Super Mario Strikers

Mario battles his rivals on the pitch for the Super Bowser Cup!

EU release: 18th November 2005
NA release: 5th December 2005
JP release: 11th January 2006
Developer: Next Level Games
Publisher: Nintendo
NGC Magazine Score: 69%
Mods Used: None

Super Mario Strikers – or Mario Smash Football – is the start of Next Level Games’ journey to becoming a Nintendo first party developer. As they were made up of ex-Black Box staff that worked on the enjoyable Sega Soccer Slam, a Mario Football game was the perfect start to this journey, adapting chaotic, violent football into the Mario world.

And the comic style violence hasn’t been removed, as Mario and Co can tackle each other with no punishment, even shoving beloved characters into the electrified edges of the pitch. One disappointment is that there’s only one main character per team (Mario Baseball featured plenty of characters for choosing your own team), so the others are just random Toads, Shy Guys or Birdos.

One reason for this is the special shot, which only the main character can do. You charge it up, complete a little time-based minigame (like a bar from a golf game) and it produces a powerful shot. Most of the time, this doesn’t seem any more likely to lead to a goal than a standard shot, but once you get the timings right and hit the perfect spots, then you’ll perform an extra powerful shot, which will guarantee a goal, and count for two.

The weakness of this is that, once you’ve mastered the timings, you just need to reach the opponent’s half and pull this off. There’s no limit to how much you can do it, no building up towards it, so it kind of destroys the game as it’s just both players pulling off this special move. Until you reach this point, the game is a ton of fun, with items and the occasional Bowser attack mixing things up. That said, I do think the sequel on Wii improved things a lot.

Fun

So what we’ve got is Sega Soccer Slam with some Nintendo characters and power-ups hastily thrown in. Nintendo love? It’s more of a Nintendo wet kiss. This is simply not good enough.
Tom East, NGC Magazine #113

Remake or remaster?

A collection would be nice.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to buy Super Mario Strikers, but it is available on Nintendo Switch Online.