Mario Party DS is by far the best Mario Party game out there! It's fun; however, to make it REALLY fun, play with others
Gameplay: There are TONS of minigames. You can play 4 player (which is everyone against everyone), 2 vs. 2 (which you get put on a team with another player and you work against the other team) and 1 vs. 3 (which one random player plays against the other three). All of the minigames are very fun and can really suck you in. One nice addition to the minigames is that you can practice a minigame as many times as you want before actually playing it for real. They have a little feature where you press X before a minigame and you can practice all you want before you do the "real thing." In story mode you play with all of Mario's friends and try and beat Bowser in a bunch of parties. In these parties, you try and collect coins to buy stars. You roll a dice and move that many spaces, depending on the space you land on, you might get something, or lose something (ie coins). The main goal is to have the most amount of stars at the end of the party. Pretty self-explanatory isn't it? For the most part, these parties are very fun, however, the one problem and my biggest complaint is that even when the CPU is on level hard, they still SUCK and are very easy to beat! If you really want a challenge, then get 3 other friends together and play against them! Trust me, playing against others makes the game a lot more fun and competitive!
Graphics: The graphics are definitely top-notch on the DS. By far some of the best graphics I have seen yet, and I own a lot of DS games!! All of the players look great and the backgrounds and minigames are also amazing. But what else would you expect from a Mario game, right?
Sound: Of course, the sound and music is great because they use a lot of great Mario tunes, and include some new ones! Anything from jumping around the board to kicking a soccer ball in one of the minigames, it all sounds great!!
Value: Once you have beaten story mode, you can still play parties against other people. I know I keep saying this, but really, in order to make this game better, you have to play against other people! The nice thing about Mario Party DS is that the WHOLE GAME is in Single card multiplayer (meaning you only need one copy of the game to play with 3 other people for anyone who didn't know!!). This really adds to the game because you don't have to worry about all your friends going out and buying the game! One problem with the game though, is that it doesn't support Wi-Fi. Now that's not a big problem because I like being able to talk to the people around me while playing, but still, it would have been nice if they had included that!
Conclusion: All in all, this is a very good, solid game for the DS and by far the best Mario Party yet! I would recommend this game to anybody who is looking at getting it, but try to get some friends over to play with you, because without other people, it's really easy! However, there are a lot of minigames and you can spend a lot of time playing this!