Mario Baseball (series)

The Mario Baseball series is a spin-off series of the Mario series that revolves around the concept of baseball. Only two games have been released to date, one being for the Nintendo GameCube, and the other for the Wii. Unlike previous spinoffs the player could recruit people via completeing scout missions to get enough scout flags to recruit the player on one of the opposite teams.

Mario Superstar Baseball
Mario Superstar Baseball was the first installment in the Mario Baseball series. It featured a total of 32 playable characters, six of which could be unlocked; these characters were divided into four different groups.The groups were balance, technique, speed, and power. The game also featured three characters from the Donkey Kong series: Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, and Dixie Kong. The game also had a unique feature called 'Chemistry'. Chemistry was the relationship status found between the team captain and its players. The better the chemistry between the characters, the better that team will likely perform. Should a team have bad chemistry, they may perform poorly in the game. Six mini-games were also featured in the game, one of which was unlockable.

Mario Super Sluggers
Mario Super Sluggers is the second and most recent installment to the Mario Baseball series; it was released for the Wii in 2008 in Japan and North America; however, no release dates have been announced for the European and Australian regions. The game featured a total of 41 playable characters. Nine more than the original. All of the previous game's characters were reunited in the sequel, and they were all default. There were a total of nine stadiums to play in, four of which had to be unlocked; each stadium, unlockables included, had their own unique mini-game for the player to engage in. The game also featured many cutscenes, each of which told a story to give the game a more involved aspect of gameplay.The Challenge Mode was changed from going around playing other teams to more of a RPG feel.

Trivia

 * Despite having only two games in the series, this series featurers more playable characters than any other spinoff series in the Marioverse.