Super Mario Party Expects Me To High Five These Jerks

Mario Party is a cruel game that intentionally stokes chaos between friends. Last night I agreed to play the latest game, Super Mario Party, and discovered that this new entry in the franchise has tried to add a form of sportsmanship by making your characters high five each other. It does not have the intended result.

In order to make your characters high five, you take your Joy-Con and kind of swing it in the air. If all the players do this at the same time, then their characters high five. You’ll be prompted to do it at the beginning and end of the game, as well as after some mini-games. At first, I thought it was cute. Then I started to lose.

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I don’t think of myself as a competitive person, until I start competing. Then I remember that I love winning. It feels great to be the best, even at something as inconsequential as Mario Party. Last night, I started out with a commanding lead—I had three stars, and the other players trailed behind me with one or no stars—and I was feeling pretty cocky. Then another player stole a star from me, as is their right.

Mario Party is full of random bullshit like this. The first star I got, I had actually stumbled on at random by landing on a “hidden block.” My second star, I had stolen myself, so I couldn’t really fault anyone else for stealing one from me. It was just that, at that point, we were almost at the end of the game, and the star had moved pretty far away from me. I wasn’t going to have a chance to get another before the game ended, meaning that my efforts had been for nothing. Even after my star got stolen, Mario Party still expected me to high five all the other players. Well, I didn’t fucking want to.

I’m not going to say I flubbed my final high five on purpose. I tried to get the weird swinging motion correct, I swear! I just wasn’t feeling it, and thusly the character I was playing, Rosalina, did not high five. Today I learned that Mario Party is actually prepared for this scenario. Each character has a unique reaction to being a refused a high five. Waluigi’s is pretty funny:

Super Mario Party is a game for children, and encouraging children not to get hard feelings when they lose, or to celebrate each others’ successes, is a good thing. But I am a grown ass adult, and I refuse to be mature about losing. I was so close, and ended up in a measly second place. I will be bitter about this until the day I die.