EricBall's Tech Projects - GCN Mario Party 4

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Mario Party 4 continues the tried-and-true formula from the N64 board game + minigame series. As usual, there are enough changes to make it unique without straying so far that you will need to read the manual.

 

One significant change is item spaces have been changed to mushroom spaces. You only buy most items from stores. The mushroom squares randomly give either a mega or a mini mushroom (no traditional mushrooms). Mega mushrooms make you big, you roll two dice, squash opponents (for ten coins), and skip past any special spaces - including stars. Mini mushrooms shrink you, allowing you to access certain short-cuts and special spaces, but your die is only 1-5 instead of 1-10. This modification works well and adds some interesting tactics to the game.

 

MP4 also adds a "team" feature which falls into the "why didn't they think of this before?" category. At the start of the game you can divide the four players into two teams of two (any combination). At the end of the game the combined stars & coins of the team are used to determine the "winner" (this is also tracked throughout the game). During the game only 4-player or 2-versus-2 minigames are played, with 2-vs-2 always being on team boundaries. Items (although not coins) are also shared between team members, which gives some additional flexibility.

 

For me, this made it much more fun to play with my almost 6 year old son. We could play as a team against two computer players, making it much easier to help each other. And for 4-player games it didn't matter which one of us won. We could compete, but not against each other. (His skill level is getting better, but I've got years of experience playing computer, console and arcade games on my side.)

 

There's also a one-player "story mode", although (so far) it doesn't provide much more than the normal "party mode"; unlike previous Mario Party games. Story Mode may be key to unlocking additional characters and/or boards, but I haven't played enough to unlock anything.

 

One cosmetic difference from the N64 version is the boards themselves. Unlike it's predecessors, the path "floats" above the animated "world" instead of being part of a themed environment. And that's really a shame since there's a lot of eye candy which gets wasted. Also, the player characters aren't themed to match the world.

 

The mini-games are fun to play, as usual. I have noticed some inconistency WRT which buttons are used (i.e. using R instead of A for a simple action) and computer versus human skill levels (having to press A & B at the same time is tough). I'm almost wondering whether MP4 was created using a prototype controller which was closer to the N64s.

 

So far I've rented Mario Party 4 from the local video store twice (although I didn't spend much time playing it the first time). I'm hoping I'll be able to find one on eBay.ca or used in the near future so I can add it to the collection (along with a 3rd controller so the entire family can play).

 

 

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