 Wow. Look at all of that. Look at this guy here with a brand new studio. Very echo. I apologize. I ordered acoustic foam to hopefully dampen some of this echo, but it hasn't arrived yet. But I'm not gonna wait any longer to make videos. I'm already way too late at making this video. Let's just get to the topic, shall we? I know you're all trying to look at the new... I didn't realize you had so many Switch games. That's gonna be the comment. I knew he had a lot, but that's ridiculous. Don't worry. I feel the same. When I was putting everything on the shelves, I thought everything was going to fit on these four. That was just the Switch, and then I had to buy four more just to put out everything else. I'm just bragging at this point. Let's get to the topic of this video. Nintendo, if you clicked on this, I hope you're still paying attention because this is directed straight at you. And your recent game, Mario Strikers, as well as your other recent sport titles while we're at it. I know what a lot of the comments are going to say. I am not salty with Nintendo in general. That's not why I'm making this video. In fact, if you look online, 95.7% of people I made that statistic up probably agree. Mario Strikers is not worth $60, and Nintendo really aren't putting enough content in their recent Mario sport games. I don't think that's an outlandish hot take for me to say. I think it's just the general consensus of the Internet. So no, I'm not salty. I love Nintendo. In fact, Nintendo Switch Sports that just released, I didn't say a single bad word about it. I just made a video talking about how much I loved the game and how much I enjoyed playing it because at its core, it's just nostalgic fun that I couldn't get enough of. And at least it was $10 cheaper than normal. But Mario Strikers was the full $60 price tag. The big question being, will it have enough content to be worth that $60? The reason why we were worried about that is because we had just gone through Mario Tennis and Mario Golf while Nintendo did try to add a story mode to pump it up with a little bit of extra content and then even supported it with a couple DLC packages later down the line. They still weren't really full of enough content to justify the price. I really didn't want to have that happen with Strikers. Speaking of Mario Strikers battle league, you know what? I'm always in a constant battle striking down day to day Internet hackers. Well, actually, no, because I use express VPN. I never have to deal with Internet hackers ever. Yeah, look, I just moved states. So technically, my actual IP address has officially changed for good. But I still want to be able to change it constantly to my heart's content for a multitude of reasons to start with privacy. Yeah, I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember postcards, but you would put a postcard in the mail and it was just the thing. So anyone that was handling it could just read everything you wrote on it. And that's essentially using the Internet without express VPN because express VPN creates a secure tunnel between your device and the Internet. I put in the postcard in the envelope. It'll help protect you from hackers who are trying to steal your private information and prevent them from gaining access to your passwords, financial details, or even your emails. You might be sat there thinking, I don't care about my privacy. I want the whole world to see everything I do online. All right, good for you. Well, there's something else you might like and that's that express VPN gives you the unrestricted access to the entire Internet. Many websites or apps are blocked or restricted, depending on where you are in the world. I'm sure you've ran into this before or even like on Netflix where you want to watch a show, but it's not on Netflix anymore. Good chances. UK still has Rick and Morty or Modern Family. So just switch that little geolocation and now you're there watching whatever shows you want to watch. You pay for it. Why shouldn't you be able to watch them? And you can get three months for free right now by clicking the link in the description box below or going to expressvpn.com forward slash beat em ups. All right, let's keep going. Out of all the Mario sports games, Strikers was easily one of my favorites, if not my actual favorite. I mean, yeah, the original Mario Strikers had challenge modes where each of the characters had their own specific challenges you could compete in, but that was about as extra as the content got. But then again, the Mario Golf and tennis games didn't used to have a story mode or any extra content either. And then look at the switch titles. Nintendo tried with Mario Golf. There was a full campaign where you play as a me character and then a bunch of Mario bad guys teach you how to be the next best Tiger Woods you can be, except hopefully a little less problematic. And then Mario Tennis's story was actually kind of sick. It had its own overworld and cut scenes where Wario and Waluigi unleash a cursed tennis racket upon the mushroom kingdom. And then you play as Mario having to seal the curse by competing in a bunch of different challenges and boss battles. They really tried. So what were they going to do with Strikers? I was wondering, what extra modes? What would they do with the story? I'll cut to the chase. No, they didn't do, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't, nothing. And actually there's less content because there's not even challenge modes at this time. You have the regular game of soccer, which is about three to four minutes long. And then you have Cup Mode, which is just playing that a bunch of times to see who wins over a bunch of games rather than just one and done. The content just isn't there. And Nintendo, why? You can't keep, well you can. You can do what you want. You're Nintendo and I'll keep buying everything that you make. You can't keep releasing these Mario sport games with lackluster effort. It would be fine even if this Mario Strikers, the core game was incredible, right? Like one of the best things you've ever played. And no matter how many times you dive in and you play that three minute mode, it's just as fun as it was the time before. That would be fine. But even that comes with its own flaws. Like when you go to play online, you can play with another friend online, just one, if you want to go in and play co-op. And that's it. There is a way to do four player online since there's four characters. But for some reason, Nintendo still can't figure out how gamers actually play games online. This video I'm making right now feels very much like a 2006 rant video. I literally finished sitting everything up yesterday. I was like, I could spend a couple extra days. I could write a script. I could really flesh out my ideas. Or I could kind of just half bake the video and throw something together so that people that are waiting for content can actually get something. Then I realized that's actually kind of perfect because that's exactly what Nintendo did with Mario Strikers. But if you want to play with four players online, you need two separate places. This isn't even, this is hard to explain. Two people have to play locally and connect their switches together, then pair up online with another group of two people doing the same thing. Because we're still in 1995 with Nintendo online. You have to add people on the Switch friend list, then make a lobby, and then they have to manually search for your lobby to get in. It was the same in Nintendo Switch sports. This just seems to be Nintendo's way of doing things. There are a ton of games on Switch that have voice communication within the game itself, friend invite systems. It just doesn't make any sense that Nintendo refuses to play along with any of the current day online features. Especially now when they have a pretty expensive online premium system getting way, way, way off base here. Let's pull it back and talk about the game. This is the last time I'm going to say it. The game has no content. You can pick it up. You can play the base game for a couple hours and an hour. In fact, technically for four minutes, you can play this game and experience everything the game has to offer. Nintendo, I don't think you should go down the route of putting out something that's bare bones minimum and then relying on DLC updates to fix it later like what Halo and Microsoft are doing. I know Mario Golf had a couple of DLC packages, but it really didn't add that much. By then we were all over the game anyway. It's crazy to me that they are the same company that will spend five, six, seven years making a Zelda until it's perfect and delaying it at all costs because they know that Zelda and Metroid and Mario needs to be perfect. But with their sport games, they literally have the opposite sentiment. Just get it out there and we'll just DLC update it later, which they're not good at. I guess Nintendo make enough money from these sport games for this not to be a problem. Drikers sales haven't exactly been incredible. And right now as I stand here on Twitch, it's got 500 viewers right now. It is tied with American truck simulator for views on Twitch. That's pretty telling. It's a sports game. It's perfect for Twitch. I hope I've made my point on the content really quickly. I'm going to talk about the game itself. Just like in my cyberpunk review, I trashed on the game and talked about in specific detail why the game at its core was bad. And then I didn't talk about all the glitches until right at the end of the video because I didn't want people to get confused between the glitches making the game bad and the game just being bad. So I don't want to make this the focus because I think it's more important that we focus on the fact that the content isn't there. And that's why this game is bad because this part is just my opinion. And my opinion is that the game itself is actually pretty, pretty mediocre, pretty bad. Not bad. Okay. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. I take it back. I take it back. I take it back. The first thing I'm going to say is on launch day, I posted a clip on Twitter of me uninstalling the game. People did not like that. A lot of people thought that I was uninstalling it because I was just bad at the game. That's not the case. I sat there and I went through all the tutorials on stream. And even in the tutorials, I was not having a good time. And then I jumped into some online games and I won some and I lost some. But at the end of the day, even when I was winning, I wasn't having fun. And for me, even when I'm losing in a game, I should be having fun. When I play Mario Party for 40 minutes with my friends and then I lose at the end because I didn't get enough stars, I guarantee you I had an amazing time playing that game regardless of the outcome. A good game should be good even if you're losing. So when people say you're just bad at it, that's why you hate it. That is a terrible argument because even if I was bad at it, if the game was good and fun, I'd be having fun. You can still enjoy the game just because I don't like it doesn't mean that you can't like it. So it has 74 on Metacritic despite the fact that someone, the Daily Star gave it a 10 out of 10. They gave it a 100. I think we can all laugh at that, right? This game is perfect. This game has nothing wrong with it. I'm never trusting Daily Star with anything. But the review I find interesting was actually the very last one. GameRadar gave it a 50 and I would agree with that. I actually already had like an average five out of 10 score in my mind, but their review is perfect. Though occasionally likable and basically inoffensive, which is not what you want to hear about anything. Let's say back in my high school days, right? I was dating a girl and I was going to break up and I started by saying, look, although you're occasionally likable and basically inoffensive, that's not a compliment. Mario Strikers Battle League struggles to build on its ideas and ends up feeling pretty undercooked as an experience. Yep. That's exactly it. I loved Mario Strikers on GameCube. It was a blast 15 years ago. They did not build upon or improve the core formula at all. It's still just Mario characters on the battlefield, tackling, passing and shooting. And while the animations are pretty sick, once you've seen Donkey Kong's finisher animation three times in a match, you're just going to want to start skipping. And thankfully, all the animations can be skipped and are skipped by anyone you play online. You will never see an animation. There's not really much to say about the gameplay. Some people have tried to say it's complex. I think the most complex thing about it is just getting a hang of what the heck is going on at any given time. I said on my podcast, you know, like the cup game where there's like five cups and a little ball and then they like, they put a cup on a ball and like, follow the ball and they start shuffling all the cups around and you're like, you're trying to track them and then they stop and you go that one and then and it's not there. That's literally me trying to follow the ball and Mario Strikers Battle League. I got no idea what's going on. It looks to me like a mini game in Mario Party. It's just a little miniature battlefield with these big giant Mario characters running around. You're supposed to time kick the ball to each other, but the distance between characters are like a nanosecond. And when you're passing to yourself, that's not too bad. But when you're playing online, you not only have to be constantly expecting a pass, but on top of that, the lag is pretty brutal online. Sometimes you'll get into decent matches that aren't too bad, but some are like seconds of lag. Bob even posted a clip to Twitter of him pressing A a few times, then letting go and doing something else. And then after a few seconds, the input lag catched up and his character Waluigi kicked the ball yet again, that goes into Nintendo's online system being kind of trash. And for anyone saying it's not that hard to see, you're just getting really old because you're like over 30 and a boomer. Yes, that's true. That is true. I am struggling a lot with my cognitive abilities as I grow old. But like one of the only options in the settings menu is to turn on assist mode so that you can see things easier because at any given time, you'll be number like one, two, five or eight. And when you pick a team, it makes you all the same color already. So I've got a red one above my head. I'm wearing a red Guernsey as Luigi. Everyone else is red. My buddy has a red number. And I'm supposed to know what character I am and who I am while also trying to follow the ball and the other characters who are just constantly tackling and throwing endless items at me. OJ Essence put this best when he said it's not a soccer game. It's a fighting game. OJ loves the game. So that was actually a comment in the game's favor, but that's kind of my problem with the game. No offense because OJ is a great friend of mine. Maybe the fact that it's out of chaos is what makes it fun. But for me, it's just too hard to track what's happening. And even when I'm scoring goals, I really just feel like the RNG was in my favor because boom, boom has no clue how to be a goalie. He'll have shots hit him right on his shoulder and he'll darier it and just decide to write as the ball goes by. That's if it's my boom, boom because the other player's boom, boom is always the kind of guy that would just fall on, save the president, dive no matter where the ball is going. The whole experience to me is just very frustrating. If you're still gonna sit there and say, just get good at the game and you'll like it more. I wish I could get better. I've got tutorials, which no one likes doing, and then I've got the game. That's all I got. I can't play online because I'm just going to get smoked repeatedly and that's not fun, so I can't learn there. And then the offline mode is just the same thing as the online, but with NPCs. What I'm saying is if there was a story mode to play through or even a challenge mode or something that ramped up in difficulty or really anything that Mario Tennis had, it would at least give me an opportunity to play something that's fun that feels like it has progression while I learn how to get better at the game rather than my only option being just to get smoked online. Also, I was pretty early at posting that tweet, uninstalling it, and uninstalling it is mostly a meme. The only reason I posted it was to get a reaction, of course. People don't even have the game yet. I got it early and they were telling me my opinion on the game they haven't played was wrong. And then once the game came out, the comments on that post started to change pretty drastically. It's not just me. Usually when a game comes out and I don't like it and I have nothing good to say, I don't make the video. I've told you guys that so many times. The reason why I'm making this video is because I am pretty sick of these sport games not getting the love and care that they deserve and $60 for a bare bones game is not something we would let any other company get away with. Last of us getting remade caused the internet to go into a fury. That naughty dog would dare to charge $70 for that. But Nintendo does the exact same thing. Essentially charges $60 and releases it. And you have people defending that. Then the game dies off in a few days. Then no one talks about it anymore until it gets a DLC. And then they talk about it for like a day. And then the game is gone. And that Mario Strikers that we all fought for that we all wanted so badly. This is that. To me, that's super sad. I don't think there's anything we could do about it. We can't change it. Everyone's either bought the game or not bought the game. Maybe Nintendo will prove me wrong and release. I don't even know what kind of DLC you would need. Tons of extra modes, a story mode, a whole new game, essentially, for free to make it worth the price. If other companies can't get away with it, why does Nintendo always get away with it? Nintendo treat the sport games like you treat the Zelda games and they would be incredible. That's just my thoughts on the game. I appreciate you and I love you. Like the video, subscribe. I will be going back to scripted content as well as random stuff that I make and the, you know, whatever it is I usually do on this channel. Let me just get in the groove and feel it out. And I hope in the meantime this video was sufficient for you guys. I wanted to say something about the game. So that was what was in my heart.