We’ve started feeling a little sorry for our office Wii, you know. As the past month or so has ebbed slowly into the record books our happy Xbox 360 has been enjoying the constant electrical surge of use, whilst even the lumbering PS3 has been getting some new-kid-at-school attention despite the drastically varying quality of the opening batch of titles. All the while, the little Wii has sat there sulking, only being used for sporadic jousts on Wii Sports. It’s not that the thing lacks decent games; the problem is that it lacks enough of them to mean that some titles that would have otherwise been seen as rather… well, plain, are getting some time in the sun.

Quite where Mario Strikers: Charged Football was going to fit into all this was not quite so clear to me when I dusted off the disc slot on our machine and fed it the Mario Strikers disc. I’ve had plenty of dabbling with Mario sports titles to date, with some of my rounds on the Nintendo 64 version of golf passing down into family folklore and my antics on Mario Kart DS still ringing loudly in a bunch of defeated friends’ ears. They’re the ideal kind of game for the hour-long session before or after the pub, or to slot in nicely in the middle of an epic weekend of progression through an RPG. ‘Pick-up and play’ is the motto to be had here, and even the more average titles (yes, I’m looking at you, Mario Slam Basketball) have got a certain charm to them that caters for repeat plays.

Charged Football is, as some of you more astute types may have guessed, pretty much a full-on sequel to 2002’s Mario Smash Football, offering a selection of Nintendo’s finest Mario-based characters to use as team captains and a selection of themed pitches for matches to take place upon. The action is focused into one period of three minutes, during which the rather obvious aim is to score more goals than your opposing team. Squads are formed with one ‘major’ character – your Yoshis, your Luigis, your Marios etc – as the captain, and a supporting cast of three outfield players made up of a selection of the more minor fellows, such as Dry Bones, Toad or Birdo. Each team also has a standard keeper in the form of Donkey Kong’s annoying croc-like foes Kritters, so it all boils down to a five-a-side type of thing. Players have certain attacking or defensive attributes that allow team selection to be a slightly tactical matter, and picking a well-balanced team will most definitely be of assistance when things start getting tough.

Not that this is in any way comparable with the usual five-a-side antics you might play (or become suddenly injured to avoid) at your local sports centre with your work colleagues. During the various matches you’ll play you will get used to slamming your opponents into electric fences or off the edge of a teetering pitch floating in the sky. You’ll not think twice at seeing Koopa Trooper turn the ball into a large steel shell and fire it at the opposition ‘keeper, or a string of epic passes being ended with a rather spectacular bicycle kick into the top corner of the net. Everything about Mario Strikers has been given that grin-inducing and vastly over-the-top Nintendo spin, and its all the better for it.

It’s not quite as simple as running around the pitch and knocking the pigskin into the onion bag, of course. Control over your players is handled by the nunchuck and is pleasingly tight, allowing for all sorts of quick twists and turns. Running with the ball might get you somewhere in the lower levels of the game, but as soon as you start playing against teams with a little more oomph you’re going to need to start knocking the ball about as if it were on a pinball table, which is easily achieved via a simple tap of the A button on the Wii-mote. Add into this the Z button performing shots and the flicking of the remote being your primary method of retrieving the ball and you have your basic control scheme, with nuances and button combinations offering plenty of special tricks to use to swing the match in your favour, such as the appearance of red, green and blue shells, banana skins and other such items to get possession back. There’s also a number of moves to make the most of the ball once you get it.

The most obvious of these is the Mega Strike, which comes in a number of forms. Should you hold down the Z button for long enough with one of your backup crew of players they will unleash some sort of themed special trick shot, varying from the Koopa Trooper steel shell mentioned above to Birdo’s special suction shot. Each gives the ball a firm whack, and unleashing one usually leads to a scoring opportunity at the least. If you feel the need for more of a team effort, chaining consecutive passes around will charge the football (hence the subtitle) through three stages, with initial red being relatively weak and the latter white stage being pretty much unstoppable if smacked toward the keeper. Thus, you’re left with two pretty different styles of play to utilise, and mastering both will stand you in good stead.

The main special move, however, is the Mega Strike that is triggered when you hold the Z button down as your team captain, and it’s this move that arguably unbalances the game slightly. Performing the move will see a sliding bar appear on the screen similar to old-school golf games, with the player clicking once to set the number of shots the captain will take, and once again to set the accuracy. Having done this, the relevant number of shots are fired at the opposition ‘keeper, with a maximum of six if you’re spot-on. This in effect means that you can overturn a five-goal deficit in one move, which can get a little frustrating, especially in multiplayer modes. In single player modes the move becomes more difficult to slot into proceedings with the ever-increasing amount of pressure from opponent defenders, and to give it its dues the balancing of hanging on until the bar ticks up more shots with wanting to get the move performed and on the scoresheet becomes rather tense, so it’s not all bad. Still, with the nature of the game going towards making scoring a tricky proposition, being able to pick half a dozen in one go still seems a little too much.

Speaking of game modes, there’s a smattering on offer to delve into. Domination Mode sounds rather fancy but actually ends up being the bog-standard exhibition mode, offering you the chance to battle against another team in a series of games, the length of which you can decide for yourself. The main ‘showcase’ mode is certainly the Road to the Striker Cup, which works as most classic Mario sports title ladder modes have in the past. Starting at the lowly Fire Cup, your task is to form a squad and take then through a number of tournaments to eventually get them to the Striker Cup. Each tournament increases in number of teams participating and difficulty, and playing your way through the group stages to get through to the knockout phase becomes increasingly fraught. Persevering will see you unlocking new captains and arenas for use in Domination Mode, so the fruits of your labour do taste sweet once achieved.

Other than this, there’s a Scenario Mode to work your way through. This offers a dozen challenges where the odds are stacked against you to varying degrees, with initial efforts being somewhat modest such as winning a game from 2-0 down with a man missing. The difficulty does ramp itself through the roof about midway through, and by the latter stages you’ll need to be knocking in six goals against a hellishly difficult team in order to complete the challenge and get the unlockable game cheats as your reward. It’s fair to say that the single player aspect of Mario Strikers is enjoyable while it lasts, but with only three modes on offer it will take a staunch player a couple of days maximum to work their way through and you’ll soon be focusing mainly on the multiplayer options for fun.

It’s with this title that Nintendo have decided to offer the first slice of online gaming with the Wii, and after much testing it’s safe to say that the experiment has worked beautifully. Logging on is as simple a matter as clicking on the menu icon, and once done you are presented with the choice of friendly matches or series or ranked equivalents. You are also handily given the option to hook up with people on your friend list who happen to be online at the same time, though if you’re not that lucky finding an opponent is easier than falling off a bike. Clicking on your selection of friendly or ranked will sit you in the lobby whilst it searches for players of a similar skill level to yourself (this being set by number of wins and losses in ranked games), and once an opponent is assigned you’re off and away.

It’s remarkably smooth, too. Lag only rarely rears its ugly head, and given that we’ve been playing on a pretty busy wireless connection that can only auger well for future titles. Football is a tricky sport to get right when it comes to online gaming as Konami would admit with their Pro Evo series, and although Mario Strikers benefits from not needing quite the same amount of split-second timing it still copes beautifully well with online play, never once feeling as if it’s not responding to what you’re doing. The fact that you’re never short of potential opponents even when on your own at home extends the lifespan of the game vastly, and chances are that the popularity of the online league ladder will see people playing the game well past this Christmas period and beyond.

You can’t argue with that, either. This isn’t just an average Mario sport title filling in the huge void in worthwhile Wii releases – if anything, it’s probably the best reason to invest in the hardware that consumers have had since the launch hoo-hah died down. If over-the-top sports titles are your bag then it goes without saying that this is going to be your slice of halftime orange, and even if you’re not particularly a fan of real football you’ll have a hard time not enjoying the shortened periods of almost rule-free mayhem the game chucks at you. The single player modes might be a tad light on the ground, sure, and the captain Mega Strike may give players the chance to knock in too many goals at once, but with a great online mode added into the mix and the classic chunky colourful presentation and kooky Nintendo songs, keeping a smile off your face is insanely difficult. If you've starved your Wii in recent months, feeding it this will help it forgive and forget.