For all of the touted innovation of the Wii's motion sensing controller, Nintendo has not used the console to rewrite its IP library. With the notable exception of the Wii-series of games (Wii Sports, Wii Play, Wii Fit and the like) most of Nintendo's primary Wii releases have simply been reincarnations of their most popular franchises. While games like Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess are popular – some would even argue excellent – titles, their roots still go back more than 20 years.
With incarnations of most of Nintendo's major franchises already out of the way, secondary and tertiary IPs will start coming into play, and yes, that means the various Mario sports games. Mario Strikers Charged already released last year and was a moderate hit. Now it's time for America's pastime to get the Mario treatment with Mario Super Sluggers. We take a closer look at the game's early success and its faults.
Good enough to qualify as a 'hit'
According to the NPD, Mario Super Sluggers was the eleventh best selling game for the August period. The game was the fifth best selling title on the Wii during the same period. Overall, Mario Super Sluggers sold over 111,000 copies; not bad considering its late August release.
A good means of comparison for Mario Super Sluggers is the other Mario sports title on the Wii: Mario Strikers Charged. As of March 2008, that title has sold over 1.77 million copies worldwide favorably comparing to the game's prequel, the late generation GCN game Super Mario Strikers, which sold roughly a million copies in the U.S. It remains to be seen whether Mario Super Sluggers will best the success of Mario Superstar Baseball, its own GCN predecessor, which sold well enough to be added to Nintendo's "Player's Choice" label.
So many obscure Mario characters, your head will spin.
While one might think that the main single player mode for Mario Super Sluggers deals with baseball, that's actually something of a tertiary component to the Challenge Mode. Players make their way around an over-world map, playing various mini-games and fulfilling various tasks in order to unlock new characters and items. Eventually, players challenge Bowser Jr. and Bowser and can then consider the mode "beaten."
After players beat the roughly five-hour Challenge Mode, the Exhibition Mode will no doubt occupy most of their time, as it allows them to simply play straight up baseball games with three of their friends. Unfortunately, the mode offers no way to save team configurations, play online or even track wins and losses over a season. The inclusion of various ballparks' themed mini-games didn't make up for the lack of the above features in many players' minds.
Above gameplay modes aside, many players considered the game's motion sensing controls to be the most disappointing aspect of Mario Super Sluggers. As one could expect, players can use the Wii Remote to pitch and hit, but the actual motion-sensing is highly imprecise; players can vaguely waggle to accomplish either task. Considering this does not even best the baseball game in Wii Sports, many players were let down by Mario Super Sluggers, which received an average 70 percent on GameRankings.com.
"As a Mario game, Mario Super Sluggers feels kind of cheap; as a baseball game, it fails to capture the finer points that make the sport interesting in the first place," reads Ryan Davis' two-out-of-five review on Giant Bomb. "Its accessibility is probably Mario Super Sluggers' most well-realized characteristic, but what you're getting access to simply isn't much fun."
Swing batter!
Mario Super Sluggers had a TV ad campaign that featured kids in a class communicate using baseball signals that end up getting noticed by a teacher who responds in kind; a cute ad, we have to admit. There was also a special launch event at the Nintendo World Store, where gamers could talk to the voice of Mario himself, Charles Martinet. Finally, Nintendo launched a semi-viral campaign for Mario Super Sluggers with collectible online cards at mariosupersluggerscards.com where players could collect digital cards for all 41 characters in the game.
Frankly, GameDaily BIZ considers games like Mario Super Sluggers to be discouraging – despite coming a year later, it is more similar to its GCN predecessor than Mario Strikers Charged and is more disappointing in its implementation of motion sensing controls. While the merits of these sorts of releases could be debated, since no doubt many Wii owners missed Mario Superstar Baseball the first time around, this sort of double dipping with GameCube games shouldn't be acceptable at this point for the Wii. Nintendo promised true innovation with the Wii, but gamers will start to more readily and more vocally call them out on that vow with rereleases like this.
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