Along with adventure and RPG's, sport has always been a popular video game genre, mainly because so many categories derive from it. These inlcude basketball, baseball, football and soccer. And of these categories, you'll never lack the wacky characters that make a party out of the game...

We've all seen what Nintendo can do to your regular tennis match or the cart race you've seen at your local fair. But will they stop there? Oh no, heck no, Nintendo is far from done. Two new sport games are right on the horizon, Super Mario Strikers and Mario Superstar Baseball, but today we'll focus on Super Mario Strikers, Nintendo's new soccer game for the Nintendo GameCube announced and showed at this year's E3.

For all those who aren't very soccer-savvy, this is your lucky day, as I'll be going over the main things you should know about this popular sport. The main objective of the game is to score a goal by sending the ball inside your opponents goal. There are two teams, both of eleven players, and three main areas in the field, which is a large rectangle with two goals at each end and a circle right in the middle, called the midfield. There are also four main positions/jobs players can have; goalkeeper, defender, midfield and striker. As a goalkeeper, your job is to guard the goal, blocking any incoming balls. This is the only player who can use his/her hands. A defender stays near the goal and they too have to defend the goal from strikers and block players' plays, but they cannot use their hands. A midfielder moves around the midfield, and can go back and forth to defend and attack. They should keep the midfield under control, recovering balls and sending them to the strikers. And last, but not least, the strikers. These players have the important job of shooting and scoring on the opposing goal.

That's the traditional and official way of playing it, but Super Mario Strikers is an exception. "Fair play"? "A clean match?" Bah, who needs all that when you've got Chain Chomps, ice-cold shells and spiny shells. And that's not all, on the screenshots you can see that some dirty fouls by Wario and even explosions, Hammer Bros., Toads performing some incrideble moves and Mario jumping sky-high and whacking the ball with a hammer to score a one-of-a-kind goal.

No soccer game would be a soccer game without the classic multiplayer action. In Super Mario Strikers, you can have three friends come over and face-off all day or night, be it all together or two-on-two games.

But what can we expect from the game? Super Mario Strikers was just recently announced, and with the amount of information we've been given and shown, this title looks promising. Tune in to NinFormer when the release date approaches for more information on this game.