Game of the Month: July 2007
Mario scores a goal to win the top spot.
With all the videogames that are released each and every month, it can be quite a difficult task to decide which title to spend your hard-earned money on. Granted you could go by our review scores alone and weed through the long list of names to find something that scored high or low, but what if you had somewhere else to turn?
Rather than wait until the end of the year like for our big award blowout, your incredibly masculine friends at IGN.com have decided to employ a monthly tribute to the weeks that were. We're resolved to illustrate to our readers what we thought was the very best game for each system over the past month, and tell you the reason why.
While some of us often chime in with our comments at the end of reviews, for the most part, the reviews on IGN are primarily written by one editor; in this feature we get all of the editors on a particular channel to vote for our Game of the Month. What better way to represent your channel than to speak your mind all at once?
How does it work? Simple. Any game released in the past month is eligible for the award and is taken through a battery of tests by every editor on that particular channel. After we've finished evaluating each game that comes down the pipeline, we put our heads together and decide on a single "best of" winner that's worthy of the title "IGN Game of the Month". Pretty straightforward, don't you think?
Now that we have the guidelines out of the way, let's move on and congratulate this month's winner...
Why We Picked It::
It wasn't a difficult decision.
Mario Strikers Charged lived up to our expectations, delivering players an arcade-fast single-player soccer experience complete with more lovable mascots than ever before, new selectable sidekicks, more stadiums to battle it out in, and even some Striker Challenges to extend replay value. The title shined with an attention to presentation uncommon in the majority of non-Nintendo-developed Wii software, sporting crisp, clean cinematics and real-time stages overrun with advanced particle effects and fluid character animation. Charged additionally included a fun four-player-compatible offline multiplayer mode, but it was the title's online mode -- new to the series -- that really hooked us. (Now that we've tested it with more people, however, we're less than thrilled by some of the statistical downloading times and frequent drops from Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.) All in all, a worthy sequel to the sleeper hit original.
Via IGN
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