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"Who are you looking for?", I asked my roommate, a non-gamer, who was watching a full game of Super Mario Party. Without losing a beat, he replied happily, "Chaos!
Mario Party is a series of video board games entirely devoted to swing. You get a star. You move a few spaces. You lose a star. You steal a star. Someone is flying it back. You win coins. You win all the puzzle games, but you lose all the rhythm games. Then, one way or another, thanks to the random result of a die, you trigger a cartoon bomb with a gray mustache and your pieces disappear. A game of Mario Party It's a big leap from tragedy to triumph and back, and the only reason it's so much fun is because the whole emotional journey is told in the language of "weird Nintendo."
Some Mario Party The games do not reach this balance. They may be too cruel, too childish or the mini-games are not absurd enough. Super Mario Party, released on October 5 for Switch, is one of the best entries in this long series, as it harmonizes these competing elements of pleasure, disaster and absurdity. Super Mario Party also takes advantage of the versatility of the switch surprisingly, albeit contradictory, stirring the formula of the traditional multiplayer party game. Over the last weekend, my apartment was an open door Super Mario Party feast, and despite the surprising upheavals between first and last place, and my nicknamed the "cold stone" Mario Party slut, "we had never wanted to quit smoking Super Mario Partypartly because of its ability to exploit human social interaction in the service of gambling.
Let's start with the basics: Super Mario Party is a four-player board game. Players choose a Nintendo character, roll dice, and move around the board to collect items and coins. Between each round, players are thrown into a three-on-one, two-on-two or free game minigame. The coins are awarded to the winners. And with these coins, players can buy stars on the board if they pass near the position of the star. This location moves whenever a player gets the star, which inspires a lighthearted strategy. Thinking in the end is not much, because players can also win random stars by landing on certain boxes or by flying stars. At the end of the game, Mario Party give extra stars to players who, for example, have landed on the most unlucky spaces, won the most mini-games or traveled the most often. Whoever has the most stars wins.
It is clear from the beginning that Super Mario Party is a heavyweight of the series because, in this version, the traditionally perverse Nintendo characters such as Bowser and Bowser Jr. are playable. If you walk around the map with the villains of the game, the villains do not stop appearing new, although a little abnormal – but do not worry, the NPCs always treat them with fear and reverence, even when they steal their stars . Players Shy, Boo, Koopa Troopa, Monty Mole, Goomba, a simple Hammer Bro and Dry Bones are also playable.
Super Mario PartyStarting groups include Megafruit Paradise (Tropical Floating Islands of Fruit), King Bob-omb's Powderkeg Mine (a very dangerous lava lair and bombs) and a dull scene called Whomp's Domino Ruins. After that, you can unlock another board with more exciting tips. From what I can say, there are only four tips. It's a parody. Especially because one or two are worth writing at home. I can not understand why this is the case of one of the biggest titles of Nintendo on his new big console.
The steps support a few tired people Mario Party tropes, such as landing on a space and being deformed or transported elsewhere, or paying a fee to move the big man on another path, or landing on a certain space long enough to blow up a bomb at a different area. ;effect. They feel a bit too polite in places, without idiosyncrasies. It's cute to see sand squid on Megafruit Paradise, but the design of the stage is not particularly cool. Some quality of life changes, such as having a visual indicator of the number of spaces that you will need to roll to reach a certain place on the board, reduce the idiotic and time-consuming stuff caused by the ### 39, strange user interface of previous games. choices.
Action at the heart of each Mario Party The game, like the board games that inspired them, is fundamentally random: roll a dice. Super Mario Party take some steps to make it a little less random. . Although each character can still choose to roll a traditional six-sided dice, he also has his own custom dice block. For example, here are the six faces of the Bowser die: -3 pieces, -3 pieces, 1, 8, 9, 10. So you have a 50% chance of moving a lot of spaces and 33% of not not go anywhere and lose money. Other custom dice pose less risk and stability, like Mario's (1, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6).
QUOTE OF THE BOX
"We are finished."
TYPE OF GAME
Random number Kingmaker
LOVE
Excellent mini-games that exploit Switch's versatility, unconventional innovative modes, more strategic board games, a reduced barrier to entry (with a high skill cap)
DISHIKED
The game Joy-Con only / without a handheld is uncompromising, apparently, only four panels at the exit, the lobby is useless and unnecessarily ridiculous.
This adds two levels of strategy: First, choosing your character is now more than a matter of sheer aesthetics because custom dice are different. Secondly, you always have the choice of dice blocks, so you can get the best of them, no matter what situation you are in.
The other allies are the ally of others. Super Mario Party allows players to team with NPCs by landing on friendly spaces and finding friendly items. These spaces give players an NPC (chosen from the list of characters that are not yet played in the game) that follows them and can even help in mini-games. Players will also have the opportunity to use their allyCustom dice are blocked each time they launch. The ally also rolls an additional die for each turn, adding more space to your cast, so you should consider this when developing strategies. You may also have no strategy at all and no luck.
Now let's see what really interests people: mini-games. Nintendo uses its most multifaceted console well in this updated version of the classic Mario Party formula. Super Mario PartyThe mini-games use a range of frankly stunning genres and ideas, many of which take full advantage of Joy-Con's movement controls. There is a mini-game in which the Joy-Con represents a pot handle and the player must cook each side of a steak cube by turning it over. It's capricious, and you have to rotate a little next to a throw, but realistically. There is a three-on-one mini-game in which teams face each other to see who can suck the most dust bunnies. There is a mini-game in which players have to compete in tricycles, which they peddle by turning around a joy-con. Another volcano in which a volcano explodes, exhaling popcorn and rocks, forces players to dodge the rocks to catch popcorn in a cup.
Then there is my favorite, Slaparazzi, in which players earn the most points by being the closest to a moving camera. They only have the opportunity to run and hit. This leads to hilarious photographs of Rosalina pushing Shy Guy to burst. There are also crazy people WarioWaremini-games, like the one that asks the players to caress in turn a giant worm in a forest clearing. Whoever wakes the worm loses. These games are when Super Mario Party is at its peak. Mini-games are both ridiculous, exhilarating, fun and fun. total bullshitwho, if you have already played Mario Party, is an ideal combination of qualities.
It's a noob-friendly Super Mario Party, suitable for a user-friendly console that sold 20 million units. It's a lot of people to please. Super Mario Party will certainly please many of them, as well as occasional parents or non-gamers. Switch owners will inevitably change in a match. Most minigames are new and difficult to master, even in normal mode. For me, playing more than that in a few days does not bother me. It has been my pleasure to dig deeper. Nintendo is the master of the skill cap formula for reduced entry barriers, and in most Super Mario Party mini-games, this sounds like a guiding principle.
Mario Party has the reputation of breaking friendships and dividing or dividing. My theory is that this is partly because many iterations are not super fun, so players feel the need to spice things up by pricking each other. It's also partly because it's fun to watch someone in the eye and ruin their day by pretending that it's all part of the game. Super Mario Party The minigames feel unnecessarily cruel, forcing players to give meaning and bias to their behavior at play. I like that, but for me, it reduces corruption, treats the devil and destroys each other – the dynamic social engineering flourishes, but that other players can find the villain.
Super Mario Party makes efforts to mitigate the behavior ruining the friendship. At different times in the game, a maternal (and somewhat condescending) voice says, "Ready …… .. Yeah!"As players get the order to do high air with the Joy-Cons. The reward: some coins. Ironically, this inspired some snipes with friends that were not coordinated enough to catch the extra pieces.
There is more to Super Mario Party as the bread and butter board game of the series. There are other modes that vary on Mario Party themes, and they are not disposable. They are charming, intelligent and surprising. Players can access it using a menu that Super Mario Party refers to a "block of party" – perhaps a sad reminiscence of Nintendo's Wii U days – or wandering aimlessly in a poorly appointed lobby, stopping at various stands to participate in different fashions. The lobby (called the Party Plaza) is not cute enough to compensate for its inefficiency, but the game seems a little more experimental.
The most important of these modes is Partner Party, a cooperative version of the classic fashion in which players can move freely across the board and share the rolls of dice. Coordinating movements with another player and developing strategies on how to get stars or outsmart opponents add a much appreciated – and somewhat adult – level of complexity to what is often referred to as half boring game. That's the other half who is suffering here. While Mario PartyThe team mini-games are excellent and require screaming cross instructions; they are the only ones you can play in this mode. Having such a small part of the mini-games available is really disappointing.
Another mode, Survival in the river, has four players using their Joy-Cons to paddle on a raft on a tumultuous river. Between dodging and gaining speed, players can hit bubbles to unlock cooperative mini-games. Winning gives them more time to complete the multi-branch course. It's pure joy, again, the mini-games are recycling quickly. And Soundscape, probably the craziest thing I've ever seen in a Mario Party is a treasure trove of rhythmic mini-games in which players stand up and move their controllers according to certain activities: draw tablecloths under stacked wine glasses, rotate batons as a color guard and hit pose Soundscape works great because of the incredible music, which oscillates between the honky-tonk and Nintendo remixes (with NPC fans clapping and beating in the background). There is also an online multiplayer mode, which Kotaku could not test at the check hour because the service is not yet online.
In Super Mario PartyIn the first trailer, one detail intrigued us, my colleagues and myself: mini-games that used two Switch tablets side by side. The models of the millennial stacked glamor trailer took two Nintendo Switches (technology worth $ 600) with a tank game on each of them, then placed them in the middle of a cafe and connected them to each other. a swipe. Transparently, the tanks rolled from the first screen to the second and fired at each other. What? At E3, Nintendo would not speak Kotaku about how it worked. I still think it's literal witchcraft. (This is probably the local wireless.)
IRL, these games are crazy. Seriously bonkers. It turns out that the perfect setting for the tank game, Shell Shocked Deluxe, East Actually something like a cafe: a place to spend some social time with friends. There is also a baseball game, Mini league baseball, which gives rise to little cries and the angry fist pounding me. Two players throw and catch balls while two others hit and are on deck. The result is a very competitive team game that, with two Switch consoles, allows one team to have the stick perspective and the other the face-off. Hustle Puzzle and Banana split are ruthlessly cooperative, asking two pieces to reason spatially in unison, and in the latter case, twist two consoles so that parts of a puzzle line up.
Here's the thing: not everyone has access to two switches. It's a bit presumptuous to assume that even the majority of Switch owners would do it. And this presumption is not limited to these mini-games: to even bring four people to play a game of Mario Partyyou need four Joy-Cons. In fact, each player must play with a single Joy-Con held horizontally. I hate that. I do not know if that is rational. Maybe some of Mario PartyThe mini-games require improved motion controls and Joy-Con force feedback, but could not they have been done with a Pro controller?
You can not play Super Mario Party in any other way – not with a Pro controller, neither with the dual Joy-Cons, nor in portable mode. For me, the latter is particularly wild. Board games like Super Mario Party are the only occasions I'll connect my switch, and yet it's incredibly strange that I can not even navigate a menu in this game without detaching my Joy-Cons.
With these modes, Nintendo is flirting with something new. However, given the few cards offered by the classic game mode, I can not help but wonder what compromises have been made.
Despite some minor misses, Super Mario Party offers precisely what I wanted: a refreshed, ridiculous and largely replayable virtual board game that will not end my friendships, but could put some at risk. It is saturated with small (and big) keys that give the character of the game, but respects rest and improves the classic mechanics. Chaos still prevails, but with more opportunities for strategy, Super Mario Party has aged to the rhythm of his audience.
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