168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mario Strikers: Battle League was easily the best reveal🌸 of the recent Nintendo Direct for me. A lot of the games seemed baked in a sense of nostalgia, designed to appeal to our inner child. 'No way, Gleep Glup is back!' and so forth. Mario Strikers, the second nostalgic sports title revealed at the Direct (after Switch Sports), was that for me. Football is the best sport in the world, and Strikers is easily Mario's best sports title. Golf, Tennis, and Sluggers are all good, but none of them have the charm of Strikers, and in some ways it's a surprise that it's taken so long for it to come to the Switch.
Golf and Tennis do lend themselves more to the motion elements of the Switch, I suppose, but then by that criteria, so does Sluggers - plus, the Switch is not as motion centric as✱ the Wii anyway. That's part of the reason Switch Sports looks so uninspiring to me. Especially the football mode, which appears to be a weird 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rocket League without cars game that vaguely resembles football but is, in fact, not football. Mario Strikers is not true football either - Allan Saint-Maximin can do a lot of things, but I'm yet to see him pick up the ball and breathe fire on it - but it understands the rush that makes football great and applies typical arcade conventions to it. Football is not just a backdrop to Strikers, it's a game that is soaked in football. Each crunching tackle, each bicycle kick, each jockey for space, it screams football. Real football.
There are a lot of great football games out there. FIFA has been consistently top of the league, and Pro Evo used to put up a good fight before falling on hard times and thoroughly 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:embarrassing itself with eFootball. This Is Football was good once upon a time. Championship/Football Manager fulfil your management sim ambitions. Arcade wise, not so much. This Is Football incorporated some arcade mentality, with the Deliberate Foul/Dive button, but was still a true football game. FIFA Street embraced skill-based arcade football, but remained fairly realistic and with four games in its roster had a very hit and miss return on its ideas. Sega Soccer Slam is the only major competitor to Mario Strikers, and it had a single game that wasn't quite as good as Mario anyway. Captain Tsubasa also has the arcade elements to it, but it’s also way too slow and too concerned with mimicking real football to fully embrace its best ideas.
Of course, that the previous games were good does not necessarily mean the new one will be. Mario games tend to be fairly consistent, but there's always a chance. What it needs to do is carry on the spirit of the early games into the Switch era. Of all the sports games, Strikers has always been the grittiest. Football is a contact sport, and a saving tackle will be greeted with as rapturous an applause as a goal. If it's a tackle that leaves the other team's show pony on the deck, the applause will be even louder. The previous Strikers games understood that. The message was never 'hurt your opponents' (it's still Mario), but there was the implied understanding that you were, in football parlance, supposed to 'leave one on them'.
The trailer for Battle League showed that to a point. When Bowser was out-doing ASM with his fire breathing tricks, Luigi came along and dropped him to the deck. Players were barged into electric fences, in a move I can only imagine would have Sergio Ramos rubbing his hands with glee. Golf, Tennis, and Sluggers are games where you win, but Strikers is a game where you make the other team lose. I've always supported two football teams: Newcastle and Whoever Sunderland Are Playing. Of course, these days Sunderland are so far down the leagues Whoever Sunderland Are Playing tends to be The Red Lion and Bolsover Police Station, but the point still stands. Sunderland got whacked 6-0 on the day we signed Brazilian international Bruno Guimaraes, and I'm still not sure which made me happier. I mean, probably Bruno, but still. Tough call.
The new Strikers needs to keep that mentality, especially with online play. It's never going to be a brutal, nasty affair like heading to Burnley away, but it can't all be the delicate, inoffensive football of Arsenal 2-0 up at home. It's the best Mario sports game because it's the only one where you can make your opponents suffer, and that needs to stay in the latest title.
