Mario Hoops 3-On-3 Preview

You have different modes of play, with the first one being of course tournament mode. You have 4 main cups being the same ones you see in every Mario game- Mushroom, Flower, Star and Rainbow. Each one of them has different basketball courts. With some of them offering different gameplay mecanics. For example, in one you have to shoot the ball in a Piranha plant’s mouth, or in another stage you will play underwater so you move slower. One stage I liked a lot was in the mansion from Luigi’s Mansion as ghosts could grab the ball as you’d throw it. Of course there are others, but what would be the point of spoiling it all to you? This is a preview after all! But anyway, the goal in tournament mode is to win of course, and depending how you perform you will get the bronze, silver or gold cup instead. I should also state that by finishing the game on easy, you unlock hard, and after finishing hard you unlock an even harder mode of play. Each cup consists of 3 matches, while the 4th one has an additional stage, so it doesn’t take too much time to complete.

Besides that you can just play a single game against the cpu, or you can also play mini games. They are really simple though and once you’ve tried them once you probably won’t go back. The goal in those is to get hold of 100 coins and then cross the finish line. You have 3 different ones, which you can unlock by beating the game’s time. I played the mini games for roughly 30 minutes and haven’t played them since so that shows you how much “fun” they are.

There is also a multiplayer mode, but that is where I was the most disappointed with this game. They at least included one, but honestly, it really sucks! You can play against your friends in mini games, but you can’t even play real games! What’s the point of adding a multiplayer mode if you can’t play the main game with your friends, especially since the mini games are so bad! And if you’ve been following the development of this game closely, you should also remember that it was supposed to include standard multiplayer modes, but also wifi play. Multiplayer is the reason you keep playing a game like this one once you’ve unlocked everything, and without any decent multiplayer modes, it gets old really fast!

And one last point I’d like to add is that the game’s AI is incredibly good! This is the kind of game that made me swear and scream at my DS thinking the cpu was cheating! I played on easy and thought it was too simple, but once you get to hard, the difficulty level increases so much that at points I would just put my DS away as it became nearly impossible at times, as if the game’s AI was doing everything perfectly and performing moves I could only dream of doing myself. Really, because this game offers so many possibilities, it manages to pull them all at once in game and unless you practice a lot with the title, you will have a hard time finishing the game 100%.

While I was really excited at first when I got the game, one week later, I am already thinking about putting it aside and getting something else. I’ve unlocked most of the fun stuff and nothing has me interested in this title anymore. It’s nice of SquareEnix to have added a Final Fantasy stage as well as several characters like the mages and also Moogles, but they just change the look of the game itself, not the way it plays. We’ll see what my opinion of the game is one month from now, but right now I feel this game is average at best. Some people might find it really fun, but I wish Camelot was still working with Nintendo and had developed this game since I feel it would have been much better.