Mario Party (1998)

Mario Party is the first installment of the Mario Party series. It was developed by Hudson Soft, published by Nintendo, released on December 18, 1998, in Japan, February 8, 1999, in North America and Brazil, and March 9, 1999, in Europe and Australia for the Nintendo 64. The success of the game created the Mario Party series that we all know today.

Mario Party

"Hee hee, I got it!"

Genre(s):	Party
Platform(s):	Nintendo 64
Release Date:	JP: December 18, 1998 NA/BR: February 8, 1999 EU/AU: March 9, 1999
Developer(s):	Hudson Soft
Publisher(s):	Nintendo
Country:	Japan
Series:	Mario Party
Successor:	Mario Party 2

Plot

One day, Mario and his friends were arguing about who the superstar was. Wario says that a superstar must be strong, to which Donkey Kong agrees. Both fight to see who is the strongest and Luigi is in the middle of both. Toad says Mario would make a big superstar, or maybe Peach or Yoshi. The group begins to get closer to Toad. He says he has an idea, suggests that the group go through the green pipe in the center of the Mushroom Village and through their adventures, discover who the superstar is. He warns that the road will be dangerous, and it takes not only strength, but also courage, wisdom and a good heart. They all agree and run to the pipe.

Why It's a Party

It has a new, interesting premise for a Mario game: Mario and friends having a party and Bowser wants to ruin it. Because of its originality, this game was a great success and created the Mario Party franchise with a lot of great sequels in future Nintendo consoles.
The controls, despite the mini-games of crush buttons, are pretty decent and solid.
Pretty cool and well detailed cover art, the Japanese cover especially looks good.
Introduced mini-games for the first time, with examples of the most fun ones being Face Lift, Shy Guy Says, and Bombs Away.
The soundtrack is good, with some of the most memorable songs being Rainbow Castle, Tropical Island, Engine Room, Birthday Cake, and Mushroom Forest.
Good graphics by the standards of the late 1990s.
The voice performance is decent, aside from a few characters. (see QTDTPOTH#5 for more details)
The AI is decent, at least in the middle in minigames, and works decently, although sometimes it is unfair.
Nintendo learned the lesson of the minigames where you have to roll the analog stick about and since Mario Party 2, the analog stick has been used sparingly and by the time of the GameCube, Nintendo's analog sticks have gotten much more comfortable to use. Nintendo also did not create more minigames that rely on using constant rotation of the analog stick to win until Mario Party: Island Tour.

Qualities That Damaged the Palms of the Hands

Some bad minigames:
- The infamous minigames that require constant rotation of the analog stick to play. These include Tug o' War, Paddle Battle, Pedal Power, and to some extent, Cast Aways and Deep Sea Divers. Due to the uncomfortable design of the Nintendo 64 analog stick, many players used their palms to play these minigames, which caused many of them to get blisters, friction burns, and lacerations on their hands. Nintendo would go on to offer gaming gloves to everyone who got injured. More info can be found here.
- The single-player mini-games are way too overpowered for the solo player, as they can get lots of coins without interference from the others. The biggest example here is Whack-a-plant, the player can get a whopping 36 coins just from this mini-game, and it's really easy to do so! Other games are so easy that it's more of a time waster for all the players as the 1 player is essentially given free money, Memory Match, Ground Pound, and Shell Game are the offenders here. After this game, Single Player Minigames were removed but they were re-added in Mario Party 8 as "Challenge Minigames" Where they are only playable in the 2-player modes.
- Bash N' Cash puts the Single Player at a huge disadvantage against three players and unfairly favors the other three players.
There are no items in this game, which cuts out a significant amount of strategy the player can play. The closest thing to "items" are the random dice blocks and warp block, but they only appear randomly. Due to these factors, it is near impossible for a player who is behind to catch up to the person who is in first, the only real way they can do so is with chance time.
Along with Mario Party Advance, this game has the fewest minigames of the franchise with 50 in total; however, 10 minigames are only in single player, which you can only access when you land on a particular space. The remaining 39 each sit in one of three categories: four-player, one versus three, or two versus two. Which category you get depends entirely on the spaces the players landed on during the turn. This can result in you having to play the same mini-game multiple times during a game.
Most of the game is only based on luck and decision-making, it can be fun at a certain point, but luck-based mini-games are mostly decent or mediocre like Pipe Maze and there is almost no strategy in these types of mini-games, you also have to be good at making decisions on the boards, since in themselves the boards are not well designed and in several you can lose coins easily in an unexpected way or easily access Bowser and Boo.
- Nathaniel Bandy puts it best himself: "To sum up Mario Party in a nutshell, it's the equivalent of getting punched in the balls over and over again and never knowing when you're gonna get hit again."
Poor voice acting for Toad, Luigi, and Wario.
False advertising: One of the artworks intended to be used for a title screen based on who is the Superstar of the last board map played in Adventure Mode and his or her board, the artwork for Yoshi's Tropical Island depicts Mario and the gang in teams of three (Mario, Yoshi, and Luigi against Peach, Donkey Kong, and Wario) playing beach volleyball on what appears to be more of a sandy beach whose sand is tan-colored and with some palm trees in the background supposedly referencing the board it's based on, yet the actual board map is of two islands that are Watermelon and Cantaloupe Islands where the former's that is sandy is light cream-colored; and to which in the entire game itself, there are no Mini-Games of any sort in the style of volleyball.
Confusing cover art: The dice block that Mario is punching makes the cover art look like it's "Mario Party 3".

Trivia

Ever since the game was first released, the Mario Party series as a whole started to be referred to as "the game that destroyed friendships".
This is the only Mario Party title on the N64 to not be released on the Virtual Console, mainly because of the stick rotation mini-games.

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