The Mario Party series consists of absolute bangers. It’s the perfect game to play with friends as most people can pick it up and play without having to have any sort of gaming experience to be “good” at it. Let’s be honest, nothing really matters in Mario Party except for luck and bonus stars.

Mario Party Superstars released on October 29^th and has been receiving some excellent reviews since. I’m going to break down everything that’s new in Mario Party Superstars, give my opinion that’s going to make you yell at me on Twitter, and then hopefully you’ll be able to make a decision of whether or not to pick it up.

Throwback Dice Rolling

One of the biggest features of the latest Mario Party, Super Mario Party, was that each character had their own unique dice block. Some characters had dice blocks that were extremely risky, while others were more consistent. Mario Party Superstars has stripped this feature. Each character only gets a 1-6 dice block (unless you use items).

For me, the unique dice blocks were fun for the couple of games when I was trying out each character with friends. However, it quickly became, “Who’s statistically got the best dice block?” No longer was Mario Party about playing your favorite character, it was about playing the best character.

I think taking out this feature is a good idea. I miss dunking on my friends with Yoshi rather than Wario or Bowser. Levelling out each character allows people to just play whatever character they like.

Timers

One of the worst parts about playing Mario Party online used to be the random on the other side of the country that decided that halfway through the game was a fantastic time to go take their dog for a walk. It used to take forever to get through a game if you had somebody in your game that took their sweet time to do… anything.

Mario Party Superstars has integrated timers on just about everything from using items, to rolling dice, and even readying up for mini games.

GOOD GRAVY THANK YOU FOR THIS. Nothing is more tilted in turn-based games than people who have nothing better to do than waste your time. And if you’re one of these people then I hope all of your saved filed get corrupted.

The Classic Minigames

Again, this isn’t really something that’s “new” … but whatever. Nintendo decided to go an interesting route with Mario Party Superstars. Rather than conjuring up some new ones, they decided to bring back the best minigames from the Nintendo 64 and GameCube Mario Party games. This includes a game that previously got Nintendo in a little bit of trouble in the past: Tug ‘o War. Back in the day, kiddos used to put the joystick in their palms to rotate it really fast. Unfortunately, a bunch of them got blisters from this and Nintendo had to agree to provide “sports gloves” to protect the hands of the kids. Now, all you get is a warning label.

This is not only hilarious to me, but I also appreciate all of the old games that I know and love being brought back to the Nintendo Swich.

A Few Classic Maps

Along with the minigames, Nintendo also brought back 5 old school maps from previous Mario Party games.

I’m honestly not a fan of this at all. Not that they brought back classics, but that they only brought back 5 of them. If the content was already there, it seems easy to give the players more content than normal. I thoroughly enjoy playing through each Mario Party map and when there’s only 5 maps, it feels like there’s very little content.

Characters

There are only 10 playable characters in the New Mario Party:

• Mario
• Luigi
• Peach
• Daisy
• DK
• Wario
• Waluigi
• Yoshi
• Birdo
• Rosalina

Again, why only 10 characters? Especially when they do not have their own dice blocks… give us more! It always feels bad when a newer game has less playable characters than the one before it.

If they were trying to market this as a “classic” or “throwback” game, then they should have only included the classic characters. Since they didn’t, they should have added many more characters.

Conclusion

Honestly, there’s a few things to be upset about, but they are so incredibly minor. It’s a Mario Party game. It’s going to be great. Especially since we already know that the games are great, timers were incorporated, and the maps are classics.]

Get yourself some friends, go pick up , and have yourself a fantastic night. Maybe during that game night, you check out our Fall Drop? I mean only if you want to…