Mario Party DS

November 25,2007 - Gamers probably scoffed when Nintendo made the announcement that Mario Party would be coming to the DS. After all, of all the franchises Nintendo is in possession of, Mario Party is without a doubt the most milked. There have been three Mario Party games released on the Nintendo 64, four on the GameCube, one on the Game Boy Advance, and one on the Wii. While the games have always been fun, none have ever come close to the enjoyment the first two games provided. With this being the tenth entry in this incredibly long-running series, it can safely be said that Mario Party DS is quite solid.

Unlike Mario Party Advance, with Mario Party DS you can tell right off the bat that this game is a true blue Mario Party experience. For those who are somehow unfamiliar with the series, Mario Party is essentially a turn-based board game set with limited number of turns. After every turn, the four party-goers will take part in a minigame, and these can range from standard free-for-alls to handicap 1 vs. 3 games to 2-on-2 team battles. The minigames are played with the sole intention to earn coins which you use to trade for stars. At the end of the board game, the party-goer with the most stars wins the game.

The single player story mode is your average run-of-the-mill story. Bowser is throwing a party with tons of food and he invites Mario and his buddies over to join in on the festivities as a way to apologize for "being a jerk". Yeah, right. When they arrive, Kamek flies in and puts a hex on the Mario and his friends to make them become little right before they are blasted far away from Bowser's Castle. With that, Mario and his friends find themselves in quite a predicament due to the fact that there's a disturbance at every world they venture into. Seeing as how everybody would like a piece of the action, all the Mario characters fight each other for the right to save that world--resulting in a game of Mario Party to decide who will save it.

While it sounds just as dumb as every other plot in the Mario Party games, the game actually tries its best to make it feel like an actual adventure. After you become the superstar--which you're forced to do at every game board, or else you'll have to do it all over again--you fight the area's boss. The bosses aren't totally sophisticated as they are in the flagship Mario or Zelda games, but they require a bit of effort on your part to take them out. For example, the first gameboard's boss is Petey Piranha, and he's beaten by catching the exploding seeds he spits at you and then launching them right back at him as he sucks up more seeds. It's actually a breath of fresh air because after all these years of doing the same thing in these games over and over, it's good to know that an effort was made to make it seem somewhat refreshing.

However way you look at it, with the solid single player component or not, Mario Party is all about the minigames. There have been plenty of games released on the DS that have had around 20-30 minigames, but again, Mario Party continues with its ability to surprise with its 70 minigames. Sure, there are still a few games that require only luck to beat, but a lot of them are pretty legit. You have your standard games that require you to make use of your weasel fingers (which is a term used to imply the skill of rapidly tapping a button), a few games that require standard button combinations, and the even more fun co-op games that require you to work with your teammate for the best possible chance to win (or lose, if you get paired up with someone you don't want to succeed).

Aside from these, there is a fair share of games that make use of DS' capabilities. Some games require you to make use of the touch screen technology and simply circle a few cheep cheeps, trace a few goombas, or make use of even more useless but fun skills such as dragging the stylus around the screen in a counter or clockwise fashion as fast as you possibly can. There are even a few games that make use of your skill of blowing on the microphone. Mario Party DS doesn't let up when it comes to taking advantage of the DS hardware.

For those of you who have been following the series since its third installment, you'd know that each console Mario Party since then has included a Tetris-style puzzle game that are pretty much ripoffs of other games such as Puyo and even Sega's Columns. Adjusted ripoffs or not, they were pretty fun and Mario Party DS features a puzzle mode that allows you to play just those. They're simply there to pass the time, but they're acceptable alternatives to Tetris itself, so it's a nice bonus.

If there's anything you can truly complain about with Mario Party DS, it's the fact that there's no online component. It's really unfortunate because Nintendo, as well as their third parties, have really been taking full advantage of the DS' wi-fi compatibility as of late, and Mario Party really could have been something special. Fortunately, Hudson and Nintendo have slightly redeemed themselves by making the game an extremely robust multiplayer even without the online play. The game can be enjoyed by up to four people with just a single card, and since wi-fi isn't a concern, there isn't a single worry about slowdown. So whether you're just playing minigames, playing a full Mario Party board, or just mashing on puzzles, the game presents quite a pleasurable multiplayer experience.

The game looks just like every Mario Party before it, extremely colorful with a greater emphasis on the texture of each gameboard. The colors are extremely lush and the characters really look livelier than they did on the Nintendo 64, and that's an impressive statement on its own. The new hand-drawn artwork looks even better, so Nintendo wasted no time making their presence felt with this one.

The sound is also very Mario Party itself. Unlike previous entries, this game features music from the games in the past, and it also includes some cameo music. There's a jukebox minigame that actually scrambles up the underground Mario theme itself, and that's just good use of the nostalgia card.

It's true that we haven't been much of a supporter of the series as it looks like it had gone down the drain a long time ago. We've even gone as far as saying that if you want titles like this to stop being made, then stop buying them. Be that as it may, Mario Party DS is an extremely solid title that builds off the success of every Mario Party game before it. It also uses the DS capabilities to an exceptional extent to add more variety to its minigames. You probably own Mario Kart DS because of the fact that all your friends have it and it's a blast to play with them. Well, Mario Party DS is going to be the other game you always bring with you. This is one of the best Mario Party games to come out in a while--but if Nintendo just took the liberty of making it online, this really could have been the best one yet. Either way, it's not bad for a tenth entry (it's certainly a surprise that Nintendo has never mentioned that).

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