Mario Sports Mix Impressions: Hockey

So being the (field) hockey superstar that I am, when I jammed the Mario Mix disc into my Wii’s slot I went straight to Hockey. Over the next 4 days I’ll try out the other sports and give impressions of them but all I’ll say right now is that if the rest of the game is anything like hockey, then Mario Sports Mix has forever ruined Mario’s good sportsman-like reputation. Since I know some of you don’t click the ‘continue reading’ button on our site, this picture which I’ll leave on the frontpage shows everything wrong with hockey in Mario Sports Mix. The photo was taken on my iPhone because that’s the only image quality you weak scumbags deserve.

That’s right, I won my very first tournament game 42 goals to 1. Hockey features absolutely no depth whatsoever. You win the face off, skate forward a bit and then shake your wrist, scoring almost every single time. If you feel like mucking around a bit you can pass with the A button or change player with the C button. If you accidentally rolled (the characters are clearly wearing rollerblades) over an item box, perhaps because your wrist had temporarily seized up and you couldn’t shoot, then you can press B to use an item. I should point out that you can only use an item if you don’t have the puck, an extremely rare occasion.

There’s different skating rinks to play on, but they’re all stupid. Two that I played on had the terrible variation of removing the game’s already inept Shyguy goal keeper and replacing him with three orange cones. At first these seem to dramatically hamper your scoring efficiency until you realise you can just skate around them. Another rink would periodically have a train plough through the middle of the rink. This sounds exciting except that you score so quickly the train almost never has the opportunity to appear, when it does though it knocks out the goalie, almost mocking your inability to score in 15 seconds of playtime. And that’s the thing, you spend more time watching Yoshi or whoever do his little victory dance than playing, making the 2 and a half minute periods drag out for potentially hours.

In the picture above, the Mushroom Tournament Final I decided to just let the AI do it’s own thing in the second period t see if it would fight back. As you can see, it didn’t. In fact at one point I even had the puck, despite not doing a thing. I don’t think anyone who worked on this game actually knew anything about hockey, I mean, second period, should be one more to go right? NOT IN MARIO SPORTS MIX and honestly, thank god there isn’t a third because this game is just dreadful.

Donkey Kong can comfortably score from the face off, immediately after the face off. Fuck this.