I think it was the Game Grumps that described New Super Mario Bros. Wii as a “divorce Simulator”. Well, let me tell you, folks; I spent about seven hours today playing Mario Party 3 with my girlfriend, and while I think that description might apply to every Mario game that supports more than 2 players, It especially applies to Mario Party.Â
I bought the original Mario Party when it first came out, and having played the more recent incarnations of Mario’s ego-maniacal board game, I can safely say that nothing has really changed since 1998. You still wander aimlessly around a “colourful” and “fun” board while stuff just sort of happens to you. RNGsus is a fickle deity, and is just as likely to reward you with a fucking metric butt-ton of coins as he is likely to royally screw you. I have an example, but you will require some context.
So just in case you’ve never played this game before, here’s the gist of how it plays; In Mario Party you hit a dice block with your head to make a number come out, and then you move that many spaces around the board. The board is usually changing and shifting constantly so you might not end up back at the beginning for the whole game if your luck is so inclined. You have to make your way to a special star tile, drop 20 coins to get a star, and then the star salesman fucks off to another spot on the board and you repeat the whole song and dance over again until the game is over. In between the turns you play dubiously balanced mini-games for a pitiful amount of coins, and you rinse and repeat until you run out of turns and the person with the most stars is declared the winner.
In our first game, Lady Vidya and I decided to set it up for the long haul and made a few mistakes before we even rolled the first die. Firstly, we picked the hardest map, some dumb bullshit called “Creepy Caverns”, thinking “eeeenh, I’m sure we’ll be fine”. This map was divided into two sections, and you couldn’t cross into the other one without first landing on an event tile and getting chased across the map by a minecart. This would very, very rarely work out in your favor. Nine times out of ten, something horrible would happen, like needing to roll at least a two to get the star, then rolling a one and getting sent all the way to the other side of the game board.
There were also these little doors you could go through to get to the other side, but they required a skeleton key, and honestly you could just use a warp block to switch places with somebody on the other side, and that is a double whammy because you go where you need to go and you fuck up your opponent. So why wouldn’t you do that instead? I should have explained that to past-me because for some reason I hoarded these stupid keys like an idiot and didn’t realize I had made a mistake until halfway through the game, when I ditched the keys and bought a magic lamp instead.
The second setup mistake was making DK easy and Yoshi hard. DK wasn’t a very difficult quarry, but he was fun to play against in the 3-on-1 mini games because he would fuck up the whole team and you could just blaze through to victory. Yoshi, though. That dumb green dinosaur was an asshole and I hated his stupid face and I think Yoshi has been ruined for me forever.
Pictured - A demure shithead
Yoshi was a consistent thorn in my side for the entire game. Even though the real obstacle in my path to victory was my girlfriend, who has a real person brain and can strategize and think and shit, I targeted this little asshole because he was so lucky it was maddening. Remember that example I mentioned? Here it comes;
At one point Yoshi was holding 91 coins, and he landed on this Shy Guy game, where you had to bet all your coins on something. So there were these two chomps, see, and they were eating some cake, and if you bet on the chomp that won you got to keep your coins and got a multiplier, but if you lost, you lost all your coins. It looked like this:
Now Yoshi bid on the tiny chomp, which as you can see, seems like a dumb idea because the cake is actually bigger than he is. How could he possibly eat faster than the big chomp, let alone finish the cake at all? Well friends, Yoshi must have known something that we didn’t, because Chomp Jr. finished the fuck out of that cake, and Yoshi’s 91 coins turned into 728 coins. I didn’t even know that you could go over 99 coins in a Mario game! It didn’t register to me even a little bit that there were no extra lives in this game and that you didn’t have to stop your coin counter at 99. It’s difficult for me to describe just how shocking this was to me in the moment. Scrooge McDinosaur suddenly had more money than I thought even existed in Mario Party.
After that I did everything in my power to fuck up his shit, but he probably would have won if someone hadn’t landed on an event square and suddenly Yoshi had to give two of his stars to Donkey Kong.
So back to talking about setup mistakes, there was one last cock-up, and it was the worst one. We were all like “Meh, what else are we doing today?” and made the game 50 turns long. Do you know how long a 50 turn game of Mario Party lasts? We started the game around noon-thirty and Lady Vidya finally declared victory four and a half hours later, after a totally grueling and impossibly frustrating game of Mario Party.Â
So after all of this we take a break, and then she says to me:
“Yo, you know what we should do, Michael?
“We should play a Mario Party drinking game.”
