After I gushed yesterday about Super Mario Strikers superb gameplay, I promised to return today with some insight from the developers. On my Vancouver trip I sat down with Mike Inglehart, game designer and Ken Yeeloy, producer for Super Mario Strikers, what transpired is after the jump.

Kotaku: Despite defying some rules, Strikers is very clearly a soccer game. It retains the basic mechanics of a soccer title, but without yellow and red cards and there is no out of bounds, instead there's an electric fence around the field of play, how did the Next Level team decide what to change and retain from soccer?

Mike Inglehart: The Golden Rule we made when we set out to make Strikers was "Anything we add to this game has to be about soccer." So any decision we had to make had to tie back into soccer somehow. We wanted to take all of the exciting parts of the game of soccer and insert those (bicycle kicks, slide tackles) into Strikers and accentuate them. The electric fence, for instance, doesn't even seem to make sense in terms of relating to soccer, but in Strikers it works. It works because players crave the physicality that the fence creates when players get checked into it.

Kotaku: Is that why there's no Yellow and Red cards? And instead players are penalized by the awarding of power-ups to the other team on would-be fouls?

Ken Yeeloy: The power-up system being added in the way it was, as a game rule, balances out the lack of penalties in the actual game. For unsportsmanlike play, the other team will get a power-up and hopefully be able to use that power-up to create a scoring chance.

Mike Inglehart: With the power-up system we looked at other games' mechanics and how they integrated power-ups. For instance, FIFA Street isn't really a game about soccer, it's a game about tricks. Originally we had the power-ups as boxes on the playing field, but then the game of soccer was replaced with a race for power-ups. We wanted the game of soccer to remain at the heart of Strikers.