Knowing this, I gotta point out that I know, too, that not every game gets its fair shake. For those of you who follow the review circuit, you already know that Mario Hoops for the Nintendo DS has been thrashed. Two biggies, ign.com and gamespot.com lambasted the game in their reviews and have likely turned many gamers off of a fantastic effort my Square-Enix.

That’s right, Square-Enix, the developers behind everyone’s favorite (maybe not, but humor me) RPG franchise, Final Fantasy, made Nintendo a basketball game for their wildly selling handheld.

Now I write this review from a pretty solid standpoint. That standpoint being: I hate sports games. Can’t stand ‘em. Not my thing, probably because the only sport I can say I “do” is snowboarding, and Hoops didn’t really turn my crank when I first popped the cartridge in my DS. Mario Hoops is, on the surface, a light-hearted, easy-to-pick-up basketball game with Mario & crew in which there are all the usual Mushroom Kingdom tie-ins. You can grab coins on the court by dribbling on the question mark boxes. You can get red shells that will seek out and knock down the player with the ball. Everyone has a crazy, character inspired dunk that you can pull off by tapping out the first letter of any given character’s name on the touch screen. This is all well and good, but it’s not necessarily any fun, right?

Well, it is. If you were to suck it up and dig into Hoops like I did (for some reason still unbeknownst to me) you’d discover that, under the hood, there is an off-putting amount of depth to this tiny title and that the appeal is far broader than that of your average sports gamer.

What Hoops has in spades is style. Because it’s not real basketball, there’s a lot of liberties to be taken, and that cracks the game wide open for audiences. The animation alone makes this game worth picking up. I get the itch to play it just to watch Bowser dunk sometimes. No joke. But when you look at the actual techniques in the game, it becomes obvious that the developers put a lot more care into the complexities than they were given credit for.

Because of the great use of stylus control, strokes pretty much take care of everything from passing to dunking and tapping the screen functions as the dribbling mechanic, the pace of the game is quick and the action is fluid. Players can steal, intercept, bat down dunkers, block, deek around defense and even control the exact postion of the ball in the character’s hand all through Square-Enix’s wonderful implementation of the touch screen control.

This said, the AI in the game won’t demand that you use all of these techniques to beat it, which is why it wouldn’t be hard to merely glance over the depth available to you and write off Hoops as watered-down Mario basketball. Unless you put in the time to earn yourself access to the harder cups further on in the game, or unlock some of the ridiculously difficult AI settings in Exhibition mode, you’ll only ever scratch the surface of the game.

If, however, you can convince a friend of yours that Mario Hoops is as cool as you say it is and not just another Mario sports cash cow for Nintendo (ahem, Mario Baseball), you’ll find out within minutes that you’ve got easily one of the best multiplayer games on the DS. Playing against a another interpretive intelligence (hopefully I’m not giving your friend too much credit) you’ll have to use every bit of skill you’ve mustered up in the tournaments to out-wit and out-play your opponent. Mario Hoops shows off the pearl of a game that it is on the inside through multiplayer once you start bouncing balls off the court walls to other team members and butt-slamming your friends out of their special-dunks and hearing them wail in frustration because of it.

Nintendo, you make friendly competition fierce, fast, and fun. Keep it up, because there are players that notice the effort.