favorite and least favorite mario party mini games (super stars)

I know this thread is for Mario Party Superstars, but I want to devote some time to saying how much Mario Party Superstars missed out from not including Mario Mechs.

799px-MarioMechs.png

There's more to do in that minigame compared to most minigames, and it even involves three different themed maps. Instead of games like Tanks A Lot, Think Tank, and Shell-Shocked, you have a health bar rather than individual HP units. While the team of three can deal only one type of damage, the solo player has regular beams, a crowd clearing shockwave, and a charged shot, all dealing different damage, probably why there's a health bar. I like the UI too, there's a lot going on such as a radar and indicators of shooting, getting hit, and charging stuff.

The minigame features damage at least for the solo player. Also, for some reason, the machines are themed after animals like this elephant-like blue thing and snake dragons, which was harder to spot in CRT monitors and less crisp resolutions, but they were apparent, just not enough to confirm as such. The dragon things even have these cute eyes. I have no idea what the relation between dragons, elephants, and sci-fi cityscapes, it's all incoherent, but I love it.

7917.png

Image from https://www.models-resource.com/gamecube/marioparty5/model/7917/ submission by DinnerSonic and Peardian

I wish this minigame returned, and I do think this is also a generally very well-liked minigame.


Look_Away_-_Mario_Party_Superstars.png

As within Mario Party Superstars, I still might have to go for Look Away, but I definitely like the original more. Why? I like seeing expressive faces really close, and the minigame is really memorable. The disembodied heads were a major boon on why I liked the original, and they lost a little bit of that quirk in the translation, but it's still a cheerful, simple minigame, and I think it still does the concept best compared to the copycats in later games like in Mario Party 9.

Least favorite minigame in Mario Party Superstars for me is definitely Cast Aways. I despise this minigame. I hope the minigame is a wake-up call to people who grew up with N64 Mario Parties that there are some real stinkers of minigames. This one murders your control stick, the glove aiming never wants it go where you want (and it always goes farthest in the worst opportunities, which means more time to reel in). At least with Flip the Chimp your have a shot at winning, the minigame probably goes a little faster, and you're not stuck in a situation where you get zero coins and the rival gets a whopping 50 coins like what happened to me.
 
I forget which minigames I put as my favorites on my Player Card. I think it was Manor of Escape (9), Goomba Spotting (9), Rapid River Race (10), and Night Light Fright (5).

Least favorites are the luck-based minigames. Besides those, I probably hate Bounce 'n' Trounce the most.
 
I love that Mario's Puzzle Party (MP3) returned, as it is the minigame that kickstarted the puzzle minigame trend, so now every Mario Party since have at least one of these. It's even the most flexible of the three in terms of player count, because you have the 4P variant (like the original), the 2P variant (like in DS), and the single player version (like in the original, but not in DS because no 1k bonus for screen clears).

Eatsa Pizza is also nice to see. Certainly it's a button masher of a minigame, but the concept is ace, what with eating a giant pizza and is the minigame that convince me that Mario Party is a special series when I seen the original video at Gamespot's website.

I dislike Honeycomb Havoc. Not only is the minigame a slow race to see who is eliminated, but it plays one of my most disliked Mario Party minigame themes. The same theme plays in Roll Call, which made the minigame less enjoyable as a result. Cast Away is also a good one that is disliked, for how long it is, but at least it fixed the reel recovery time if nothing was caught, but I will add Piranha's Pursuit. I kind of felt that in the transition to wide-screen, something is lost, namely how much more easily it is for the single player to be ahead of the chase.

Thank you for reading.
 
My favorite minigames in Superstars are Paint Misbehaving, Eatsa Pizza, Coney Island, and Cake Factory. The minigames I dislike include the Cast Aways (since I dislike the control scheme and can never win more than a few coins), Tug O War (dislike the control scheme and can never win), Bumper Balloon Cars (control scheme is confusing), Sneak N Snore (can never win, and dislike the controls), the luck based minigames, and Rockin' Raceway (since I can never win it, even though the 3DS version I can do without any problems. On Switch, the L and R buttons either barely respond at all or only respond for a certain amount of time before they decide to not respond anymore, so I end up staying in place most of the time, even with Easy CPUs.)
 
Fav: Rockin' Raceway - Cute horses racing. It does have mashing but I'd say it's more rhythmic than the below game
Least fav: Mecha Marathon - Only mashing. Dumb mechanic
 
I haven't really played Superstars but I find it pretty criminal that Mario Mechs, my all time favorite Mario Party minigame, was left out of both The Top 100 and Superstars.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back