply was to your post about them being quality games on their own merits. The part I agree with Ian on was hot reflected well in my post. I agree with what he said but I was mostly focusing on what your post said. now look what you did, you got me confused.


See I am torn between liking some of the Mario sports games, well mostly Mario Kart and Mario Baseball or whatever they call it, but I always hated the fact that Mario was in these non Mario type games. For me though it just ruined the universe I had depicted them to exist in.

So whatever I said I said in a rush of excitement and didn't think it through very well obviously.

Well, it's worth remembering that Mario Strikers WAS new IP from a third party called... what? Super Soccer Strykers or something like that? Yeah, it was ignored then... except Nintendo noticed it, realized it was a solid game, slapped mario characters on it, and brought it to everyone's attention.

Sega Soccer Slam. I bought it back then. However, Mario Strikers is MUCH improved over it, and not because of the characters. Some of the characters in SSS are hilariously awesome.

Thanks, but the point still stands. Sega Soccer Slam? What's that? That game faded into oblivion... and Mario Strikers emerged on the scene.

Sega Soccer Slam was an awesome 3rd party game you didn't buy.

Sega and Nintendo had no idea how, nor funds, to market it.

Ya it was a good game, to bad it did so poorly.

This is why I buy third party games today, to atone for past sins like these.

YOU ARE FOREVAR DOOMD TO YOUR INFERNO