Mario Party Superstars is coming to the Nintendo Switch this month, marking the twelfth home console installment of Nintendo's enormously popular Mario spinoff franchise. These games pit players against each other in direct competition across imaginative game boards, with success fueled by performance in regularly scheduled mini-games. Counting Mario Party installments on handheld consoles, there are literal hundreds of mini-games that players have dove into across the video game series' 23-year history. However, with that many mini-games, it is simple statistics that not all of those games are going to be good.
Mario Party has always had its fair share of mindless button-mashers, tedious rhythm games and simple memory exercises, but the worst of the bunch are the ones that remove any semblance of player agency and begin to show the limits of the designers' imagination, presumably favoring quantity over quality. These range from games that are completely left to chance, providing the illusion of strategic gameplay, or generally uninspired ones that are more of a chore to get through than anything else.
Some examples of uninspired mini-games include Mario Party 7's "Cointagious," which had players rapidly roll dice to get the highest score. For a game that revolves entirely around dice rolling, this mini-game simply provided more of the same in a concentrated dose. Another example is "Roll Call," which had players literally count all the NPCs on-screen within a time limit, with anyone who correctly guessed the exact number winning, while anyone even one off would lose. Introduced in the original 1998 Mario Party for Nintendo 64, it would return in Mario Party 2 and 2017's Mario Party: The Top 100. It's also slated to return in Superstars, proving that sometimes the developers' gauge on what mini-games are the most memorable doesn't align with the fanbase.
However, the real worst mini-game of them all is a Mario Party 2 original: "Day at the Races." While the game introduced some core elements of the Mario Party series and had plenty of great mini-games present, there are some questionable mechanics, including 1v3 mini-games that sharply favor the three-player teams. "Day at the Races" is a simple, four-player battle that has the players select between four different racers, with the winning bet earning the vast majority of the wagered coin pool. However, the winner of each race is totally random each time, and there's no way for players to influence the outcome in any way.
There is a lot to love in the Mario Party franchise, including some mini-games that have endured across multiple iterations of the multiplayer series. Mario Party Superstars is poised to revive and remix several classics from the franchise's Nintendo 64 era and, fortunately, "Day at the Races" is not among the games listed as returning from Mario Party 2. In the meantime, there are plenty of worthwhile Mario Party mini-games players should look into that embrace the franchise's premise and stand as a testament why it has endured for nearly 25 years.
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