Gaming Target - GameCube: Mario Party 4

Written by Daniel Ekman on October 07, 2002

First Impressions: Hermits need not apply.

The Mario Party series on the N64 was one of the best examples of how much added fun four controller ports could provide. The graphics might have been lacking a bit of polish, but when one was occupied with frenzied multiplayer mini-games it was hard to truly care. This hasn't hindered Hudson from implementing a lot of nice visual effects and, on the whole, improving the graphics quite drastically in Mario Party 4 for GameCube, however.

Graphical prowess aside, though, the new Mario Party has a lot to offer. The old mini-games have all been thrown out of the window and 50 brand new ones are taking their place. Some of those mini-games have been experienced first-hand and happily they're both diverse and satisfying. For example, one of the mini-games sees players running around in an open book where pages keep falling down upon them. The only way to save oneself from certain death is to run to the different-sized openings in the pages and to beware of competitors madly trying to push everything and everybody away from the holes.

Another mini-game has players walking around with huge crayons, trying to fill in a predetermined contour and getting different scores depending on how well the line is followed. Sounds and plays pretty much like the Crazy Cutters mini-game that has made an appearance in past titles. While this particular event is very easy, there are others that are sure to induce healthy amounts of frustration and competitiveness between players. There are mini-games that put everyone on skis, mini-games that place players in the middle of molten lava, and then there's everything in between. Thankfully, the mini-games seem well balanced so the series' past Уhalf bad, half goodФ motto is hopefully just that: a thing of the past.

The boards in Mario Party 4, of which there'll probably be five in total, will hopefully be brimful of surprises and be varied enough to warrant many a game on each and every one of them. The one that I've tried out reminded me a bit of a futuristic amusement park and was not the most visually pleasing, but that might have been more because of personal preferences than of anything else. One thing that might be a feature of that board or simply a general feature is that at certain points one can be teleported to another player's position. There are also mushrooms that either shrink the character or make him grow. If the character grows big, one will have the ability to stomp competitors and thus steal coins from them; if the character turns small then there might be secret passages to find.

As mentioned previously, the graphics carry a lot more visual flair than is customary and that holds very much true also for the presentation of the game. Everything from the main menu to the character selection screen breathes quality, which is not something that one is used to when it comes to Mario Party. The overall package seems more thought through and, even if it's too early to judge, it looks as if Mario Party 4 might just deliver the perfect board game experience.