I think the reason Sluggers wasn't as it was expected is that Namco Bandai was developing it, not Nintendo.
But at times the game was a tad fun, but after was boring as heck.
Sluggers is one of the very few Mario Sports Games that sucked.

I actually wanted to give this game a 3.25 but for some stupid ass reason, I can't.

After the amazing addiction that is Mario Strikers Charged I was hoping that Mario Super Sluggers would be just as addicting and fun but I was wrong. The story mode is lame and if you're like me you'll lose interest pretty quickly. I know this is a baseball game and they probably didn't spend to much time on the story mode but why have it in the first place? Why not just do what they do in the MLB and just do like a season mode? Work your way up the ranks and play in the world series (name it whatever you want, Mario..haha). That would have been so much more better than this lame ass story mode. This game is a lot more fun in exhibition with another person. Kind of like Mario Party, if you're playing by yourself it gets boring quickly, find another person. No online play? May I ask why? If you've played Strikers online then you know how addicting it is, this game would have been great online. The controls are decent, but not great. I played with the Wii-mote and nunchuk and it worked ok for the most part but it had problems.. When fielding you have to hold the joystick in the right direction then throw the Wii-mote forward to throw to the base (Up for 2nd, right for 1st and so on.) it gets pretty annoying when you're running towards the ball and as soon as you pick the ball up you want to throw it because you're in a hurry but you're still running with the joystick in the wrong direction and you throw to the wrong base. Catching a fly ball is easy just run (shake the wii mote to dash) towards the circle and stand on it. Pitching and batting work well. Didn't have to much of a problem with that. When you have two characters in the batting order that have chemistry and if you hit the ball you'll get a weapon, you point the wii mote at the screen and push the Z button to fire it. For some reason that seemed like it was really off to me. Maybe it was because I was in such a hurry and they were going to catch the ball so I didn't have much time to aim. Some of the mini games were pretty fun. Hell, some of them I had more with than the story mode. It's definitly a game that's not worth the 50 bucks to buy, I just rented it and I only played it for about 2 days and got bored of it. It's almost not even worth renting, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

i bet they think the controls are messed up bcus they swing not at right time, its called timing, if they actually played baseball they would understand the concept of how to control, this has some irresponsible controls at points but that doesnt make it suck. AND SO WAT if the challenge mode isnt long at least u get all the characters faster so u can play with ur friends. The graphics are an improvement bcus of 16:9 capability. If ur not intrested just rent it. i enjoy playing with my brothers. The minigames are a positive feature and toy field is cool. I also like the new field. This game is really baseball. Baseball fans get this game. AND IF CONTROLS DONT WORK i recommend to do exactly what the hand motions do.