Mario Party 5 Hands-On Impressions
We spend a few turns with the latest in Nintendo's long-running party game series.
At a recent Nintendo press event, we played a little of the English version of Mario Party 5, which is the latest update in the venerable franchise that pretty much started the party game genre. We first played a bit of the story mode, which saw Mario traipsing around through various dreams in search of Bowser and his incorrigible Koopa Kids. In this mode, Bowser is attempting to spoil people's pleasant dreams, and Mario does some board-game hopping to thwart his plans. Mario and three Koopa Kids each had a sum of coins to their names, and each minigame encounter would add to or subtract from their stock of coins based on the outcome of the game. The object here was to continually deplete the kids' coin supplies, and once they hit zero, they'd be removed from the game.
In the party game mode, we picked a character and squared off against three CPU-controlled characters on a toy-themed board in the standard party game format. In this mode, each time a player's turn comes up he or she has to effectively roll a die in order to see how many squares he or she can move. The board is littered with a number of curiosities, such as a machine that dispenses capsules that you can use during your next turn to achieve a variety of offensive and defensive effects. At the end of each round of turns, we were able to engage in a minigame with the other players. Some of these games were in the "every man for himself" category, while others pitted one unlucky player against the other three. The victor(s) of each game received a coin bonus based on their performance in the game.
The actual minigames themselves are about what you'd expect from a party game. In one, we played a sort of paper-rock-scissors game where we tried to guess what sign a CPU player would hold up and outdo it with our own. In another, players had control of a sort of three-by-three slot machine and could stop individual squares at will; the player with the best combinations at the end of the game received a proportionate number of coins. Some of the minigames are more overtly action-oriented than this--in one, we ran around a board filled with roving electrodes and had to avoid occasional beams of electricity. All of the minigames that we saw today should offer broad appeal to players both young and old, since they're entertaining and easy to pick up. Overall, the game is looking to be a solid entry in the series. You can join Mario's party in early November.
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