Mario Party Superstars, what has changed for a player of the past

Mario Party Superstars

It was 1999 when I first played Mario Party at a close friend's house. 1999 is the year of Final Fantasy VIII, Donkey Kong 64, Persona 2, Shenmue and more. Immersed in JRPG, action adventure, platform and football games of the old Konami, it must be said that there was no shortage of sensational products, capable of forgetting the homework of a little boy unable to choose whether as a platformer collectathon experience had been better Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie. Those were years in which people still went to people's homes to scrounge snacks and play paddles with yarn.

Sometimes I wonder how many of the loyal users who read us today have ever experienced a pad with a cord and many other oddities of the time, such as reading the instruction booklets or blowing in the cartridges which - I will tell you - worked, despite flat-earth studies affirming the opposite. Mario Party represented for that exceptional two-year period the quintessence of the party game, obviously on Nintendo 64: it was a breath of fresh air mixed with pure adrenaline, running around virtual game tables with Nintendo characters still evergreen today, and ruining the ligaments for win minigames and challenges that I always wanted to last longer. I had just turned 13, heck.

Let's find out what has changed for a past player in Mario Party Superstars.

A relaxing evening

The snowball minigame is the classic example of what Mario Party wants to do, that is to have fun without too many thoughts All this flow of thoughts comes from the fact that soon A new Mario Party is released on Nintendo Switch, a Superstars edition that takes 100 mini-games, remastering the graphic models, prepares the scoreboards and promises to postpone the glories of those days described above, a long journey up to the Nintendo 64 and its pads trident. From this point of view, Mario Party Superstars wants to speak both to nostalgics and to those who are approaching a chapter of the series for the first time, collecting a selection of the best minigames seen over the years and representing the perfect business card for all newcomers. . What does it mean for those who from the first Mario Party to today have grown through at least a dozen? In reality, the enthusiasm hasn't changed that much: if done right, Mario Parties can be a wonderful alternative for home entertainment between friends and family, even at a less boyish age.

They are products that are unlikely to ever have had multiple levels of reading and in which skill does count, but technicalities and completenesses have always been applied to leopard spots. I hardly played Mario Party to beat friends at individual minigames, or at least this wasn't the idea that crossed my mind while I was looking forward to the moment: my thoughts were more about quality time spent together, fun, laughter, to the joke, to the sunny and positive playful aggregation that was created. More than 20 years later, in the world and within me, a lot has changed, but not everything: the desire for aggregation, now more than ever, I feel palpable. It is true that, in the meantime, many party games have come out, but there is little to do, Mario Party has the soul of Kyoto and its characters that tirelessly filters across the ages and never seems to exhaust its sympathy .

Avalanche of minigames

Waluigi is a regular presence of Mario Party, unlike Super Smash Bros ... While I tell you all this, I naturally think of the episodes on home console, those that most of all are combined with the local multiplayer experience. I still have crazy memories of evenings insulting each other for bad luck on the board, or unfortunate dice rolls, or maybe stolen stars despite being the ruler of the minigames. Mario Party is not a scientific game, it has no particular patterns: it has its own algorithm, of course, but it is randomness that shuffles the cards and slyly spreads them around.

Although in very different phases, for me Mario Party has always been that alternative to the so-called hardcore game, a moment of leisure in which to gather 2 or 3 people and spend an hour happily, in the same room, without studying its characteristics in depth or without prevailing on its learning curve, which by nature it is scattered among many different mini-games. So, today, as every time a franchise title comes out that crosses me from the past to the present, I look back, I count the photographs that are printed there in my memory, looking at my self once in the third person, certainly less spoiled in gamer tastes, and I think about what I'm really looking for today. The answer is always the same: more than a good solo single player, I'm looking for a bit of that positive human warmth that creates a nice moment to remember and share with people who are there today, who knows tomorrow.

How long have you not played on the sofa with someone? If there is one piece of advice that I would like to give to anyone who reads these lines, it is simply to let yourself go a little more and go back to rediscover the joy of having fun in company, close to the people who matter, with the aim of laughing and joking. . Here, I think this is a beautiful business card to return to enjoy the gaming that has rocked us for a lifetime.

Try to play some Mario Party mini-games in 4 or win a board challenge by receiving and giving cheerful teasing to someone: I am absolutely convinced that kind of game atmosphere in the company, shared and permeable to emotions, has no equal in gaming. Mario Party Superstars will also give you the opportunity to play online with your friends and other people, but as with any self-respecting game, I strongly believe that local multiplayer, shoulder to shoulder, embodies the soul of the video game and returns the greater dignity to a medium who sometimes, instead of increasing our sociability, takes it away from us, leaving in our future many memories of a screen made of loneliness, but not of real people with whom we could perhaps have shared more time, but we didn't.

Mario Party Superstars takes old minigames, like this one, and upgrades them with a modern Nintendian style How long have you been playing on the sofa with someone? If there is one piece of advice that I would like to give to anyone who reads these lines, it is simply to let yourself go a little more and go back to rediscover the joy of having fun in company, close to the people who matter, with the aim of laughing and joking. . Here, I think this is a beautiful business card to return to enjoy the gaming that has rocked us for a lifetime. Try playing some Mario Party mini-games in 4 or winning a board challenge by receiving and giving cheerful teasing to someone: I am absolutely convinced that kind of game atmosphere in the company, shared and permeable to emotions, has no equal in gaming. Mario Party Superstars will also give you the opportunity to play online with your friends and other people, but as with any self-respecting game, I strongly believe that local multiplayer, shoulder to shoulder, embodies the soul of the video game and returns the greater dignity to a medium who sometimes, instead of increasing our sociability, takes it away from us, leaving in our future many memories of a screen made of loneliness, but not of real people with whom we could perhaps have shared more time, but we didn't.

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