What an athlete Mario must be. Despite his podgy, rather unfit appearance he regularly spends countless hours bouncing off walls and enemies, zooming around numerous bizarre circuits in go-karts, progressing through his own tennis tournament, playing indoor footy, hitting home runs in baseball and walking around a selection of golf courses. If I could manage at least three of the six without collapsing in a miserable heap I would be more than happy, but the fat Italian plumber has gone one better and included yet another sport in his armoury.

Mario Slam Basketball sees the Mushroom Kingdom crew returning for some three-on-three slam-dunking action, making use of the touch screen features that the DS offers to bring a hugely different slant on the sport. Gone are the huge indoor arenas, overpaid superstars and bouncy cheerleaders (you can’t have it all, I guess), in are courts on beaches, a crew of Nintendo’s finest gaming icons and some rather strange scoring rules.

Before you start dribbling and alley-ooping your way through the game there’s a number of different control facets to bend your noodle around, and as with most Mario Sports titles what seems initially to be a rather complicated collection of instructions actually ends up all seeping in and becoming intuitive before too long. The basic upshot is that you tap the stylus on the screen in the direction you’re running to maximise your speed, sweep up on the screen to release a shot or a dunk and sweep down to tackle an opponent.

A rather clever tutorial mode is available for first-timers, offering a number of practice events with break down the controls and rules into simple, bite size chunks. Learning to dribble the ball in a certain direction to avoid getting it stolen off you or how to charge up a power shot are all utterly crucial for long-term success, although in initial stages you’ll end up winning your matches reasonably easily. The controls themselves are mostly tight and responsive during training, but take them out on court in the exhibition or tourney modes and you’ll soon come to realise that things don’t transfer quite as well.

The main problem is that basketball is a sport that requires some sharp timing, even when it’s been dipped in Mario paint. Whilst sweeping your stylus in the direction of a team mate mostly sends the ball in their direction, occasionally your player will fail to release the ball at all and in the resulting moment of delay the ball will be stolen from you, especially when playing the more difficult tournaments. Likewise, holding the L button when not in possession and sweeping it towards a teammate should in theory allow you to choose which member of your team you are controlling, but in reality this often fails to work properly and doesn’t change player at all, and tapping L to take control of whichever player is closest to the ball at the time is hardly any more reliable either.

Other than this, the action is surprisingly enjoyable and full of madcap fun. Item boxes appear at random locations on the court and bouncing the ball on them will add coins to your banked total, which is added to the total of your next basket and given to you as points. Thus, Slam Basketball takes the focus away from the end-to-end nature of real basketball and focuses the player on dribbling around the court with no fear of a backcourt violation and collecting as many coins as he possibly can before chucking the ball into the basket.

To make things slightly trickier, the team not in possession can get power-ups from running over the same item boxes which can be used to regain control of the ball. A whole range of familiar weapons such as red and green shells, stars, lightning bolts and mushrooms spring forth, offering plenty of ways to get the ball back. Whilst getting hit with a red shell mere moments before unleashing a huge point-scoring dunk might feel a bit cheap on occasion, the knowledge that you can do exactly the same to your opponents will save you from screaming too hard at your DS.

Away from the court, Slam Basketball once more lays one up and then sees the resulting dunk rebound off the rim. There’s practice, tournament, exhibition, multiplayer and… that’s it. Practice mode hosts the aforementioned tutorial section as well as an option to learn each player’s special shot, which are unleashed by tapping certain points on the screen in rhythm. There’s also a number of challenges where you must collect a certain amount of coins in as quick a time as possible, but this offers very little variety despite being set on a number of courts and once you’ve bested the preset scores on each you’ll rarely venture back.

Tournament and Exhibition offer pretty much what you’d expect; the former sees the player progress through a number of increasingly difficult championships with their own handpicked team of three. To give Nintendo their dues the learning curve is actually very much in tune, with initial stages offering just enough difficulty for players to learn their craft in a competitive environment before ramping up the opposition. Completing each tournament will unlock a new player as well as unlockables such as new ball colours and outfits for existing characters.

Also locked well within the game are a selection of Final Fantasy characters which you can unlock and use, although without spoiling things I would recommend you don’t get your hopes up about seeing any specific favourite characters from any of the games. This in itself brings up another problem: the Final Fantasy characters are immensely good. So good, in fact, that picking any 3 of them for your team will see you breezing past even the trickiest of opponents with barely anything to worry yourself.

Overall, Slam Basketball is an interesting if lightweight offering. Occasionally blighted by control issues and with a rather unbalanced set of players which can be unlocked, things are not quite as good as perhaps they could have been and it’s without doubt that the game is not one of Mario’s finer sporting outings. That being said, there is still plenty of fun to be had and as long as you’re not too much of a stickler for NBA authenticity then you could do a lot worse.