Mario Slam Basketball (Nintendo DS)

With Mario Hoops 3-On-3, you`ll use Mario`s magic touch to win b-ball games! There are plenty of basketball games out there, but none with the hands-on control of Mario Hoops 3-on-3. Use the touch screen to get your game on as you exectue tricky dribbles, special passes, and sweet shots-all with strokes and taps of the stylus.

• Includes Square Enix characters: White Mage, Cactuar, Moogle
• White Mage - a character from the first Final Fantasy game, she uses restorative and support magic
• Cactuar - a small mobile cactus, Cactuars are known for high speed and evasiveness.
• Moogle - Essentially a small white teddy bear with a single antenne, Moogles generally serve as merchants and postmen in Final Fantasy games

Before the advent of the PlayStation, Japanese publishers Square Enix and Nintendo used to be the best of friends. But when Square Enix tried to split their games between the PS one and N64, Nintendo was too jealous to share and they ended up falling out – a friendship only renewed in the last few years. There can be few that imagined that one of the first new games to evolve out of the partnership would be a basketball sim featuring both the usual Mushroom Kingdom suspects and Final Fantasy characters (White Mage, Black Mage, Ninja, Cactuar and Moogle). The result is even more bizarre than most Mario sports games, but only slightly less entertaining.

To its credit, the game makes more use of the touch screen than most on the DS, with all the actions bar movement achieved using the stylus (although the basics can be replicated using the face buttons if you want to be boring). Your character dribbles the ball automatically but you can speed them up by tapping the screen and throws are managed simply by drawing the stylus in a straight line. A surprisingly subtle amount of control can be achieved, including several kinds of trick shots and even swapping hands when playing defense. A variety of special courts also complicate things with coins collected along the way adding to your score when shooting. Indeed the whole game works so well that the only real problem is the mechanical enemy artificial intelligence. It’s therefore a real shame that playing multiplayer requires both people to own a cartridge each, although that’s undoubtedly a result of the game’s superb graphics which go well above the call of duty for a simple sports game.
HARRISON DENT