No better place to announce a Mario footy game than in Germany, the country where the world cup took place a few months ago. Mind you, this is no normal football game. No, this is Fighting Football, as Nintendo likes to describe it. This is the game where Nintendo characters let their bad side loose. Bowser puts on his giant claw gloves, Toad drags his metal helmet out of the closet and Mario practises his best mean-face. This is football with iron balls (literally).

Mario Strikers Charged is the follow-up last years Mario Smash Football for the GameCube. The game is being developed by Next Level Games, an expert in this fighting football genre, as you may call them. Both Sega Soccer Slam and Mario Smash Football came from their studio and were received quite well, mostly famous for their multiplayer fun with the single-player side of things taking a back seat. Mario Smash Football was a modest success for Nintendo with over one million copies sold world wide. Reason enough to announce a successor hardly a year after bringing out the first one.

Before Charged was confirmed as a Wii title we wondered how the control system for this game would look. Would it be something cheeky where you would have to move the remote in the direction where you want to shoot? The real controls are a lot less revolutionary, but luckily more practical. Controlling players is still done with the stick on the nunchuck. The remote is here to let you shoot, pass and do goalkeeping. Yes, yes, the fine art of goalkeeping is included in Charged, although only partly in the form of a mini-game. The A button on the remote is for passing and changing players, the B button is used for shooting. Tackling is done by shaking the remote. Together with the rumble feedback it gave us the feeling like we were really smacking down opponents. Great feeling, great feature! The trigger on the nunchuck lets you use items like throwing green shields to take away the ball or dropping the always dangerous bananas.

The goalkeeping inclusion comes in when a player performs a charged shot (aah, that's why…) by holding the B button. A meter pops up and the attacking players have to stop the arrow in the red area. The better he does the harder it gets for the defending player to stop the balls. An animation sequence starts and the defending players are asked if they're ready to stop the ball. This interruption isn't good for the speed of the game but it's understandable. You see, you don't have to aim at the bar during the game, but you do in this particular 'mini-game'. To prevent the defending player from desperately searching for the good aim of the remote, this pause moment is essential.

After the defending player stated he's ready, he gets to defend the shots that randomly pop up on different places on the screen. By moving the hands quickly to the position of the balls he can hold them. Depending on the goalkeeping qualities of the defending player the score can increase with a couple of goals in this sequence. It's a fun little mini-game – the animation sequence may however grow old quickly – and it gives players more control to really do something against a power attack.

There are twelve captains and eight sidekicks to choose from. Each available stadium offers a different kind of gameplay. Thunder Island stadium for example was rated as lethal, which says enough really. On the sides of the field, players could fall off by the wind to eventually be flung back on. For the more conservative player, an ordinary stadium with lots of cheering Nintendo characters is also included.

The biggest improvement for Charged is probably the possibility to play against friends using Nintendo's online system. Of course Nintendo still keeps us in the dark about the details, but what we do know is that online tournaments will be included making it a lot easier than on the DS for us to set-up a Revolution-Europe tournament. For those who rather have their friends/opponents next to them in the room there's the offline mode where up to four players can play. As usual there's the option to play alongside with a friend or in separate teams.

As you probably can tell from the screens, Charged isn't a game that throws away the old gameplay and starts on a blank sheet. Not at all. The GameCube version in a way seems to be ported to the Wii. The graphics seem to be fairly on the same level with a tad more detail. Some new elements, new controls and online play are thrown in and there you have it: Mario Strikers Charged. You don't hear us complain, though. The 3-minutes match of Charged we got to play had good controls, was fast paced, easy to understand and… incredibly fun. And that's what this games main aim is; to enjoy football without knowing the rules or specialist tactics. Accessibility… It seems to be the magic word these days.