16 playable characters
The playable cast consists of sixteen characters; eight from the Mario series and eight from the Sonic series. The characters are broken down into groups where they’ve been given different abilities, such as speed and power. After choosing your character and the nation you wish to represent, without further ado, it’s straight into one of the three single player modes.The mission mode offers you character-specific objectives, that don’t necessarily require you to win the event, such as using Knuckles to throw the hammer 3 times, increasing your distance each time, or earning at least 20 points in a single rally of Table Tennis.
The real meat of the game though lies in the Circuit mode, which has a similar layout to the Mario Kart games, where you start off at beginner class and need to work your way through circuits, each of which contain three or more events, before you can unlock further circuits and finally advance to the higher classes. There’s also a free mode where you can pick and choose any game that you have already unlocked and, if you have the inclination to play them, some rubbish mini-games that reward you with some boring Olympic trivia
Before starting an event there is a superb visual tutorial showing you exactly how to use the stylus or the buttons of the DS, so there’s no excuse for false starts or stumbling over in the triple jump. If each of the events on offer were purely just a straightforward battle it would be a bit boring, so Sega has added a number of impressive features that increase the fun factor and make the events more interesting. In the circuit mode, you can use a joker once and you’re awarded with double the points for that event. Therefore you need to choose wisely and pick the joker on your strongest event in order to get the maximum return. In the beginner’s class you can pretty much breeze through and be confident that you’ll win most events, but later on the joker becomes an important part of your tactics.
There are also dozens of unlockables, in the form of emblems, which you’re awarded for breaking records and various other objectives, such as winning a fencing match by 10 points to 0; there’s enough there to keep you busy for quite a while.
