DAY 117 / GAME 117 Mario Party

DAY 117 / GAME 117

Mario Party

          I'm going to lump all the Mario Party games into one post, simply because the experience is generally the same across the board (no pun intended) and although they differ, I'd really end up writing about the same thing.  

Confusingly enough, this was Mario Party 1, not 3.

          Mario Party was a perfect release for the Nintendo 64 system.  A system that really stood alone as a 'party system' allowing up to four people to play simultaneously.  Previous systems offered controller multi-tap devices to support more than the typical two-players, but since it wasn't system-standard hardware very few games use it.  But with the N64 including 4 ports standard, a large number of developers kept that in mind and so there were a ton of 4-player games released on that system.  We played a bunch of great 4 player N64 in highschool; Mariokart 64, Smash Bros, Super Bomberman 64, F-Zero X, Goldeneye, Forsaken, South Park and a ton more.

         Mario Party, if you haven't played it, is very much a digital board game.  You pick your player, roll the dice and make your way around a selection of boards with various Mario themes.  The ultimate goal is to collect more stars than the other players.  As you make your way across the board you run into various mini-games that give you a chance to switch coins, stars and locations with the other players.  At the end of each round (once each person has taken their turn once) there is another big mini-game that includes everyone as you fight to screw each other over for a chance at the win.


         Now, if you've played Mario Party and are still good friends with those people consider yourself lucky.  Though it varies from game to game, a consistent theme in Mario Party is that you can be in the lead at one moment, but if someone lands on the wrong square suddenly the player in first and the player in last can switch places.  There's a ton of opportunity to steal other player's stars and sometimes stars are given out seemingly at random.  You can be doing very well in the mini-games throughout and leading the entire night and then, like a blue turtle shell homing in on first place in Mariokart, you can end up switching with last place right before the finish line.  Strong friends are friends who survived Mario Party.

          I've spent a good deal of time playing Mario Party back in day with old friends.  Back when I first bought a CD writer drive for my PC (they were 450$ at the time) we used to sit down and play rounds of this while we burned copies of PS1 games.  The process took 1 hour and didn't always work, so we really needed something to do in the meantime.  We also figured at one point that perhaps Nintendo actually built this game to sell controllers.  A lot of the mini-games required you to mash buttons repeatedly or rotate the analog stick with such fury that you were lucky to still have the same controller a year later.  
          I haven't played this game in a very long time, but they are still releasing new versions.  I can't actually recall the last version I've played but they were certainly improving since the first.  I think I'd ought to sit down sometime and try one of the newer ones.  So long as it doesn't mean buying a new controller.