Mario Party 2 follows a similar premise to the other Mario Party games - in fact, other than the Wii's Mario Party 8, they all did. After choosing one of six boards to play on, everyone takes turns in rolling a dice, and moving around a board. Landing on a blue square nets you three gold coins, while landing on a red square loses you three. At a particular point on the board, there'll be a star space, and if you land there, and have 20 coins in your pocket, you can by a star. Sounds easy enough, right? If only!
Toad, with banjo. It's worth the 1000 points just for that.
The boards on Mario Party 2 are nicely varied, with each one having a different
theme. From a Western land, which sees Toad sporting his own cowboy hat and
guitar, to a space themed sci-fi board, there's lots going on on each board, as
each comes with its own set of action spaces. These spaces, usually coloured in
green on the map, activate something in the land. In the case of the
Western land, landing on a green square by a station would activate a train,
which chased anyone in its path until it got to the next station. Landing on
the green space outside a saloon in the top left of the board, on the other
hand, gives you the option of throwing a party for a small fee - which calls
all the other players to the same square as you. Handy, if they're about to
beat you to the star.
There a loads of little ways you can trick, or otherwise con your friends out
of getting to the star, and they all add a lot of strategy to the game, almost
in a chess-like way, as you try to second guess your opponent's moves, and do
your all to make sure they don't have enough coins to pull off that dirty trick
you know they're pulling. Few, however, are more annoying than the "Chance
Time" space, which we seemed to be on the losing end of every single time
we played. Essentially the game's way of trolling the other players, the chance
time spaces let you choose to take something from someone and
give to someone else. These can range from the nearly unnoticeable
(giving ten coins to Mario), to the game changing (switch all coins and stars
with the person in last place) - which, more often than not, is what happened
to me. Going from having three stars, and being two stars ahead of everyone
else, to ending up with nothing, while the person in last place takes three of
your stars with four turns to go is not in any way, shape or form fair, and
could easily cause some arguments.
Thankfully, most of the tricks require some from of investment from the player,
and, with the going rate for stars being 20 coins, most players aren't exactly
rolling in cash. The easiest way of boosting your earnings, however, is to win
at some minigames - and that's where the competition really starts to hot up.
Three players have to try and dodge the other, who's firing arrows at them. Seeing as you can't run past each other, it's pretty damn hard.
After each player's rolled the dice, the round will come to an end, and the game will choose a minigame for you to take part in. The minigames, which pit either every man for themselves, 2 vs 2, or 3 on 1, reward the winner (or winning team) with ten coins - or, in real terms, around half a star. Knowing that your opponent's two spaces away from a star, and needs the extra coins if they want to collect (if they don't have enough coins, they're forced to simply walk straight past, and trudge around the entire board again), can certainly offer you an extra incentive to do well in the minigames - or, at the very least, prevent your opponent from doing well.
The minigames themselves offer a good variety of skill-based games that are still, somehow, pretty easy to pick up and play. While the controls are often poorly explained, you’ll soon get the hang of what you need to do as soon as you start each minigame – and if you’re really unsure, you can always choose to have a practice before you play for real, helping keep any arguments to a minimum. While there are still too many minigames that are based entirely around chance (the game where you have to push a plunger in front of Bowser, praying you’ve picked the one that doesn’t detonate it, is entirely down to luck), the majority of games are easy for players of all ages to get into – which makes them a lot more competitive, and a lot more fun because of it. You won’t often find someone being counted out a few seconds into the game, as often, it’s a neck and neck race – at least, until half way through.
They say time flies when you’re having fun, and with Mario Party 2, that’s certainly true, but it’s also one of the problems. When you start each game, you can select a number of turns to play, but even the smallest number means a game takes upwards of 40 minutes to complete. With no way to save half way through (and the Virtual Console, for some reason, not saving your state when you quit), it’s disappointing to say the least, and means you’ll need to have a substantial chunk of time available when you start playing if you want to see it through to the end.
When we reviewed Wii Party, we lamented the lack of Mario characters, and a proper board game feel. Playing Mario Party 2 has just confirmed that we were right. We don’t want another Wii Party – Nintendo, it’s time to bring Mario Party back!
