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We came away from the event almost dumbstruck by Super Mario Strikers Charged, though. The last panel of the strip is from our first time playing it, where shells and fire rebuffed our attempts to simply intuit its mysteries. Our second time, after Gabriel had been coached in its intricacies and we added GameLife's Chris Kohler to our squad, we couldn't stop playing the ******** thing. We could have added another person, even - you can play four against the machine - but we weren't leaving the couch to find somebody. The basic mechanic involved passing the ball around to build up the eponymous charge on it, which increases its chance of scoring a goal. It's a very basic sort of "hot potato" mechanic that is extremely exciting in its execution. Waggling in this one is fairly light - as a game that wants its sports elements taken seriously, Wii-centric controls happen only when a) you want to physically strike a player, which is done by moving toward the "enemy" and swinging the remote, or b) when you are defending your goal against a special shot, an airborne barrage of goal attempts. I worried about this last one, as the rest of the game is so precise, but it's great - and here's how it works: like a light-gun shooter, you use the goalie's hands to block incoming shots as they approach. The excellent twist is that the goalkeeper is selected from the players on your team - seemingly at random, so you never know who has the responsibility. And since these super shots can score multiple goals, it's a huge Goddamn deal. I'm dying to own it, primarily for co-op play in the game's tournament cups - I don't know if I'll ever even get to the online portion, easily the most elaborate on the platform.

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