In my view the Mario Party series gets a lot of unfair hate. Yeah, recent entries in the series haven’t been quite up to its usual standard but it’s always a good way to pass the time on long journeys – particularly if the ‘long journey’ is a five hour bus trip to London.
Which brings me onto one of my most fond gaming memories. I was sixteen. It was an early Monday morning, I had signed up for my Secondary school’s annual three day trip to London and I was feeling a little anxious. This was the longest trip I had ever gone on without family and I have a mental condition known as autism, which means I can struggle with changes to everyday routine. As I nervously sat on the coach, my friend in the seat next to me took out a game that helped me feel much more relaxed: that game was Mario Party DS.
The friend in question has a more extreme case of autism to me, the result of which meant I was one of his only friends. Many of us with autism struggle with communication skills and therefore find it hard to make new friends, which can be made hard by a lack of understanding from many in why we react differently to them in certain situations. Mario Party DS was like our comfort if you will, away from the social activity occurring on the bus of students as it made its journey towards the capital.
The great thing that sets Mario Party DS apart from its successors is its sheer simplicity. There’s no vehicle or Bowser Party. Just you, a dice and a game board – with a few minigames thrown in. As with a standard board game, you take it in turns with the other players to journey across the board however many spaces rolled on the dice. The game ends when a certain objective is complete. In Mario Party DS, the objective is to collect the most stars after a decided number of turns: you can choose between 10, 15, 20, 25 or 3o rolls of the dice. Mario Party DS is therefore a game that is accessible on a trip of any length: just want to play on your standard ten minute car journey? No problem: opt for a ten turn game. On a long train journey to a holiday destination? 30 turns should satisfy your gaming needs.
And if you’re worried that a 30 turn game will result in encountering the same minigames: fear not, this edition of Mario Party boasts an overwhelming collection of 73 minigames. This meant me and my fellow autistic friend had plenty to play through on our five hour bus journey to London. Such a variety of minigames on offer too: from a game where you speed down a handrail on a leaf (Rail Riders) to surfing on bars of soap in a bathroom sink (Soap Surfers). My favourite minigame was Camera Shy: a game where you run around a maze trying to take pictures of your opponents. The first player to capture photographs of the opposition wins. The controls of the minigames are extremely simple, ranging from sweeps of the stylus across the Nintendo DS’s touchscreen to speaking into the handheld’s built-in microphone – or in the case of Camera Shy, simply pressing the ‘A’ button to take a picture. If you want, you can use the Minigame Mode to play six minigames on their own without a board – but that’s not nearly as much fun.
Then there’s the Puzzle Mode (with six puzzle-action games including classic Mario Party games such as Mario’s Puzzle Party from Mario Party 3 and Bob-omb Breakers from Mario Party 4) and Extras Mode ( a two-player exclusive where you play minigames designed for two people). We didn’t play these modes on our bus journey as they didn’t appeal to us as much as progressing through a board but it’s nice when a game offers such a variety of features.
Mario Party DS doesn’t really need them though. Its main mode is addictive enough. You see, you don’t need pointless gimmicks (Mario Party 9) or endless minigames (Mario Party Island Tour) to provide an enticing party game. What you really need at its core is simplicity: just the player, a dice and a board. That’s my kind of party.
Oh, and if you want to know which Super Mario character I opted for, I decided to play as Yoshi. My friend was more traditional in his choice: he played as Mario, which admittedly makes more sense given that the game is called Mario Party and not ‘Yoshi Party’.
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