“Who are you rooting for?” I asked my housemate, a non-player heckler watching a full-up game of Super Mario Party. Without missing a beat, he responded gleefully: “Chaos!” Advertisement Mario Party is a video board game series that’s all about swing. You get a star. You move a few spaces. You lose a star. You steal a star. Someone steals it back. You earn some coins. You win all the puzzle games, but you lose all the rhythm games. Then, somehow, thanks to the random roll of a die, you trigger a cartoon bomb with a gentlemanly gray mustache and all your coins vanish. A game of Mario Party is a grand swing from tragedy to triumph and back again, and the only reason why it’s so fun is because the whole emotional journey is told in the language of “weird Nintendo.” This post originally appeared 10/3/18. We’ve bumped it today for the game’s release. Some Mario Party games don’t strike that balance. Maybe they’re too cruel, or too infantile, or the mini-games aren’t preposterous enough. Super Mario Party, out October 5 for Switch, is one of the best entries in the long-running series because it harmonizes these competing elements of delight, catastrophe, and absurdity. Super Mario Party also takes advantage of the Switch’s versatility in surprising, if inconsistent, ways, shaking up the formula of the old-school multiplayer party game. Over the last weekend, my apartment was an open-door Super Mario Party party, and despite startling upsets between first and last place, and my once being referred to as a “stone cold Mario Party bitch,” we never once felt like quitting Super Mario Party, partly because of how well it harnessed human social interaction in the service of gameplay. Advertisement Let’s start with the basics: Super Mario Party is a four-player board game. Players choose a signature Nintendo character, roll some dice and move around the board collecting items and coins. Between each round, players are thrown into a three vs. one, two vs. two, or a free-for-all mini-game. Coins are awarded to winners. And with those coins, players can buy stars on the board if they pass by the star’s location. That location moves each time a player gets the star, which inspires some light strategizing. Overthinking ultimately doesn’t amount to much, because players can also win stars randomly from landing on certain spaces, or steal stars from each other. At the end of the game, Mario Party gifts extra stars to players who, say, landed on the most unlucky spaces, won the most mini-games, or traveled around the most. Whoever has the most stars wins. It’s clear from the start that Super Mario Party is a heavyweight in the series because, in this version, traditionally evil Nintendo characters like Bowser and Bowser Jr. are playable. Moving around the map with the game’s trademark villains doesn’t stop feeling novel, if a little unnatural—but don’t worry, NPCs still treat them with fear and reverence, even when they’re stealing their stars. Also playable, aside from the obvious cast of well-worn Nintendo heroes, are Shy Guy, Boo, Koopa Troopa, Monty Mole, Goomba, a single Hammer Bro, and Dry Bones. Super Mario Party Image : Nintendo Super Mario Party’s starting boards include Megafruit Paradise (floating tropical islands made of fruit), King Bob-omb’s Powderkeg Mine (a risky, bomb-littered lava den) and a lackluster stage called Whomp’s Domino Ruins. After that, you can unlock another board with more exciting gimmicks. There are, from what I can tell, only four boards. This is a travesty. Especially because just one or two feel native to a 2018 Mario Party Game, and not high-res reskins of previous boards. It is impossible for me to fathom why this is the case for one of Nintendo’s biggest titles on its big new console. The stages rely on a few tired Mario Party tropes, like landing on a space and getting warped or transported elsewhere, or paying a fee to move the big stone guy to another pathway, or landing on a certain space enough times to explode an area-of-effect bomb. They feel a little over-polished in places, lacking in idiosyncrasies. It’s cute to see sand squids on Megafruit Paradise, but there isn’t anything particularly fresh about the board design itself. A few quality-of life changes, like having a visual indicator of what number of spaces you’ll need to roll to hit a certain spot on the board, cut down on the silly, time-wasting stuff caused by previous games’ strange UI choices. Advertisement The action at the core of every Mario Party game, as with the board games that inspired them, is a fundamentally random one: Rolling a die. Super Mario Party takes a couple of steps towards making that a bit less random. While each character can always choose to roll a traditional six-sided die, they also each have their own custom dice block. For example, here are the six sides of Bowser’s die: -3 coins, -3 coins, 1, 8, 9, 10. So you have a 50 percent chance of moving a great many spaces, and a 33 percent chance of going nowhere and losing money. Other custom dice are less risky and more about stability, like Mario’s (1, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6). Switch Switch Super Mario Party Super Mario Party BACK OF THE BOX QUOTE "We're over." TYPE OF GAME Random-number kingmaker LIKED Excellent mini-games that make use of the Switch's versatility, innovative non-classic modes, more strategic board-gaming, low barrier to entry (with a high skill ceiling) DISLIKED Joy-Con only/non-handheld play feels uncompromising, apparently only four boards as of release, the lobby is unnecessary and needlessly silly to navigate DEVELOPER Nintendo PLATFORMS Switch Release Date October 5 PLAYED 15 hours This adds two layers of strategy: For one, picking your character is now more than a matter of pure aesthetics, since the custom dice are different. Two, you always have the choice of dice blocks, so you can pull out the best one for whatever situation you find yourself in. The other addition to the die-rolling aspect of the game is allies. Super Mario Party lets players team up with NPCs by landing on ally spaces and finding ally items. These spaces give players an NPC (chosen from the roster of characters that aren’t currently being played in the game) who follows them around and might even help out during some mini-games. Players will also then have the option to use their ally’s custom dice block whenever they roll. The ally also rolls an extra die for every turn, though, adding more spaces to your roll, so you need to take that into account when strategizing as well. You could also just not strategize at all and plan to get lucky. Super Mario Party Image : Nintendo Advertisement Now let’s get to what the people really care about: mini-games. Nintendo makes good use of its most multifaceted console in this updated take on the classic Mario Party formula. Super Mario Party’s mini-games draw on a frankly staggering array of genres and ideas, many of which take full advantage of the Joy-Con motion controls. There’s a mini-game in which the Joy-Con represents a pan handle and the player must cook each side of a cube of steak by flipping it over. It’s finicky, and requires a little swivel alongside a toss, but in a way that feels true-to-life. There’s a three vs. one mini-game in which the teams compete to see who can vacuum up the most dust bunnies. There’s a mini-game in which players must race each other in tricycles, which they pedal by whirling around a joy-con. There’s another in which a volcano explodes, exuding popcorn and rocks, and players must dodge the rocks to catch popcorn in a cup. Then, there’s my favorite, Slaparazzi, in which players earn the most points by being the closest to a moving camera. They only have the option to run and to punch. That leads to hilarious photographs of Rosalina punching Shy Guy out of the way for her chance in the spotlight. There are also wacky, WarioWare-ish mini-games, like one that asks players to take turns petting a giant worm in a forest clearing.<doc-sep>Screenshot : Nintendo ( The World Ends With You: The Final Remix ) Super Mario Party comes out on Friday. It’s the series’ debut on Switch and the first main entry since 2015’s ill-fated Mario Party 10 on Wii U. It has 80 new mini games, one of which even utilizes multiple Switches to create a shared, continuous screen. What it doesn’t have is handheld mode support, the first in a handful of Switch games this fall with hyper-specific controller demands that seem to run counter to the spirit of the Switch’s “play anywhere” mantra. Advertisement Super Mario Party supports up to four players locally, just like the first game did on the Nintendo 64 when it released in 1998. Whether docked and outputting to a TV or simply sitting with the kickstand out on a table top, you can play solo or with friends with everyone using their own Joy-Con. As confirmed on the game’s Japanese web page, it doesn’t support the use of the Switch Pro controller or dual Joy-Cons mounted to the screen in handheld mode. In theory this is because various mini games require the Joy-Con’s HD Rumble and gyroscope features, but in practice it means the game can’t be played while on the go with ease. This might be a small quibble in the grand scheme of things, but as someone who plays most of their Switch games during their commute and who is one of Mario Party’s few remaining diehard fans, it’s frustrating. And it’s not the only game coming out in the next few months that seems to be struggling with how to adapt to the Switch’s portability. The World Ends With You: The Final Remix comes out on October 12 and apparently only allows touch controls while in handheld mode. According to the game’s Nintendo webpage, the game offers Joy-Con controls or touch controls, but seemingly not a combination of the two.. When the original released on the DS in 2007, a combination of face-button and touch controls were used so that players could direct the game’s two main characters simultaneously. The new version of the game apparently offloads this hybrid approach entirely, with users in Japan—where the game is already out—noting that the Joy-Con controls stop registering once they’re attached to the Switch. Unless the North American version is drastically different in some way, which based on reports from when the game was shown at PAX West it doesn’t , this means that in handheld mode it plays similar to the iOS port but with additional story content and a few other extra features. Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee & Pikachu, which come out the month after, also have something wonky going on with the standard controls. While the game does not require motion controls to catch Pokémon, motion controls are utilized and can’t be turned off, a spokesperson for the Pokemon Company confirmed to IGN last week. The company pointed out that using motion controls won’t impact people’s ability to catch Pokemon, but the video it showed to IGN to demonstrate this apparently showed someone playing the game in handheld mode with the Switch placed flat against a table, making it still unclear whether there’s any way to avoid motion controls altogether. (Splatoon 2 works in a similar way in handheld mode but in that game, there’s an option to turn them off.) Kotaku reached out to Nintendo to try to clarify the quirky control schemes in each of these cases and the reasoning behind them, but the company did not respond. Advertisement Nintendo’s commitment to exploring new ways to play games is admirable, but the lack of options for defaulting to more traditional methods reminds me of the company’s refusal to make The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword playable without motion controls. Coming out late in the Wii’s life in 2011 no doubt didn’t help the game’s poor sales, but its unrelenting reliance on swinging your arms around to solve puzzles and defeat enemies probably didn’t help either. Even now I’d love for an HD remaster of it to get ported to Switch, but not if it can’t be played in handheld mode. Metroid Other M is perhaps the most infamous example of an otherwise interesting game hamstrung by weird control requirements. Its makers wanted the game to be easy to play, so they decided to make it utilize only the Wii Remote, ignoring the nunchuck portion and its thumb stick. The result was clumsy and scared a number of people off trying the game. “Remote-only would have been fine as a default, but the game would have controlled better, and elicited less frustration, if it supported a second control scheme for those of us who prefer to do things like control movement in three dimensions with an analog stick,” wrote Kotaku’s editor in chief Stephen Totilo in his 2010 review. Advertisement While none of Super Mario Party, TWEWY: The Final Remix, or Pokemon: Let’s Go’s control limitations are that glaring, they carry a whiff of the same obstinacy. For the Wii, a home console who’s big selling point was motion controls, lack of control customization was perhaps more understandable, but given that the Switch is meant to be the system you can play anywhere however you like, I hope this new trend is just an aberration.<doc-sep>Super Mario Party is only a few days away from launching on Nintendo Switch , on October 5 – and with 80 brand new minigames made just for the latest entry, there’s plenty of snack-sized fun for you to get your teeth into. Mario Party has always been about group experiences, and the eleventh game in the series, Super Mario Party, allows for up to four players depending on how many Joy-Con controllers you can get your hands on. We know there'll be a standalone mode for Super Mario Party mini-games. But this is the first Mario Party game to let you play standalone minigames online – with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, at least – meaning there’s plenty of opportunity to compete for first place on those leaderboards. For now, here’s our list of the five best mini-games we’ve seen on Super Mario Party so far. 1. Lit Potato For all its chirpy characters, Super Mario Party will continue the series’ longstanding tradition of bringing nail-biting tension to small-scale gameplay. Lit Potato takes on this mantel with glee, giving players and NPCs a handful of ticking bombs to pass round a circle until they literally blow up in someone’s face. Seeing the circle whittle down the final few is sure to put players on high alert. Players: 2v2 2. Shell Shocked Deluxe One of the smartest gimmicks to come out of the Nintendo Switch entry is the ability to use two separate Switch screens for 2v2 play, swiping across the touchscreens to decide where you want them to connect. You can only do this with a handful of games made for the format, but the ability to line up two screens in any configuration you want before firing cannons across the ether is nothing short of a marvel. Players: 2v2 Shell Shocked Deluxe in full co-op action 3. Nut Cases Get ready to rumble – HD rumble, that is. The advanced rumble features in each Joy-Con controller open up tons of new possibilities for mini-game play, and Nut Cases makes the most of them: a 2v2 challenge that has you shake crates of acorns to gauge how many are ‘rumbling’ around inside. A truly satisfying one to win. Players: 2v2 4. What a Racket What a Racket is a classic Mario Party experience: 1v3 tennis match that gives the larger team regular rackets and the sole player a hugely oversized swatter to knock bob-ombs over the net. It looks simple, but trust us, it’s a lot harder than it looks. Players: 1v3 5. Drop Quiz Quizzes are rarely fun, but Super Mario Party’s take is a welcome exception. Drop Quiz plays a short reel of supporting characters like Toad and Kooper Trooper carrying fruit, requiring players to memorize and answer who and what they saw. The catch is that one player will be choosing what question is asked, meaning you’ll be fighting hard to pre-empt your friends’ attention spans and guessing what they might have missed. Players: 1v3 Honorable mentions With over 80 mini-games to play, and some potential extra content to unlock if you manage to try out each one throughout the game, we’ve only scratched the surface here. But half of the enjoyment comes from each mini-game’s quirky premise and dazzling puns.<doc-sep>
Mario Party is, at this point, a 20-year-old Nintendo franchise that feels like a constant staple of every system. Along with series like Mario Kart and Mario’s various sports outings, a Mario Party for Nintendo Switch felt inevitable. The game’s contents feel inevitable, too: You play on a digital board game with your friends as Mario universe avatars, and you all end up possibly disliking each other at the end. Despite — or maybe because of — the predictable formula, Mario Party hasn’t been an essential purchase for Nintendo console owners for many iterations. But Super Mario Party adds enough to the formula to feel like a must-buy for the Nintendo Switch, which is fitting for the social gaming powerhouse that the console has become. The base formula is one you definitely know, but small touches to the main game and standout side experiences offered me plenty of surprises in a series that can sometimes feel one-note. While the Switch has already had some fantastic single-player experiences, this is easily one of its biggest party game highlights, which the system felt like it was really lacking until this fall. In Super Mario Party, up to four human players can traverse a game board, rolling dice to progress from space to space. (The game’s return to the original formula is welcome. Mario Party 9 and 10 were particularly boring, as all the characters were locked in one cart together, traversing around the map as a unit.) Star collection is the ultimate goal; they’re purchased from Toadette, who travels around the map to random spots each time a player buys a star from her. You can foil your fellow players, but the map has plenty of its own obstacles: an angry Blooper smashing a bridge, or a Thwomp that will only move for coins. And, like always, each round is punctuated by a minigame, culled from a new collection. A handful of changes add just enough depth to improve the formula. Characters each have their own custom dice blocks, which they can choose to roll instead of the traditional 1-6 block. The dice offer their own advantage and disadvantages. Bowser can roll a 10 with his special block, but he can also lose coins and not move at all. You can unlock additional blocks through each play session by earning allies, who also add small numbers to each of your rolls on every turn, a mechanic borrowed from the handheld-only Mario Party: Star Rush. Not only is it cute to see all your allies — a who’s who of secondary Mario characters — but accumulating a squad is a good strategy to push yourself ahead. If you’re tired of competing with each other (and having your friendships ended by the game’s arbitrary distribution of star rewards during the final award ceremony), Super Mario Party’s River Survival mode is a breath of fresh air. The cooperative mode sends four players in a raft down river rapids, which they have to navigate using motion controls to pump the oars. While it may be shocking to hear something positive associated with the phrase “motion controls,” the act of padding a boat cooperatively — and attempting to communicate effectively — had my crew rolling with laughter. The mode’s minigames, which are triggered by navigating through balloons floating on the river, are also cooperative, and emphasize strong communication skills. They’re also critical to adding time to your run, as your main foe in River Survival is the constantly ticking timer. Each win had us all cheering for our victories, helping each other along and relishing at the in-game group high-fives you can perform each time you succeed. Motion controls extend to the game’s rhythm-based Sound Stage mode, which feels like a second cousin to the Rhythm Heaven franchise. It’s a dizzying series of minigames aimed at testing your rhythm while performing certain offbeat activities. But what I found most amazing was how much the Joy-Cons have improved motion control technology. Yes, your forearms may still get tired from relentlessly pumping an imaginary baton. Go against your Wii Remote instincts and avoid flailing with large arm motions, and this mode becomes a lot more fun — though maybe only for short amounts of time. The Joy-Cons are standout controllers for the Mario Party franchise. The huge variety of minigames in Super Mario Party harness them in creative ways, like using the accelerometer to fly an aircraft or bring a magnifying glass into focus.