I have what I’d like to consider an addiction
to a game called Mario Party: all of them, to be precise. At least, all of them that are worthy of
the title. Just as Super Mario RPG is a turn-based RPG with interactive elements, Mario Party is a
dice rolling board game with interactive elements; yet another “mariofication" of a traditional
genre. Can that be a term now? Do I get to license that? Turning down a game of Mario Party
is next to impossible; I can’t get enough of its unique brand of “screw you and everything you
stand for.” Hell, I’m so interested in the series, its history, and the technicalities behind each
game’s development, that I watch tool assisted speedruns of each game for fun. For fun. As such,
I’m crazy enough to want to figure out why: what makes each game, each board, each mini-game tick.
How much influence does luck have on Mario Party, and does that influence ultimately matter? How
much control do players have over winning? What makes for a good mini-game? Which boards work to
the strengths of Mario Party? Most importantly: what are the strengths of Mario Party? Too many
questions, a multitude of answers: I hope you’ll join me on a quest to analyze every Mario Party
to get to the bottom of why the series is so fun, heartbreaking, and addicting.
Welcome: to Chance Time.
It’s basically like Mark Brown’s Boss Keys,
but regarding a topic that is far, far less interesting. This episode of Chance Time will
focus on the first Mario Party for the Nintendo 64, which received fairly mixed responses across
the board. Gameinformer left particularly scathing comments like, “Mario Party is worthless,” and,
“it seriously hurts to play.” Paul, aptly titled the game professor said it was the perfect game
for the under six crowd; though, I’m sure we can trust the guy who gave Castlevania 64 an 8.75 the
previous page of the very same issue. “I consider this game to be along the lines of Zelda.” Safe to
say, not everyone is a fan of Mario Party. There are doubtless some out there who have only heard
it as a quote “friendship killer.” Now, I feel like this sentiment stems from popular YouTubers
and internet personalities playing and getting really unlucky, see any of the streams from Giant
Bomb. cut to [Mario Party vs. Jeff Gerstmann 2:00-2:49, use close-ups at your discretion if
you think they could enhance the clip]. Hey, I love Giant Bomb, I love Jeff, and I love all of
these streams: it perhaps makes the best case for avoiding 50 turn Mario Party like the plague.
If this is where you’re at, stick with me: let me blow your mind as an avid fan with hundreds
of hours under his belt. Yes, hundreds.
The goal of Mario Party is to collect the most
stars. Stars are obtained a variety of ways, the most consistent of which is at a star space.
The location of the star space will vary from board to board; the general rule is that each
star is worth 20 coins, and once you buy a star, the star space moves to another preset location.
There are other ways of obtaining stars, but this will likely be your main goal for each board:
book it to that star space. Boards consists of many different spaces, which each have different
effects. A blue space will give you 3 coins, while a red space will take away 3. A question
mark space called a “happening space” will activate an event specific to that board. A
blue space shaped like a star will activate a single-player mini-game, chosen at random. A
mushroom space will spawn a dice block containing both a mushroom and a poison mushroom.
The mushroom will give you a second roll, and the poison mushroom will cause you to lose
your next turn. Visiting the Boo space will allow you to steal coins from another player for free,
or steal a star from another player for 50 coins. A Bowser space will do one of many bad things,
ranging from specific bowser mini-games that take away your coins when you lose, to straight up
stealing all your coins for no discernable reason. If you happen to meet Bowser on the board,
he will take a set amount of coins from you: usually 20. Finally, an exclamation mark space
will activate “Chance Time”, where one player will give something to another player, chosen at
random: this one is quite infamous, as you might imagine. Different boards have different rules
and specific events, but the blue and red spaces, star spaces, happening spaces, and chance
time spaces are consistent among them all.
There are typically 20 turns in a game of Mario
Party, though you can pick a different amount depending on the game. cut to [Mario Party vs.
Jeff Gerstmann 8:06-8:14]. Jeff says don’t do it. A turn consists of a roll from each of the
four players, the order of which is determined by dice block at the beginning. Everyone is given
ten coins to start with, and then it’s off to the races. This is where things get interesting.
You would imagine that rolls are very important to Mario Party, correct? There’s a star space
and your goal is to reach it before the other players. Except, this isn’t the only way to win.
At the end, when the results are tallied, three bonus stars are thrown into the mix. The mini-game
star will be awarded to the player who earned the most mini-game wins, or the most coins within
mini-games to be more specific; The happening star is given to the player who landed on the most
happening spaces; and the coin star is given to the player who had the highest coin record at any
one point. Let’s take two hypothetical players: Mario and Luigi. Luigi has an outstanding lead: 5
stars and 50 coins. Mario trails behind with not a single star and 160 coins. It’s the last turn,
Mario lands on Boo and steals a star from Luigi, giving up 50 coins in the process. That leaves him
with 1 star, 110 coins; and Luigi with 4 stars, 50 coins. It’s alright though, that was the final
act of the turn and after a simple mini-game: Luigi takes home the gold. The bonus stars are
dealt: Mario gets the mini-game star for his exceptional skill. Fine enough, but Luigi’s lead
still isn’t shaken. Mario gets the happening star for getting lucky enough to land on the most
happening spaces. Dicey, but Luigi’s victory is assured. Right? Mario gets the coin star for
being tactical; hanging onto his coins at all costs. Final totals between the two. Luigi has 4
stars, 50 coins. Mario has 4 stars, 110 coins. In the case of a tie, the highest current coin total
wins: Mario is the superstar. This is the lynchpin of Mario Party, the toss-up that defines its
appeal, and the core of the scrutiny with which every single Mario Party game is analyzed.
See, you might hear a lot of people describe Mario Party as a game of luck: get high rolls and you’ll
win, which is often phrased in a negative context. That’s where you get stuff like “friendship
killers” and other fun descriptors. Bad things can happen at seemingly random, vendettas can form,
the tides will turn at an arbitrary rate: but what if I told you that it isn’t so unpredictable. To
some extent, there is a strategy to Mario Party: not one as strict and suffocating as Monopoly,
rather something I like to call survival strategies. Nothing is ever guaranteed in
Mario Party. You could want for a space, and roll one too short; you could plan for a bonus
star, only to lose it to another player; you could shoot for the stars, or land on a Bowser space.
You can’t determine what roll you’re gonna get, at least not at this point in the series: your best
bet is to work with what you’re given. Roll a 10, evaluate your options. Count the number of spaces
ahead of you: maybe there’s a fork in the road, which fork would be a better choice? Is another
player closer to the star than you? Do they have a better chance of getting there before you? Maybe
taking the path farther away from the star will be more advantageous, since you’ll be passing
the Boo space which nets you a free coin steal, and you also land on a happening space, not only
causing a board event to occur, but increasing your happening total. Another player gets the
choice between a happening space and a chance time. You haven’t landed on a single happening
space all game, so trying to catch up to the other players just before the end of the game seems like
a fruitless endeavor; on the flipside, a chance time could turn the game around and secure a win
for you. Sure, it could have the opposite effect, but you’re already in last place and need
a hail mary. These are survival strategies, and we use them not necessarily to game the
system, but to survive the RNG. This working in tandem with what I consider the skill-oriented
core: the mini-games. The fact that doing well at each mini-game could potentially net you
a star, while giving you additional coins, and preventing other players from gaining coins at
the same time is another fitting counterbalance to the RNG. As such, I propose that Mario Party is
a balancing act between these three elements: strategy, skill, and luck. Luck can be a powerful
element, but because of the other two elements pulling against it, rarely will it ever be a
deciding factor. As we saw in the example earlier: Luigi was on track to win purely because he bought
the most stars, which inadvertently means he got the best rolls, which also means he got the best
luck; however, Mario was able to pull it back by planning ahead and using his mini-game skill
to his advantage. He didn’t survive simply because he was lucky: not solely, anyway.
Let’s mold this into the foundation of the Mario Party experience and my analysis of it. It
will become the thesis for this entire project, so keep these questions in the back of your
mind as we move forward: what is the balance between skill, strategy, and luck? How does
that balance affect the play experience? And, most importantly: does that balance make for a
rewarding, competitive, and fun Mario Party?
--transition [Mario Party vs. Jeff Gerstmann
3:30-3:55, in the middle of the clip, blur the screen, fade in text that says “the
boards” and fade to black at the end]
Mario Party 1 is, in many respects, the first
of its kind. Board games have been around for a long time, I’m not talking about that: I’m
talking about a video game version of a board game. Hudson Soft had their work cut out for
them: not only did they need to make a set of boards with the same appeal as other popular
board games, they also had to craft an engaging set of mini-games to add an interactive element.
Obviously they were successful, but it’s important to acknowledge how easy it is to get something
like this wrong. Dozens of Mario Party clones have been attempted over the years, and almost
none of them are good: a bunch of movie and television licenses that wanted a quick and easy
family game and picked Mario Party as a seemingly easy template. For that much, at least, I’m proud
of what Hudson pulled off here, and while I have a lot of respect for it kickstarting a series
I love to death, I’m not gonna pull my punches: it can sometimes be strangely constructed.
The main attraction is Party Mode, with 8 boards to pick from. When evaluating these
boards, I’m not gonna blast any of them for being too gimmicky or whatever: I’m gonna refer back
to that sense of balance on both a micro and macro level. What balance do the selection of
boards promote individually and as a whole?
Let’s start simple: DK’s Jungle Adventure is
a good starting board. The star space moves to preset locations; thwomps will block certain
pathways leading to situations where a player may need to spend ten coins for a chance at a star;
coin stones only open when you have twenty coins; and happening spaces spawn a large boulder that
will move everybody in its path. The simplicity of this board usually means that players will
have a decently high coin total, unless they get really unlucky with thwomp placements and red
spaces. Boo is in a location that every player must eventually pass to make a full cycle, so
coin and star steals are quite common. Since looping around the board is mostly painless, and
the opportunity to star steal is so prevalent, usually this board allows for high scoring games.
The only things here out of your control are the happening spaces and boo steals, which in turn
makes it one of the best traditional Mario Party boards. There’s an element of chance and a ton
of junctions that allow you to strategize. While it doesn't break new ground, it’s safe enough
that you can almost always have a fun time.
Comparatively, Mario’s Rainbow Castle is less
traditional. This board is setup like a circuit: you’ll be funneled into one endpoint, and then
spit out back at the start space. There are a few intersections to give you an element of choice,
and a lot of psychological warfare in regards to the central gimmick. Bowser and Toad await you
at the end, switching back and forth once their respective stars are collected: Bowser will give
you a ztar for 40 coins, and Toad will give you a star for 20. A lot of people aren’t a fan of
this idea, but I think it’s a cool twist on the traditional formula, even though in the context
of the first game it wasn’t really a twist because a formula hadn’t yet been established. Though you
can’t necessarily control your rolls, you can pick which paths you take, which in turn affects how
quickly you’ll reach the end. If Luigi is in front of you, there’s a judgment call to make: do I take
the left turn for a quicker path to the end, or the right path for a longer path? That answer will
likely depend on how many players are around you, who’s closest to the end, and which character
is giving out a star at the moment. You need to think ahead and guess at the amount of switches
before you’ll reach the end, and though you can never guarantee you’ll be correct: again,
these are survival strategies, and ones that make the board far more interesting. Maybe it
sways a little too close to luck, but there’s enough of the other two elements here that I can
excuse a few bad rolls in favor of a unique board gimmick. DK’s Jungle Adventure and Mario’s Rainbow
Castle are fairly similar: they both loop around, they both have intersections, they both have
boo: the only difference being the way in which you collect stars. Even just one little twist
can radically change the pacing of a board.
Yoshi’s Tropical Island is a blend of both. The
gimmick revolves around Bowser and Toad switching spaces whenever a player lands on a happening
space. They’re on either sides of the two islands, which you can cross by paying a whomp a set amount
of coins that increase based on how many coins have been funneled into them by other players.
It’s a really neat board that can be a little luck based, yes; but there are seven happening
spaces spread out across the board, so the chances of landing on them over and over and causing
madness isn’t ridiculously high. I really like how the whomps can change up the flow of the board
if you have money to burn: imagine funneling 40 coins into one of these, it would be devastating,
and you could essentially trap your opponents on an island as they both only have one exit point.
There are a few chance time spaces to shake things up, boo is on the right island for coin and star
steals: this board has everything! You can block people off, you can lose all your stars to a
chance time, you can get screwed or saved by a happening space. It takes the gimmick of Mario’s
Rainbow Castle, makes it a little more random, creates another potential star space, and places
them on two loops instead of one. What Hudson did right with this first Mario Party is create a set
of boards that have a good balance, but aren’t too afraid to tweak that balance to make boards that
all feel distinct from one another: you pick DK’s Jungle Adventure for a simple, skill-oriented
experience; you pick Mario’s Rainbow Castle for a mix between strategy and luck; and you pick
Yoshi’s Tropical Island for a unique blend of the two. Unfortunately, this approach to board design
is a double edged sword: I appreciate that Hudson were still trying to figure out what this kind of
game even was, and what worked the best, but it ended up creating a few duds. The three boards
I’ve discussed are by far my prefered boards whenever I boot up the original, and the only
other two that I sometimes consider are Peach’s Birthday Cake and Wario’s Battle Canyon.
Peach’s Birthday cake is an okay idea, but it’s brought down by how simple and
luck-based it is. It feels like an inferior version of Mario’s Rainbow Castle: baby bowser
forces you into a lottery, with only one of four choices being a “winner.” Of course, a “win”
to baby bowser is sending you to a red space, bowser space nightmare: the other three are
losers because they open the path to the only star space at the top of the cake. This is
your primary source for collecting stars, with the secondary being happening spaces that
allow you to buy a piranha plant that will steal a star from those that land on it. These ideas sound
okay on paper, they’re just a bit impractical. Mario’s Rainbow Castle has a very similar fixed
star space gimmick, but at least there you were guaranteed either Bowser or Toad when you got
there. Barring the occasional happening space, you’ll always know when either Bowser is there
or Toad is there. Peach’s Birthday Cake has a luck-based lottery that is bad for the one person
who picks the winning lot, but great for the other three since the lottery doesn’t reshuffle until
all four lots are picked: essentially meaning that this spot is designed to give one player a
hard time occasionally. It is a very small board, which in theory would allow the piranha plant
spaces more use; yet, I rarely find this to be the case. It is ridiculously expensive to buy a
piranha plant: 30 coins to be exact, more than it costs to buy a star. Not only that, it will
only activate when someone lands on that specific space, and will disappear after one use. You’re
gambling your money away hoping that someone will land on your happening space out of the other 13.
Why would you risk 30 coins on the chance that someone will randomly land on your space out of
the literal dozens of other spaces, when you could save that money for another star purchase?
I feel the same about Wario’s Battle Canyon. It has less going against it, in that there are
no underutilized or underpowered gimmicks here, but it is weighted far more towards being skilled.
The central gimmick revolves around five squares around the board, and you travel between four of
them by cannon. These cannons change direction after landing on a happening space, and spit
you out at a seemingly random space on one of the squares. The fifth square, which consists of
solely single-player mini-game spaces and Bowser, can only be accessed by paying the Fly Guy
at the top right square ten coins. Passing Bowser will cause him to fire a cannon at a
random square, and take coins away from anyone on it. This one seems pretty cool, right? The
gimmick isn’t too obnoxious, you can actually figure out which spaces it cycles through and
in what order when shooting out of the cannon, and you never have to see Bowser if you don’t want
to. What’s the issue? It’s too skill-intensive, which may sound dumb at first, but hear me out.
The cannons cycle between predetermined spaces at the same rate and frequency, so you could find
out what that order is and press the button at the correct time. To do this would be asking a hell
of a lot from the player, and would require many, many board refreshes to get right. I can admit
that maybe if I had played this board numerous times, I’d be able to game the system and
land exactly where I want: but for casual, even hardcore play, this thing moves far too
fast to initially land where you want. In effect, this becomes a luck-based mechanic until you play
the board so many times that you just know when to press the button to get what you want: and when
you know how to do it correctly, the entire board turns into a straight line. Even then, there are a
couple happening spaces that can completely screw with your momentum, a Fly Guy that can bring
you to him when another player spends 10 coins, and if someone dares to enter the Bowser circle,
he’ll fire away at a random square. Again, I can’t say any of this is bad, and some of it
can be quite fun when you know what you’re doing, but it leaves just a little bit too much up to
chance for it to be one of my go-to boards.
These last three, the ones the game deems the
most “difficult,” are where my first questions came in. The idea of “difficulty” in a Mario Party
game is hard to quantify. Is being more luck-based difficult? If there are more chance time spaces
is it more difficult? Is it more difficult because you don’t have as many opportunities to
strategize? I think the problem you’ll run into consistently with these questions is that they
aren’t the right questions. You shouldn’t be asking “what can I do to screw up the balance,” or
you’re just looking for trouble. Mario’s Rainbow Castle might be less balanced than some of the
other boards, but it maintains a baseline level of strategy and skill that none of these last
three boards have aside from the bonus stars.
Luigi’s Engine Room is “difficult” because it
has a set of blue and red doors that open and close each turn, each happening space, and each
20 coin purchase. You start on the bottom right, move towards the middle, and pick accordingly from
several different paths based on which doors are open. It sounds like this would present several
opportunities to plan ahead, though if you ask me: it’s too hectic for any grand strategy to
ultimately matter. If you don’t roll enough to make that red door by the end of the turn, if
someone lands on one of the five happening spaces, or visits one of the guaranteed switch stations
near the start space, it’ll completely screw you over. Factor in the fact that every single
player can do this to any of the other players, and what this board results in is a series of
screwed plans and endless death loops. When I played this board for footage the star space ended
up past Bowser, who takes 20 of your coins no matter what. Instead of making it so that there’s
a chance you can get the star without passing him, maybe by placing a set of red and blue doors
that open up to either Bowser or the star, you must pass Bowser to get this star space, and
the turnaround is so damn quick that you’ll be in a state of limbo unless you get really lucky with
mini-games, low rolls, and evading a guaranteed boo coin steal every single time a player enters
a warp pipe. You have to walk into that lower left section when the red door is open, when you have
40 coins, and you have to hope to god no one will steal coins from you to prevent that purchase.
Bowser’s Magma Mountain’s definition of difficulty is random dice rolls. You can take short cuts by
paying ten coins and clearing a dice roll. You’re forced to do this on the final intersection,
with one path giving you boo and the other Bowser, who on this board, can dice roll into
a star steal. You could potentially roll bad on the intersection, giving you Bowser, and then roll
bad on Bowser, costing you a star: all out of your control. Additionally, the happening spaces make
every blue space into a red space for two whole turns. As this is a hard board, every star space
will turn into a chance time space when bought, and all of this combined makes for a luck-based
nightmare. I sometimes get legitimately angry playing this board. You can lose a bunch of
your coins to red spaces or chance times or boo, practically anything. You could fail a shortcut,
optional or mandatory, lose even more coins, lose a chance at buying a star: this feels like
the most luck-based out of any board in the entire game, and it sucks because I really enjoy the
shortcut mechanic. You pay ten coins for a chance at a shortcut to the star space, luck-based
yes, but you don’t have to use most of these, you can save your coins and take your
chances the long way around. That final, mandatory one however is so punishing that being
locked behind two dice rolls is absurd. Your survival strats aren’t gonna help jack squat
if you lose a mandatory set of dice rolls, or get screwed by the high chance time count.
Is this what a difficult stage is? Low-scores, getting screwed constantly by luck? Well,
Eternal Star is apparently a hard stage, but it doesn’t really live up to either of those
definitions. There are seven baby bowsers spread across chunks of a giant star, with warp spaces
that take you to random locations. Stars cost 20 coins, but you have to win a dice roll against
baby bowser to take home the star. The catch is that you will always get an 8 to 10 dice block,
making it very easy to take a star, with a very slim chance that you’ll lose a star of your own.
Both boo and bowser exist on their own spaces, and when passing Bowser: he will automatically
take a star no matter what, then shuffle the teleporters. I do like the teleporting mechanic:
though it is technically random at the beginning, they stay the same until Bowser switches them.
You can take the routes that you know are safe if they’ve been used by other players, and
having more than one star space means that this is a much higher scoring game than the other
two. Unfortunately, that automatic star steal for taking a bad teleport, and the chance that you
can lose a star to a dice roll, however slim the chance might be, is a little annoying. Not nearly
as annoying as Magma Mountain and the Engine Room, but still frustrating nonetheless. Since
your chances of losing a star are quite low the games end up with a higher score than
usual, but the sticking point for me is that the board is really dull. You’ll know where the
teleporters lead after just one person uses it, and from that point it’s about getting lucky and
rolling high. The board is in the shape of a star, so criss-crossing is common. It’s a small board
with nothing going on, that doesn’t pull anything from you: no strategy, no skill, no luck. You’re
basically handed stars on a silver platter.
What gets me here is that Eternal Star has nothing
more going for it than a board like DK’s Jungle Adventure except for more chance time spaces. If
you take each part of the star and put them all together based on where the teleporters lead,
you just have a fairly basic board with a bunch of meaningless intersections that all loop back
to start. None of this helps me to form an idea of what difficulty is supposed to mean: two of
my favorite boards are considered easy, but in what way are they easy? Mario’s Rainbow Castle
is easy, but it’s quite luck-based and can very easily lead to death spirals. Is it the mere fact
that you can think your way out of bad situations? Is it the act of removing player control? I think
you get the point: difficulty in Mario Party is undefinable. This selection of boards too often
sway in the direction of luck, and make for some boring, simple board experiences. The good boards
are indeed good, but when there are only three of them that can produce truly fun turnouts, I can’t
say these boards were a tremendous success.
--transition [Mario Party vs. Jeff Gerstmann
4:19 - 4:30; text saying The Minigames]
That, is only one aspect of Party Mode, however.
Think of Mario Party like a chemical reaction: the boards are one element, and the mini-games
are another. Mash them together, and the end result will often affect how satisfying every
board can possibly be. Mini-games aren’t the only determining factor, but I would say they’re
often the most important. There’s an entire bonus star linked to winning enough of these mini-games,
and they’re the prime source of income, meaning it could also indirectly be linked to another
bonus star. Needless to say, the better the mini-games the better the Mario Party. I think the
original has a great set of mini-games that fill in the cracks left by some of the weaker boards;
mini-games that future titles will repeatedly take inspiration from, or in some cases steal outright.
We do have to address the elephant in the room: control stick spinning. Here is perhaps the reason
Mario Party 1 has never seen a Virtual Console release: the control stick spinning mini-games
make up 1 in 10 of the mini-game roster, 5 of the 50 total: Cast Aways, Tug o’ War, Paddle
Battle, Deep Sea Divers, and Pedal Power, gave some players blisters and other injuries to their
palms. You could always spin the stick with your thumb, something Nintendo themselves recommended,
though it’s hard to deny the speed boost you get using your palm instead. So of course a bunch of
kids ended up hurting themselves, their parents got justifiably angry and sued. Nintendo lost
a class-action lawsuit costing them thousands of dollars in damages: I don’t think I need to
say that I don’t like them. They’re a fine idea, but replacing any of these mini-games with a
simple “tap a” would have been much appreciated. I played them with a Gamecube controller, which has
a far more comfortable analog stick than the N64 controller, and it was still painful. It wouldn't
even be so bad if spinning with your thumb was fast enough, but I've never won Pedal Power
without using the palm of my hand. Eventually for the sake of my health and the condition
of my control stick, I just set my controller down whenever one of these came up. Better to
lose a mini-game than to lose my right hand.
Those five are automatically out in my book. Cast
Aways isn’t too offensive, since you can move the control stick with your thumb and reasonably
expect to do well, but those other four are painful. Thankfully, the rest of the lineup
makes up for it. Not every mini-game is a hitter: Box Mountain Mayhem, Coin Block Bash, and a lot of
the single-player mini-games are way too simple. Especially the ones that rely on memory or sight.
There are a lot of: track this moving koopa shell, or match these pictures, or ground pound the flat
pegs. I did this stuff in elementary school. I know this is a kid’s game, but come now: we can
do a little better than this. My favorites are Ghost Guess and Limbo Dance. Both of them test a
different set of skills: observation and timing. In Ghost Guess, you need to pinpoint the first Boo
to move in the circle by observing their body and shadows. Sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly hard
to figure out once you’re playing. Limbo Dance is a fairly unforgiving test of your button timing,
asking you to find the right rhythm to stay in between two extremes: falling backward, or hitting
the limbo pole. It sucks that these are the only two single-player mini-games worth a damn, the
rest feel like huge pace-breakers, especially the lengthy ones. Landing on Memory Match or Ground
Pound makes me groan; they just prolong your turn and probably irritate the other players even more
because they don’t get to do anything while you’re perfecting Ground Pound for the 18th time.
In terms of the multi-player mini-games though, most fare better. There’s a good mix of
platforming, puzzle solving, reaction timing, straight up action, and silly fun. Bombs Away
is a great test of your platforming and often feels chaotic with three other players there with
you; Bumper Balls is a fun action game where you try to push everyone off the arena, using fake out
tactics to trick other players into careening off the edge after you; Shy Guy Says is a tense test
of your reaction speed, to see who can press the right button in the fastest time; Face Lift is a
goofy yet also challenging face distortion puzzle. The free for all mini-games are perhaps the most
balanced and fun, with the only exceptions being the ones where you have to work together. I’m
not necessarily sure what Hudson were thinking with these: they aren’t too hard to win, one
of them goes on a little too long, and having all four players work together just feels…
wrong. 1v3 and 2v2 have elements of teamwork, but there’s still a distribution of players that
face off against one another; three people might have to work together, but they’re still competing
against one player. In a free for all mini-game, it just means everyone is working together, and
when that element of challenge and competition is removed, all we’re left to think about is
the quality of the mini-game itself. That’s never a mindset you want to be in while
playing a mini-game: these aren’t meant to be super fun and fulfilling on their own.
2v2 mini-games are balanced incredibly well, though oddly there are a surprisingly small number
of them. Handcar Havoc has a good balance between button mashing and precise turning; Desert Dash
requires a lot of coordination between both players to push the button at the same rhythm;
and Bombsketball is straight up 2 on 2 basketball which is hard to screw up. The coolest thing
about these mini-games is that they feel the most balanced: even some of these free for alls have
strange things in them that can arbitrarily halt your pace, like the obstacles in Platform Peril.
To avoid them you’ll have to move to the side, thus halting your pace and putting you a little
behind your opponents. It is possible to go the entire mini-game without encountering a single
obstacle, putting you at an advantage over your opponents who will surely have a tough time
catching up and reaching the end first. 1v3’s are even worse about this, and are often the most
contentious mini-games in the entire series. Trying to balance a team of three versus a team of
one will always leave the most room for error. As such they make up what I consider to be the worst
mini-games in this first installment. Pipe Maze would be a fun test of your observation skills,
but since the one player gets to decide which pipe to send the treasure chest down, a skilled
one player will secure the win every time. It’s also one of the only 1v3 mini-games that feels
pointless because only one person will win. Coin Shower Flower is hilariously unbalanced, giving
the one player a tremendous shot at all the coins. They’ll fall in somewhat random places on this
flower, and Mario Party movement physics aren’t the best so I see what they were going for here,
but it’s clearly weighted in favor of the one. Most of these coins are easy to grab, and the 5 or
10 that fall off will go to the person that just so happens to be close enough when it does. I’ve
never seen the one player get less than 20 coins, and I’ve never seen one of the three players get
more than 5: it’s cruel. Bash n’ Cash feels unfair in the opposite way: the one-player can lose
all of their coins, while the three players are never in any danger, and can in fact steal the
coins that the one player drops. I understand why this mini-game can be triggered by a Bowser
space, because it feels appropriately punishing, but why on earth is it in the normal rotation
when Grab Bag accomplishes the same goal, but allows every player a chance to steal? The
one player has a shot at evading the hammers by jumping on player heads; that can only last so
long though, and I’ve never seen this mini-game end without at least one coin bag flying out of
the one player. Honestly, the only 1v3 mini-games I enjoy are Piranha Pursuit, Crane Game, and Bowl
Over. Piranha Pursuit is a fun test of timing, to see if all three players are on the same page and
feed the piranha plant water at the right times, while the one player has to mash like their life
depends on it, while also ensuring they jump at the correct times. Crane Game isn’t spectacular
or anything, but it does require some A mashing, and introduces a fun element of choice. If you’re
confident in your mashing ability, you can pick a player that might not be very good at it: or if
you’re terrible, you can opt for the treasure chest or coin bag instead for free money. Players
with higher coin totals will yield better results, so going after them is always the better option,
but it often means that they’ll be the harder option: nicely balanced. Finally, Bowl Over
has a fun anticipation phase: where is the one player gonna curve the shell, where should
I move myself to avoid the shell. This frantic, get the hell out of my way mindset could mean that
players end up bumping into each other and make it easier for the one to get all three of you in
one fell swoop, but if you all work together, you can decrease his rewards. It’s not perfect:
the reward system doesn’t go both ways, so that’s a little strange, but it’s more fun than
the others for that anticipation phase alone.
I’m not gonna go over every mini-game with a
fine-toothed comb, I hope you get the picture. They’re not all great, or even good, but enough
of them are competitive enough to make a set of simple, yet effective mini-games. Sometimes,
that makes all the difference in the end.
--cut to [Mario Party vs. Gerstmann 5:55
- 6:11; text saying The Singleplayer]
So, let’s face it: we don’t all have friends.
Though I’ve played many of these games with friends, the footage I’ve captured has
been against CPUs because it’s hard to setup a game in this day and age. Especially
since I’m emulating them. For that reason, though Mario Party is certainly not
required to have a satisfying single-player: it’s a nice bonus when it does. There’s only one
single-player mode called Minigame Island. You get a few lives and have to survive a gauntlet
of mini-games until Toad challenges you to Slot Car Derby at the end, which I’m terrible at so
whoop dee doo. You get a Bumper Ball Maze for it… which is neat… I guess. I mean it’s not
not fun, I suppose. Really, in the original, the only way you’re gonna have fun by yourself is
if you start up Party Mode and set up three CPU players. The competence of these computer players
will make or break the single-player experience: too easy and it’ll be incredibly boring, too
hard and it’ll feel like playing a game of chess against an algorithm. Finding that balance
is nigh impossible: you just can’t emulate the way a human being will strategize, ironically this
is a nice indirect way of proving that strategy actually does exist in the series to some
extent, because you can feel its absence.
There are three difficulty selections: Easy,
Normal, and Hard. Typically in game development, difficulty of AI is developed from the top
down: programming the hardest version first, and adding handicaps the further you decrease that
difficulty. Let’s take Luigi again, on the hardest difficulty. His decision-making on boards will be
based on the most sensible move he could make, you can probably already see the problem with this but
on the surface it isn’t too offensive. Luigi will go after stars at all costs, taking the best paths
that will lead him to said stars. Bumping him down to Normal or Easy will mess with that programming,
adding in hindrances like “take a different path” or “prioritize something else.” I can’t say for
sure that this is how Mario Party’s AI is handled, since the code is property of Nintendo and hasn’t
been released to the public, but I can make some educated guesses. Rolling with this idea, I’m
only gonna discuss the effect Hard computer players have on the game, as it is the closest
to another human being you can possibly get.
In that sense, everything is in order. They tend
not to make dumb decisions and take pathways that lead them to the star. They steal stars from
the player in first place, they steal coins from the player who has the most: stuff that
seems sensible. There are limits, however; you can’t program geniuses, the AI need directives.
You need to program them a specific objective, like steal a star from the player in first
place: this doesn’t account for the amount of bonus stars another player who isn’t in first
place potentially has, or the likelihood of another player getting another star soon. It is
a strict, predictable behavior that becomes so easy to game after a while. It got to the point
where I could manipulate the computer players into stealing from each other to win the game
fairly easily by keeping my totals low, losing a few mini-games so that a computer doesn’t use a
boo steal on me, but on another computer instead. When you get to this point, this mindset, that
is when single-player Mario Party transforms into something fascinating. I wouldn’t describe “gaming
the system” in this respect fun by any means, since the AI, at least in the first title,
act pretty much exactly how you would expect them to and exploiting that behavior isn’t very
hard. Add to that the scattershot, unpredictable behavior in mini-games, and you’ll likely get
your hands on the mini-game and coin stars.
Some mini-games are indeed hard to game this
way: stuff like Musical Mushroom and Platform Peril rely solely on reaction time and platforming
ability. Computer players have a hard grip on this skill, and I very rarely came out on top against
them: especially in Musical Mushroom where it seems like they start running the very frame the
music stops. Mushroom Mix-up, on the other hand, is totally winnable. It may take a very long
time, but eventually the computer will mess up and that’ll be that. You can even exploit their
pathfinding to block them from landing on the mushroom, a tactic you can use on other players,
but is much more effective against such limited code. Most of them are easily winnable, which is
why it usually comes down to board tactics in the end. Though this stuff is fairly harmless, albeit
somewhat ineffective, I don’t see it as a major issue. You can realistically play single-player,
two-player, even three-player Mario Party with relatively minor hiccups: you just won’t get the
same exciting experience you would with a full crew. I don’t mind single-player modes and play
experiences: I do mind when that single-player consideration begins to encroach on the ability to
craft a meaningful multiplayer play experience.
There is a… progression structure to this game
that really shouldn’t exist, and to make matters worse: unless you’re playing with four friends all
the time, some of these shop items can be fairly pricey: 980 coins for Bowser’s Magma Mountain,
sheesh. You can potentially make more money with a Lucky or Casino coin box, but the Casino one
can actually lose you coins so it isn’t always the most ideal. You also need 100 stars to unlock
Eternal Star, and considering how I feel about the board overall: not hugely worth it in the end. The
real draw for me are the different blocks you can buy that change up the game: there’s a plus block
that gives you coins equal to your dice roll, a minus block that takes away coins equal to your
dice roll, a speed block that limits your dice from numbers 8 to 10, a slow block that limits
your dice from numbers 1 to 3, a warp block that switches your position on the board with another
player at random, and an event block that can give you coins, a free use of boo, or bowser. Each
of these blocks can be purchased for a fairly low amount of coins, and can be toggled on or
off at your leisure. They appear at random, so I can understand why some players would want
a few of these off; for me, they’re really fun. I’m not a huge fan of the warp block since it
gets rid of your roll, but the other blocks are fine by me. They are technically luck-based,
but the fact that they’re optional just adds to their appeal. If you’re a player who enjoys
the unknown and loves when a few shakeups occur to change up the game, none of these blocks can
seriously hinder you: they can take away coins, screw up a dice roll, or take you away from a
star. Compared to future games, they’re pretty tame. You also get an option to turn off Koopa
and Boo. If you want to prevent star steals, or prevent easy coins whenever you make a lap,
it’s nice to have the option to turn these off… after completing Eternal Star… and only on some
maps. It doesn’t make sense to place these options under weird barriers for the sake of increasing
playtime. This is a party game: playtime will be more natural than it will in other single-player
or even multiplayer games. Thing is, whether you’re up for a game of Mario Party has nothing
to do with what you’ll get out of it as a reward, not in the same way single-player games benefit
from level ups, or multiplayer games benefit from cosmetics. In an effort to squeeze out as much
content as humanly possible, they make it really hard to experience everything the game has to
offer unless you put in a godly amount of hours, or play on an emulator with a 100% save: whichever
works for you in the modern era I guess.
Nothing this game does is particularly
revolutionary, or overwhelmingly successful. The progenitor of one of my favorite
video game series is fairly decent, go figure. It’s aged in a few ways, it was really
the first of its kind so mistakes were bound to be made. It has a certain novelty the rest of
the games don’t have, the quirky control stick spinning that hasn’t aged well in the slightest,
the single player mini-games that never return, the experimental board gimmicks. I could
understand if you loved Mario Party 1 for being so different, so innovative for its time: but I
usually go for some of the future installments when I have friends over, who actually want to
play Mario Party with me. Still, you can’t go wrong with a round of Yoshi’s Tropical Island or
DK’s Jungle Adventure every once in a while. Thus, I’d like to give you my rankings of each game
and board to bookend the video. I’ll be doing this for each game in the series, because hey:
why not? I wouldn’t take them too seriously it’s just a fun way to end the video.
Mario Party 1 sits at the top, because there’s nothing else to even dethrone it yet. Think of
this as a placeholder for right now. Board-wise, here are how things stack up. The best board is
Yoshi’s Tropical Island, followed by DK’s Jungle Adventure, Mario’s Rainbow Castle, Wario’s Battle
Canyon, Peach’s Birthday Cake, Eternal Star, Luigi’s Engine Room, and Bowser’s Magma
Mountain. On the next episode of Chance Time, we’ll be taking a look at Mario Party
2 for the Nintendo 64. Catch you then.
I love his restrospectives, and especially mario party. This should be a fun watch
He has pretty good commentary. I would love to hear a 10 hour long video talking about all the games (1 hr per video).