Mario Sports Superstars

Nintendo has a long tradition of sending its mascots straight from adventures onto the sports field. Mario Sports Superstars takes this idea to the extreme: instead of a single discipline, it crams five different sports into a single title, making it a sort of festive mix for the whole family and for players on the go with the Nintendo 3DS.

The lineup is genuinely broad. Football, tennis, baseball, golf and horse racing, each discipline with its own rules, controls and pace. Mario's cast of characters, from Luigi through Peach and Yoshi to Bowser and Donkey Kong, appears across all the sports, so you can take your favorite hero onto the pitch as well as the green. The game aims for accessibility: the rules are easy to grasp, yet each discipline hides enough tactics to keep you entertained for the long haul.

A particularly interesting element is horse racing, where caring for your own horse, feeding and stroking it, feels closer to a light simulation than pure arcade. This discipline lends the otherwise brisk sports package a surprisingly calmer dimension. Football and baseball, by contrast, bank on team action, while tennis and golf stay faithful to the tried-and-tested Nintendo recipes that series like Mario Tennis and Mario Golf have honed over the years.

In terms of development, the game follows a long line of Mario sports titles that Nintendo has been releasing practically since the days of the Nintendo 64. Merging five distinct sports into a single title meant balancing the fun and depth of each one so that none felt like a hastily thrown-in side dish. The game also supported local and online matches for players who wanted to test their skills against others.

Culturally, Mario Sports Superstars fits neatly into the proven concept of Mario party games designed to appeal to a broad family audience. It isn't a title that breaks records for depth in any individual discipline, but as a five-pack of accessible sporting fun featuring the best-known mascots in the gaming world, it fulfills its purpose without a hitch.

Why play: Five sports in one with the whole Mario crew, ideal for family-friendly, accessible fun on the 3DS, where everyone can find their favorite discipline.