Mario Party 2

"The best Mario Party game yet!"

This is the sequel to Mario Party 1 and the Prequel to Mario Party 3. Its beats both of those games! This 2000 release will sure make you want to party!

On with the review!

Liked Mario Party 1? Then you'll love this one for so many reasons! The graphics aren't the best part of the game but you have to say they are incredible. Backgrounds, board maps, and characters, its all good! You can even say these graphics are better than Mario Party 3! The control is also perfect. Its a board game so you dont need any advanced control. You just press A to roll the dice and the character you pick moves for you. Other buttons do other things like look at the map or use an item. About the minigames, if you dont know what to press, they will tell you! The only hard part is pressing the A button a lot, but that won't take too much effort. The best thing about the games control now is that you do not have any games where you can rotate the control stick quickly! Your hands and controller are safe from any damage. A big difference from this game is the new features. You can now use items to really screw your enemy up and they could do it to you. This makes the game a lot more challenging. New minigames, and they even kept some old favorites. Bumper Balls, Face Lift, and Mushroom Mix ups. Good new ones are Honey Comb Havoc(good strategy) and a game with red lava and Thwomps. Some of the minigames are pointless, like the one with the face looking, but with over 50 minigames, no game is overplayed. Minigames are played after each person goes on the regular game board. If you think you are bad at some minigames, you can press the R button for practice. There's also new game boards, and a small thing is that your character and others dress up for the theme of there board map. Another cool thing EXCLUSIVE to this game is that when you win in the entire game, a small cut scene shows at the end of you battling Bowser in many different ways. Some of the items are a big help. Heres a list and description of some cool ones.

Items:

Skeleton Key-lets you open certain doors and sometimes you need one because Stars are in them.

Duel Glove-Use it and you are in a duel with your selected enemy.

Boo Bell- Use it and Boo will ask if you want to steal coins or even Stars.

Gold Mushroom-rolls 3 dice

Mushroom-rolls 2 dice.

Theres plenty more but these are some of the best.

And about that story, its still the same good one: Be the Superstar by collecting stars and coins. Bonus Stars like landing on the ? spaces a lot or collecting the most coins from minigames also help you accomplish this goal. Once your done with the board, you and even your CPU opponents put together the current coins and get put in the bank to buy stuff. Only minigames are there to be bought. Why do you by them? To add plenty of replay! Once that's done, you go on a minigame coaster, doing all minigames in a certain order. It's a Mario game but that doesn't mean it's easy. Nope. If you get far there, the CPU gets unuasally insane and it takes a lot of effort to beat them. And about that music. Not bad at all. The board game music is the best out of all 3 Mario Party games and the minigame music is just as good. The sound is pretty good, too. Similar sounds to Mario Party 1. Voices improved a bit. Mario, Luigi, Wario, Bowser, Yoshi, and DK sound good. Toad and Peach dont sound good though. Maybe Peach could be considered all right, but Toad sounds like a bum with a high-pitched voice. Other than that, the whole sound category is excellent.

You think Mario games aren't challenging? Think again. I already told you about the minigame coaster. You can set characters up to Hard and the name of the difficulty says it all. There is also tons of replay value like buying minigames and seeing other boards. This game is very fun. My suggestion is, have a freind play with you because the fun doesn't add up with just CPU opponents. I find that if you play with freinds, the game becomes more challenging becuase you want them especially to lose.

Conclusion

Buy this game. Its too good for a rental. A game that gets a 9 is definatly good enough to buy.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/19/01, Updated 07/15/03