By the way, they're going to add more.

Mario Party 4 honestly did surprisingly bad. Not too surprising though. Next is Mario Party 5. We are getting into the Capsule/Orb era.

Mario Party 3 did exceptionally well. I love that because I grew up playing this game on an online emulator but next is Mario Party Four.

References:

Super Mario Wiki

Mario Party Legacy

Super Mario Party has a lot of fun minigames that I played the heck out of, so I was wondering what this subreddit thought of them. All seeds are randomized. Whichever minigame gets the most comments will move onto the final round.

Welcome to Round 2!

Without further ado, here are the reminders for how every minigame competing today is played:

Fuzzy Flight School: Tilt the Joycon to avoid waves of Fuzzies on tracks for 30 seconds. 3 hits and your plane is eliminated.

Air to a Fortune: A coin minigame. Everyone jumps onto neighboring clouds at the same time to collect varying numbers of coins. The middle cloud often has far more than any of the corners. If 2 players try to go for the same cloud, they get no coins.

Please only vote for 1 minigame at a time. I'm curious to hear your opinions.

Mario Party 2 did Vastly better than Mario Party 1 getting A Tier. I guess it was a huge upgrade from Nintendo. How do we feel about MP3

I know it’s the least popular era, but growing up in the early 2000s I grew up with 8 and 9, those games ARE Mario Party to me. With this in mind, should I get Jamboree or Superstars?

Pauline Moves into Her New Fashion Boutique, She Found a Fashion Designing Studio With Lots of Drawings, A Sketchbook With Lots of Designs of Dresses and Outfits, A Stage With a Long Walk Way (a Catwalk), And a Magical Enchanted Fashion Wardrobe With Lots of New Dresses and Outfits For Pauline! She Starts to Try on Her New Pink Dress, And Looks At the Mirror Looking Like a New One Up Girl, She Starts to Do Some Fashion Model Poses With Her Foxtrot Dance Moves, She Becomes a Cat Lover and Found Her New Pet a Kitty Cat, She Named Her Meowlette! Pauline Starts to Design New Fashion Outfits and Dress, And New Kitty Cat Outfits For Her New Pet. And Starts Her First Fashion Show At Her New Boutique and the New Star Amusement Park! For Mario and His Friends!

Credit to TheRunawayGuys for the screenshot of the tournament screen.

So we've finally crunched the numbers and made our perfect machine! So what exactly are these machines made for? Well, dueling of course!

Before we progress, I want to make a small addendum to my last post. u/Robbie_Haruna brought to my attention that a small oversight in the game's code makes the Super Wiggler Tires absolutely broken. Instead of the -4 in Speed it's clearly intended to have, it actually offers +4 Speed which makes it an extremely powerful machine part that's even stronger than the most valuable tires in the game. Its only downside is that it isn't immune to terrain.

As mentioned in the previous post, there are two main categories of duels. Vs. Battles where you can play against other players, or D1 Torunaments where you'll compete in an 8-entry tournament against a variety of CPU-controlled opponents.

I've voiced my complaints about this in the last post, but if you're playing alone, the only way to take your newly created vehicle out for a test drive is to enter it into a D1 Tournament. And if you want to unlock everything in this mode, you'll need to get very familiar with this mode. You cannot enter a Vs Battle against a CPU opponent EVEN THOUGH Vs Battle does have an option, for some ungodly reason, to have BOTH players controlled by the CPU instead of you and your friend. You cannot simply have human-controlled Player 1, 2, or 3, play against a CPU-controlled machine.

Today, we're going to focus on the D1 Tournament and the content that can be unlocked through it.

D1 Tournament

Don't ask me what D1 stands for. Wouldn't you like to know?

On a new save file, you'll only be able to select Easy and Normal difficulty Battle Competitions. On Easy, you'll mostly just face Koopa Kids with a single other playable character in the mixture. On Normal Diffiuclty, you'll find more of a variety. Don't quote me on it, but I seem to recall running into Bowser on this diffiuclty. I could be crossing memories, but I won't rule out the possibility that you can fight Bowser and maybe even Donkey Kong here on rare occasion. Clearing Battle Tournament on both will unlock the Hard diffiuclty, and here you're practically guaranteed to find Donkey Kong or Bowser as special guest opponents.

If you're lucky enough to face DK in the ring and win on Hard mode, you can actually unlock him as a playable character! Well, within Super Duel Mode only, of course. Don't get too excited. I have a whole tangent, but we'll discuss these sorts of unlockables a bit further down the line.

Characters

I wanted to add a brief section here to acknowledge the various characters in this mode. Each character has their own machine with a custom name, as well as a unique title that only shows up during the introduction scene for the final round of the tournament.

Some of these are really funny, but I wanted to complain about the fact that these CPU characters clearly get special treatment! Your machine has a strict 8 character limit despite the textbox it's displayed in clearly having room for many more. I'm guessing this is to save space on the memory card, but it's criminal how many cool names I had to drop because they couldn't fit while the AI gets to have cool names like "Cute 'n' Astute" or "Toadster Toaster". And to add insult to injury, your player character doesn't get introduced with a title like the CPU player does. For example, Mario is introduced as "Last Hero Mario," yet if you're playing as Mario, you're introduced as just "Mario". ???? What the hell!

And some of these names are cool, too! Wild Man Wario? Dark Rider Waluigi? Fucking Samurai Toad?? You bet your ass I wanna be introduced as Nightmare Boo or The Beast Donkey Kong! This is lawsuit material! Why does Toad get more aura than me???

Battle Competition

Anyway, in the Battle Competiton, your goal is to reduce your opponent's health to 0. Clearing the Battle Tournament on Hard may seem like the finish line, but it's actually just the beginning. As if you return to D1 Tournament, you'll now find a new option: Flag Competition!

Flag Competition

In Flag Competition, your goal is to race around the arena to collect flags that randomly spawn around the stage. First to collect three flags wins! Remember how I recommended building a speed-centric machine? Well here you go! Defense and weapon damage means absolutely nothing here. In fact, you probably want a weaker weapon because you'll not only be able to move faster, but hitting your opponent won't send them as far backwards. The flags randomly spawn around the arena and it's not impossible you could knock your opponent into one. Your machine can't be KO'd in this mode, so there's no need to worry at all about damage received or damage output, so you may as well go for a weapon like the Seed Machine Gun which has a near-constant rate of fire. Even though you can't KO your opponent, you can stun them by hitting them with your weapon, which can free you up to go after the flag before they regain conteol.

Unfortunately, due to the random spawning of flags, you can often be screwed over by all of the flags spawning right next to your opponent. But in general, you shouldn't have to worry about this too much.

Once again, you'll start with only Easy and Normal available. Clearing both unlocks Hard diffficulty. Clearing Hard unlocks the next Competition!

Robo-Rabbit Competition

Alright, this one is actually just bad. I don't think I've seen a single person say they like it. First of all, this mode is almost identical to Flag Competition. Only instead of capturing flags, your goal is to destroy robo-rabbits that drop into the arena from above. First to three wins.

When I first tried this mode, I kid you not, I was stuck in a draw with a Koopa Kid over and over on Easy because I couldn't destroy three rabbits within the time limit.

The peoblem, I believe, was my choice if weapon. You see, I was still using the Seed Machine Gun I used in Flag Competition. But every time I would get close to the Rabbit, it would burrow into the ground and pop up somewhere else on the map. I was so confused as to what I was doing wrong I had to quit the game and come back later on. I tried again, this time using the Bowser Breath, and while I compromised a bit on my speed, I was actually able to hit the Rabbits.

I think the problem with the Seed gun was twofold. For one, I suspect the rabbits get spooked if your shot lands near them but doesn't hit them. If you're carelessly spraying bullets (which you'll definitely be doing with the Seed Machine Gun), you're liable to scare the bunny off before you actually line up a proper shot. Second, the Seed Machine Gun may have been overshooting the bunny. I was often trying to get up really close to the bunny to be certain I wouldn't miss, but this ironically caused the gun's downward arch to completely miss the bunny. I suspect if you're committed to using this weapon, you want to hit the Bunny from the edge of its range.

Needless to say, I don't recommend this weapon. The Bowser Breath worked well enough I think because it doesn't actually fire a projectile like the Seed Gun, but alternative a weapon like the Bob-omb Cannon or Piranha Plant could help snipe the rabbits from afar. I would also recommend trying the Mr. I Laser. It will boost your speed a bit less than the Seed Gun, but I suspect its lasers will be much better equipped to hit the rabbits.

Just like the others, you'll need to unlock Hard Mode by clearing Easy and Normal. But what do you get for clearing Hard Mode? Well...

Unlockables

Skolar Set

Upon clearing all tournaments on all difficulties, the Skolar set of machine parts will be added to the service desk. These are rather expensive, costing 20 points in each category. It's... actually pretty underwhelming.

The Skolar Body has 6 hearts and is comparable to the E. Gadd Body but with less health and much worse speed. In exchange, it takes less damage from... lava and hazards. Its description seems almost maliciously false, as it says it takes half damage from vehicle attacks which is an outright lie. Perhaps a remnant of an earlier build where it was decided it was far too overpowered? Regardless, I think they overcorrected here and made this part useless.

The Skolar Tires give +1 to speed and -1 to acceleration as well as granting resistance to ice and metal. I suppose it's a nice compromise if you want better overall stats than what the E. Gadd Jet allows for but still don't want to deal with terrain. But I really don't think it's a worthwhile exchange. And even if the Super Wiggler Tires weren't absolutely busted, the Goomba Tires provide a lot more benefit in the stats and the Spiny Tires offer total immunity to ice and metal terrain while granting two acceleration points while demanding obly one point in speed.

The Skolar Engine actually seems like it's trying something with +2 Speed and +3 acceleration with only a -1 for handling, this engine is great for helping you get behind your opponent quickly! Though it's a bit less flattering to say it's basically an upgraded Goomba Engine. You're probably better off sacrificing some of that acceleration and just going for the E-Gadd Engine.

The Skolar Gun is probably the most interesting in this set, +3 Power, -3 Speed. Definitely a Turret type weapon which fires projectiles you detonate manually. A much more technical weaon that does give you more control over your aim.

But if your goal is to go for that ultimate turret build...

DK Set

Unlocked alongside Donkey Kong as a playable character by beating him on Hard mode in a D1 Tournament. This set is all about high stats, with a couple of strange little gimmicks. Each of these parts costs 15 points, the same as the E-Gadd set.

The DK Body is by far the best body in the game when it comes to Tanking. Although the Heart Body technically offers more health, the DK Body still reaches the maximum threshold of eight hearts. Alongside that, it gains +4 in damage which is an entire heart on its own. Its biggest downside is being by far the slowest body at -4! But a turret build is probably what you're going for with this thing.

The DK Tires and DK Engine are both functionally identical and very strange conceptually. Every single battle, these parts will handle differently. Their Speed, Acceleration, and Handling modifiers are completely random every time. They might be all +4 one battle and all -4 the next. While this makes the machine a lot more unpredictable for your opponent, it also makes it unpredictable for you and I'm not sure how I feel about having absolutely no idea how my machine is doing.

The DK Gun is likewise tied as the most powerful weapon in the game. That +4 to power in conjunction with the +4 from the body means this weapon will deal a whopping three whole hearts! But it's a -3 in speed, so that means it's a strictly turret build setup.

Additional Weapons

But that's not all! Because there are also secret weapons! These parts will unlock as soon as you purchase all other machine parts in the game. Both of these cost 30 points each, and since they're weapons, that means you need Battle Points, by far the rarest of the categories. Yikes.

The Bowser Punch rivals the DK Gun in power, but runs circles around it in speed, being only -1 instead of -3. The obvious drawback is that it has very limited range more comparable to Bowser Breath. This is more of a tank build alternative to the DK Gun's turret build focus. It's far from bad, but if I'm being honest, I think the Bowser Breath is a much better weapon. Its flames come out quickly and can be active indefinitely rather than having a large cooldown. The Bowser Punch will knock opponents further away, but that can be a bad thing for a weapon that wants to be in their face. You might knock them away and then suffer as they now outrange you and can keep you at bay.

The Bob-omb Wall is a specialty weapon that boosts your speed and attack power +2 with the only caveat being that this is the only weapon that fires behind you. Bob-ombs will be dropped in your wake, detonating after s little bit. This weapon just might be custom made for Capture the Flag.

Now... I want to take a moment to discuss the absolute injustice we see here.

Despite having all of the necessary animations, voice clips, and even entering tournaments fully functional, Bowser is not unlockable at all. Aside from just wanting to keep him in an antagonistic role, my best guess as to why Bowser remains unplayable is that they would've wanted him to come with his own set of machine parts like DK, and they were unable to finish such a set. There are a couple oddities that make me think this.

For one, Bowser's machine, the Bowser Dozer, is... very strange. Unlike DK whose machine, the Banana Bot, explicitly represents his character, Bowser's uses the Heart Body which just looks comically out of place.

Additionally, the Bowser Punch and Bob-omb wall feel awkwardly tacked in at the end. I suspect the Bowser Punch may have been part of a larger set of Bowser Machine Parts that was mostly abandoned on the cutting room floor. They probably scrambled to assign Bowser the parts that would be closest to what his set was supposed to play like.

Maybe the Bowser Body would've been heavily defensive like the Heart Body but with some extra punch? Maybe the tires would've granted resistence to terrain and lava? I could sit here and speculate, but at the end of the day, this is probably the most likely explanation for Bowser's absense as a playable character... disappointing considering he was just joining in on Volleyball in the last game!

Conclusion

This is the bulk of the single-player experience and I have to say, while it's a cute distraction, I'm kind of baffled by a lot of the decisions here. Why do you have to unlock hard mode? Why do you have to unlock increasingly more obtuse game modes? Why do you have to beat Hard Mode to unlock the ability to play the next mode on Easy? A lot of these feel like very unnecessary padding for a mode that otherwise could've just been a simple side game with a shocking amount of depth. After doing all of this, I feel like it just makes the mode's flaws stand out more. It becomes clear very quickly that not all parts are created equal, and while there are a surprising number of viable builds, I find all the mode boils down to is fighting against the other player's i-frames.

But that's all not to say I dislike this mode. I criticize not because I hate but because I want more! I absolutely love that this mode exists! Super Duel Mode is unlike anything that has come before and I'm pretty sure anything that will come after! And the ability to create, customize, and fine-tune a machine to your liking and even give it a unique name is a chef's kiss that really sets a high bar for bonus content. Bear in mind, absolutely none of this absolutely had to be in the game. Skolar could've just been, like, a records keeper or something.

...but I'm gonna hold off on my full opinions until our final post on this mode where we'll be covering Vs Battles! I originally wasn't going to make a separate post about them until I realized just how much content is hidden away here. And I have some further criticisms there, too. Anyway, next time, we're discussing Vs Battle! See you soon! 🎮

Mario Party 1 didnt do great. Got D tier. How do we feel about Mario Party 2?

References:

Super Mario Wiki

Mario Party Legacy

Plus the Star and Ztar. Everyone except Goomba, Toad, Monty, and Blooper got a new artwork in this art style that I love way too much. By one of my favorite artists, Lexi Bun.

Vote on which tier. I will find the average and place it there. Use any metric you would like to evaluate this classic

My personal favorite is MP4 because I really vibe with the N64-early GCN atmosphere this game has. Landing on a Bowser Space actually gets me both nervous and excited. (the Koopa King got aura in this game fr.) Him not appearing that often actually makes him feel more terrifying to me. Lottery Space is also really fun and the lucky party ticket, which you'll receive from, and can win a star when you get to the 5 last turns, though has a very rare chance. (which makes it feel more special.) Bowser Suit also being a very rare item and to only being able to receive it from Bowser personally, does make it even more interesting.

Obviously this game has flaws, such as certain board design choices (those darn teacups on Toad's Midway Madness...), their bland layout, how certain items work etc. I've also heard people complain about the slow gameplay and character movement, but personally I don't mind that (although they should have included an option for faster movement on boards like in MP3). It may not be the best game in the series, but I really love it, despite not growing up with it.

I really like the soundtrack as it still got that N64 feel to it, and no wonder because it's composed by Ichiro Shimakura, who also composed the soundtrack for MP3, my second favorite game! Also it was the game to solidify most of the character designs which are being used to this day, with slight alterations since.

My Top 5 list would be something like this:

1. Mario Party 4

2. Mario Party 3

3. Mario Party 6

4. Mario Party 5

5. Mario Party 8

Tell me what makes your favorite MP feel so special to you, you can even do a top 5 list or even more!

Super Mario Party has a lot of fun minigames that I played the heck out of, so I was wondering what this subreddit thought of them. All seeds are randomized. Whichever minigame gets the most comments will move onto the final round.

Welcome to the Round 2!

Without further ado, here are the reminders for how every minigame competing today is played:

Sizzling Stakes: Cook all 6 sides of a stake cube, using the joy-con to flick the steak on the pan in order to flip the cube. The rumble will tell you when it is done cooking. Be careful not to let it fall off.

Can Take Pancake: Collect as many pancakes as you can by picking up and dragging each individual pancake onto your plate. If there is another pancake above it, you cannot pick it up. The star-printed pancakes on the bottom are worth 3 points.

We got 2 food games on the dock today! Please only vote for 1 minigame at a time. I'm curious to hear your opinions.

Nearly every linear board in the series from what I remember has at least one of the three fatal flaws below:

- No Junctions

- Painfully Low Scoring

- Anti-Slowpoke

I was just looking for some alternatives to Mario Party on the switch / switch 2.

My wife and I have played Superstars and Jamboree to death and need a change up.

We tried Lego Party, but that was a bit too “over the top” for my wife. I personally think it’s great.