Mario Party (Review)

The Mario Party series is often referred to as the most hated of the Mario spin-offs and with some good reason. In the ten years since it's debut, the franchise has released 10 games (8 console titles and 2 handheld spin-offs) with little innovation between them. Thinks to eBay, I've been able to acquire most of them for my Mario collection fairly cheap. While I'm probably not going to spent much time playing through all of them right now(if at all), For the time being, I'm going to try and take a quick refresher course on the 3 games I already owned.

I played the original game when it was first released, and 10 years later it's still fairly enjoyable. Mario Party is pretty much a board game with some mini-games to break up the monotony. You and 3 other players move around the board collecting coins and buying stars. The one who has the most stars at the end of the game is declared the winner. You get coins through certain spaces on the board, and by winning the various mini-games that you come across. At the end of every turn everyone will compete in a mini game for coins.

The boards all have various features and traps to take advantage of like planting seeds in a giant birthday cake, or getting shot out of multiple cannons in a battlefield and all the stages feature Bowser who'll always show up to screw up someone's progress by taking their coins or stars. Most of the boards here managed to keep me and my friends entertained as opposed to most of the latter games. Sure, the game can be frustrating as hell, but naturally that's only when you're losing. There are some things featured in this game that were thankfully dropped for the sequels. There's an annoying space that will either give you an extra turn or take one away, a solo mini game space that a little too time consuming, and the way that you are rewarded for team based mini games can be a little infuriating (one mini-game allows a solo player to steal upwards to 60 coins).

The main draw of the Mario Party games are the mini games. Depending on the spaces everyone lands on in the board it'll actually become one of 4 different types of games (4 Player, a 1 vs. 3, or 2 vs. 2). Most of these are incredibly unique like the one where you play jump rope with a line of fire enemies as the rope, bobsledding down an icy cave or racing miniature cars. For the most part they're all fun and the actions used to preform the games are more diverse than the sequels. Sure, some of the games pop up way more often than they should and couple of the games are out right unfair to some of the players, but I'd say that over 90% of the mini games are enjoyable. I've really talked about this game a lot longed than I intended to, but I guess I had a lot of ground to cover. I say the game is pretty fun to play solo but I give the game a higher recommendation if you have a couple of other people to play against. So, whether you're planning on a single player experience or multiplayer, the game is still recommended either way.