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EX's Mario Party (N64)
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| [January 19, 2007 07:26:49 PM]
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My final thoughts on Mario Party are that although it lacks a strong story or narrative, the gameplay is fairly well tuned and easy to pick up and learn while remaining difficult/challenging to master the mini-games that you play throughout the game. In this regard, the gameplay is well balanced (with the exception of the thumb-stick rotation mini-games which are outright). However, I dislike how time-consuming the game is; the main board game can only be played with 4 players (people or the computer) and requires a minimum of 20 turns, which can easily exceed an hour if not two or more for a single game of Mario Party; I would have hoped that Nintendo would try and streamline the game a bit more so it goes by a bit faster by cutting redundant/unnecessary dialog or cutscenes/animation. Also, the reward system of obtaining stars and coins for unlocking extra features is too much in favor of playing multi-player, making it all the more tedious and massively time-consuming to rack up a decent amount of coins if you don't have the people or controllers for 4 people to play at once.
The slow reward system and sheer time-consumption has discouraged me from wanting to pick up board-game type games for a while because of the lack of enthusiasm and time for getting people together to play such a game makes it a tough game to pick up and actually play through and enjoy it to its fullest potential. Thus, while an innovative idea, I think it takes 'too much effort' to actually enjoy it, giving it more shelf-space value than game-play value.
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| [January 19, 2007 03:11:59 PM]
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I remember first playing Mario Party back in elementary school with my friends, but for this replay, was unable to obtain multiple controls for the N64 that I borrowed, so was unable to play multi-player games, so this log is based entirely off of single-player gameplay experience.
The defining game structure of Mario Party is that of a board game presented in video game environment, taking advantage of not only the 3D graphical capabilities of the N64 system to a large extent, but the video game media to implement the astoundingly large collection of mini-games. Along this line, it reminds me of some of the other early N64 games like Super Mario 64 and Star Fox, which took games previously designed in 2D and turned them into ground-breaking 3D games (of their time). The game controls were extremely simple, making the game easy to learn how to play, but hard to master, particularly with the mini-games.
The main feature of the game was the virtual board-game, in which players moved around the board trying to collect stars and coins until the last turn (pre-specified) was reached, which a random mini-game taking place between each turn, giving an additional opportunity to get more coins and adding to the mix in the gameplay. The sheer variety of mini-games made it all the more interesting; there were single-player, 1 vs. 3, 2 vs. 2, 4-player free-for-all and cooperative mini-game types that evoked a much wider range of approach to playing the mini-games in attempt to be the supreme victor. I was surprised not only at the number of mini-games, but that they were mostly very different, and well designed, displaying/testing the capabilities of the N64 system. The mini-game where you get to tweek the features on Bowser's face to try and get it to match the example picture--actual polygon modification in-game--was very intriguing. While I was able to get a god glimpse and the technical innovations of the game with a single-player play-through, I was unable to experience the multiplayer aspect, which Mario Party was really geared for; if my knowledge serves me correctly, all coins and stars earned by all (human) players are counted towards. This leads to the next major component of the game:
By playing through the game, players unlock, or gain access to more maps (game boards) to play on, which follows a rough story line of 'trying to become the biggest superstar by collecting stars.' Additionally, players can unlock or purchase new mini-games or random game-events from the item and mini-game shops to add new dimensions of difficulty to the game. As a part of this there is the Mini-game Island, where players have to try and play through and meet certain winning conditions on all of the mini-games to unlock access to most of the mini-games for play in the main board-game and also individual mini-game practice or the mini-game-only board.
While the overall game concept by Nintendo (of a video-board game) was novel and unique, it failed to compel me to keep playing to unlock the majority of the remaining mini-games for practice-mode due to the rate of star/coin collection when playing with only one controller/player. By picking up the game, its instantly obvious that it was intended as a multi-player game, and performs as such. I found myself constantly struggling with/against NPC opponents even when they were set to easy difficulty because they already know and understand the rules of the game, giving them an unfair advantage against me.
While the AI was challenging, it was still defeatable once I started to master the mini-games. However, while the more strategy and skill-oriented mini-games were more interesting, there were a few 'button-mashing' games such as the balloon burst. The worst of all, however, were the 'palm-grinding' mini-games that required you to rapidly rotate the thumb-stick several times per second--constantly. Not only did I feel very stupid playing those mini-games, but it started killing my wrist after a while because of repetitive strain. It probably isn't all that great for the controller either, although it may have been a conspiracy by Nintendo to get you to destroy your controllers to get you to keep buying new ones...
There was one thing from Mario Party that remains even more heavily on my mind about Mario Party, however. Despite the game having an 'E for Everyone' rating, I found the mini-game Grab Bag (a game in which you try and steal money from other players by running up behind them and looting from their money sack) to be rather... disturbing. Call me sick/twisted, but the characters looked like they were actually humping each other. Perhaps its just poor animation or my lewd imagination, but I found it both irritating and disturbing to keep getting 'raped' due to my difficulty maneuvering around the npcs.
Overall, I'd say I found the game challenging to play and interesting to study as an example of innovative game design, but not really very fun to play single-player because it is really a game that's only oriented towards social multi-player play.
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EX's Mario Party (N64)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Thursday 18 January, 2007
GameLog closed on: Wednesday 31 January, 2007 |
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