Mario Party 4 (GameCube) Review

By James H. 13.01.2003

Review for Mario Party 4 on GameCube

The one player offers a lot of things to do. There starts off with the Story Mode. This consists of playing round a board to get to the Star. The person with the most Stars wins. Pretty simple really, and very easy to get into and play. The game goes on and after each player has rolled the dice and moved round the board chosen you have to play a mini-game. There are loads of mini-games.

Some of my favourite are; Trace race, avalanche, domination and dungeon duos. Trace race, a very simple mini-game yet very addictive. It basically is trying to keep to line that twists, turns and loops. Avalanche is skiing across a basic level against obstacles and an avalanche following you. Pretty simple yet very addictive, one of the better mini-games. Domination is a very basic button bashers paradise. Tapping A as fast as you can to get the longest line of thwomps. Dungeon Duos is a brilliant team mini-game that is great to play when there is a few mates round. Going along a course helping your teammate get past walls and the helping you, helping them across obstacles, this is very hard if you're not much of a team player. Once you have played the mini-games in Story Mode you can practise them whenever you want and if you just want to play mini-games without the board you can.

Each mini game has its own unique style of gameplay. Some like Mario Medley requires button bashing with a bit of thought, some like dungeon duos require teamwork and precise timing and some like trace race require perfect precision in direction on the 3d stick. Most of the mini-games are individually different.
The boards themselves are a just likes a normal board game. Roll the dice, and then move round the board collecting coins and stars. There is a limit on the amount of rolls. At the end of each go there is a mini-game. A random type of mini-game will be chosen. (2 vs. 2, 1 vs. 1 vs. 1 vs. 1 vs. 1 and 3 vs. 1. There are from over 50 mini-games to choose from. At the end the stars and coins are counted up and players are rewarded stars for things like most coins and most mini-games won. Not much gameplay is involved in the boards themselves; it is also boring watching the computer have their turn, more like watching an interactive movie.

The boards are neatly presented; the characters are all moulded perfectly to their 2d counter parts, right down to Mario moustache and Peaches dress and patterns on it. All the mini-games are bright and colourful and look nice on the eye. Some of the best looking is; Paratrooper Plunge, Booksquirm and three throw. The multiplayer, the sole reason of the game. To party on some brilliantly designed boards and play some mini-games. The party mode is brilliant but if you don't have time the mini-game room is brilliant. Tic tac toe is a brilliant idea, choose you square on the board, play a mini-game and the winner wins the square. The first person to get "tic tac toe, 3 in a row" is the winner.

Completing boards is easy but with different difficulty modes, loads of mini-games to play and completing all boards with all players should be keeping playing for ages. The multiplayer will never get boring how ever much you play it.

Cubed3 Rating

8/10
Rated 8 out of 10

Great - Silver Award

Rated 8 out of 10

All the main aspects of the game are damn near perfect. The graphics are clean, bight, colourful and nice to look at. The length is very long with a multiplayer you will never get bored of and with over 50 different mini-games to play you won't be getting bored for a long time. There are a few niggles like some of the poor mini-games but most things are V. good! Well done Nintendo and Hudson Soft, Mario Party 5, bring it on!

Developer

Hudson

Publisher

Nintendo

Genre

Party

Players

4

C3 Score

Rated $score out of 10  8/10

Reader Score

Rated $score out of 10  8/10 (9 Votes)

European release date Out now   North America release date Out now   Japan release date Out now   Australian release date Out now   

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