Mario e esportes não é novidade, mas Mario e basquete é. E curiosamente, desenvolvido pela...SquareEnix.

Ao invés de assumir a série Mario & Luigi, ou prosseguir com um novo Mario RPG, a parceria Nintendo/Square desenvolveu o primeiro e até então único jogo de basquete com o bigodudo.

O jogo é único, com mecânicas próprias e desenvolvidas com a tela de toque em mente. Tanto é que, tirando a movimentação, tudo é feito por meio de interação com a tela de baixo, usando a stylus para fazer gestos.

Tal qual Mario Strikers Charged, jogo de futebol com Mario, o sistema de pontuação difere do esporte original, com pontos sendo compostos do tipo de lançamento feito e a quantidade de moedas coletadas antes do lançamento.

Sem conexão online, a jogatina multiplayer fica restrita a encontros locais, outro ponto negativo pro jogo.

We all know about it, and we all see it. It's obvious. Nobody ever wants to admit it, but it's there.

People on this subreddit hate Kobe Bryant. The first question to ask: why? Why do you all hate him? The obvious answer: you didn't watch him in his prime.

Likely explanation: I know that most of you are around 14 or 15 years old. That means you only got into basketball in the last couple years. So you never watched Kobe in his prime.

And because you didn't watch him in his prime, you try to compensate for that by diving into stat sheets and analyzing box scores. But here's the thing: basketball isn't played on Excel spreadsheets. The moment somebody brings up "true shooting percentage" or "win shares" I know they know nothing about basketball. Kobe's game cannot be encapsulated by one stat. He's the second greatest guard ever, and one of the 5 best players to ever play the game.

So when I hear somebody say that LeBron is better than Kobe, I laugh, because I know that anybody who watched Kobe in his prime wouldn't think that. Unlike you guys, I have watched basketball for a significant amount of time, so I know that Kobe is better.

You might be jealous of Kobe's new contract, or jealous of his status as the greatest scorer in NBA history, or whatever. Unless you're a Bulls fan who watched basketball in the 90s, or a Lakers fan who watched basketball in the 2010s, you don't know what real, cold-blooded, killer instinct, will-to-win basketball looks like. And there's nothing wrong with that. This sub would make you think that Kobe isn't even a top 100 player ever.

So don't go spouting bullshit about players you didn't watch. Talk about your "greats" like LeBron, The Best Player in the World™, but leave the Kobe talk to the adults. Fair?

Like Mario Baseball and Strikers, which released around the same time, Mario Hoops is surprisingly good. I don't know why a Mario basketball game is fun, but it is. Lots of content in this one, the only issue is the repetitive nature of the tournament mode, which may get boring if matches are played within a short period of time. The gameplay doesn't require very much skill beyond movement and shooting, so it's not exactly a game I would play for very long. Still, not bad for a DS Mario sports game.