The Mixed Glory of Mario Party and why is "Top 100" a DS game?

[kisrael]

I really have a soft spot for the Mario Party series - in fact one of my few GameFAQs entries is a guide to the 1P mode of the original where you have to beat all the games.

( https://www.gamefaqs.com/n64/197861-mario-party/faqs/3605 )

 

Minigames are such a delightful little slice of retrogaming, but with slightly tweaked graphics. At its best each one offers a little mechanic that could almost be its own little Atari 2600 game- even better because there are so few 4 player Atari games.

 

(And an underappreciated part of Mario Party is how well they do AI, for so many games they have computer players that play from various levels of idiot to pro, It's easy enough for a casual programmer to make a minigame, but getting a computer player to play it without being perfect or terrible is a huge challenge)

 

Of course the tragedy of the Mario Party series for may fans is just how much boargame crap they put in, for those people who just want minigames. While almost every entry offers some way of saying "just minigames please" few achieve anything near the perfect balance of the olympic stadium level in the original- just enough board game that you could blame luck for winning or losing the whole thing and to set up 4P, 2v2, or 3v1 matchups, but so much less of this stupid sitting waiting waiting crap, where the dice roll is everything. There seems to be a disconnect between the audience who would really love minigames and really love a good, slow, long playing game of candyland...

 

Anyway, I got a Switch the other month, and looking for games for it I was surprised to see Mario Party: The Top 100 was a DS game. I dunno, DS has never seemed like that much of a social system to me. I would love to see this on Switch... wonder if there's any hope of that...