Mario Party 4

November 01, 2002

Platform: Nintendo Gamecube
Developer: Hudson Soft
Publisher: Nintendo
Reviewed by: Slusy

Gameplay: [7] Graphics: [7] Audio: [6] Replay: [6] Overall: [7.1]

Back in the dark days of the N64, Nintendo had many first-party titles, but few winners. One of the few breakthrough series that emerged from those dark days was the Mario Party series. With simple gameplay, an emphasis on multiplayer, and a format suitable for a quick get-together, Mario Party and its two sequels were instant hits, with each new game in the series improving greatly upon the last. My wife and I lost countless hours to all three of the Mario Party games, so naturally Mario Party 4, the first installment on the GameCube, was a guaranteed purchase. We could only imagine that all the fun that we had on the technologically limited N64 would be amplified greatly since the developers had a solid premise and the freedom to improve on that premise with all the power that the GameCube had to offer.

While that was certainly the plan, this version of Mario Party didn’t necessarily deliver on its promise. What could have been one of the must-buy titles of the year ended up being what feels like the developers just kind of going through the motions of pumping out another Party. While there are, of course, 50 new mini-games and improved graphics and sound, the overall product feels sort of hollow to a Mario Party veteran.

The overall premise of the Mario Party games was essentially to take the best elements of both board games and video games and merge them together into one satisfying party game. Generally, you would pick one of the characters from the Mario games (Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, etc.) and roll dice to move around a game board in a quest for Stars; whoever has the most Stars at the end of the game wins. In order to earn the coins to buy Stars and other items, after all players have made a move on the board, there is a mini-game, the winner of which earns a set amount of coins. The game is genius in its simplicity, and just about anyone can just jump in and play; the only control schemes to memorize are those of the mini-games themselves, and those are spelled out before each mini-game starts.

While this formula worked extremely well in past games, in Mario Party 4, it seems that the party poopers have arrived. The main offense in this regard is the way that the boards are set up. For some reason, the designers decided to do away with most of the items that you can use to influence your movement and replace them with mega-mushrooms and mini-mushrooms. The former lets you roll two dice instead of one, and allows you to steal 10 coins from any opponent you pass, but comes with the downside of bypassing any event spots on the board (the only one of any consequence being the chance to buy a star). The latter reduces your die roll from ranging from one to five rather than the normal one to ten, but allows you to pass through pipes which block your way to certain parts of the board. These pipes are, in my estimation, what completely kill a lot of the fun of the main game. Since it often happens that Stars are placed behind a pipe, and since it is so difficult to get beyond a given pipe (since you must have a mini-mushroom at the right time and then be lucky enough to roll high enough to pass the pipe), it often happens that Stars are much fewer and farther between than in previous installments. As an example, my wife and I played a 15-turn game in which not a single Star was found, not even by the two computer players in the game. Since collecting Stars is the entire goal and most of the fun of the main game, such a low Star count makes the game much less satisfying.

What’s more, the item games from previous installments are completely gone, replaced with a bland “choose a chest” item space that always results in a mini-mushroom or a mega-mushroom. Battle games, where each player antes up a number of coins and the winner takes the pot, are much less frequent in Mario Party 4, which is a shame, since the Battle games were arguably the most fun of all the mini-games. The mini-games that are present, as always, are fairly hit-or-miss, and can be somewhat entertaining, but there simply aren’t enough. In fact, there were more games in Mario Party 3 than there are in this installment, and the former was restricted to the 64 MB that could fit on a cartridge. In the jump from a cartridge to a 1.8 GB mini-DVD, it’s hard to not be disappointed by a decrease in mini-games, especially since the mini-games are the main draw of the game as a whole.

One other main flaw that one would expect would be solved in the time between the release of Mario Party 3 on the N64 and Mario Party 4 on the GameCube (roughly a year and a half) would be that of computer players. Since the game requires four players, any missing slots are occupied by the computer player with one of three difficulty levels. The main annoyance concerning the computer players is that they are still treated like human players, in that each of their turns is fully played out from beginning to end, including reading through all the text that might pop up from turn events. Simply put, no one wants to watch the computer player take their turn; you just want to know what they did. A game with one or two players is thus rather tedious, as you spend half or more of the game waiting for the computer to go. As it stands, a 20-turn game takes roughly an hour, but removing computer turns could either shorten the time needed to play or increase the number of turns one can get in within a given time period. Either would be an improvement, and hopefully that will be included in the inevitable Mario Party 5. As it stands, be prepared for a lot of sitting around when playing with less than four human players.

Graphically, there are some nice effects, but the end result is not much different than the other Mario Party games. The graphics are designed to be utilitarian, and as such are mostly 2D boards with 3D characters walking along them, and, as such, the graphics do their job. You will notice some interesting lighting and water effects in the mini-games, of course (one that particularly stands out involves pressing buttons to hold a character’s breath underwater), but these are more the exception than the rule. Nothing looks bad, but there’s not too much here that really taxes the GameCube’s processor, either.

Sound is a similar story. Amazingly, given the scant amount of speech in the game, it is still presented via text windows rather than voice acting, which is extremely disappointing, to say the least. Music is mostly relegated to a few sugary-sweet tracks that players over age 10 could probably do without. Again, the audio falls far below the GameCube’s potential.

Mario Party 4 could have been put into heavy rotation in my GameCube lineup, but as it stands, it’s basically reduced to a novelty. The designers didn’t make the modifications to make this more than an N64 game with a different controller, and the changes that were made hurt the game rather than help it, for the most part. If you’ve played all the previous Mario Party games, then there’s not much for you here. If you haven’t, then Mario Party 4 might be worth a rental (or even a purchase if you have at least three people ready to play at any given time), but be prepared to dust off your N64 if you want to see what the series really has to offer.