Name: Mario Party DS
Genre: Party Game
Platform: Nintendo DS

I have a weird relationship with the Mario Party games. Nintendo usually strays from incremental upgrades to their major series, but Mario Party has always been the exception. While fun and usually fairly polished, Nintendo rarely takes risks with the franchise. Every year another Mario Party game comes out with more minigames and maps and it feels more like Nintendo is giving us expansion packs than sequels. It takes certain catalysts to really shock Nintendo into making changes with the series.

One such catalyst is a new platform. The Nintendo DS is a minigame hotbed, with its touch screen making even the mundane and overdone games new and fresh. It also had the ability to access the Internet to play games online, so titles like Mario Party can be played even by the friendless. That is, if Nintendo took advantage of that and added online play, which they didn’t in this case.

If you have played any of the Mario Party games nothing will seem foreign. Players battle on a large game board rolling dice to progress across themed maps. Every few rolls there is a minigame battle between the players to earn coins which allow them to buy items and stars. Whoever has the most stars at the end (if a tie it goes to highest coins) wins the game. Mario Party DS does little to shake up this formula and other than adding touch screen controls for some of the games it feels and looks like any of the previous versions in the series. Be it for good or bad, Mario Party DS looks and feels like the Nintendo 64 editions shrunk down to fit on the DS. It also plays like it, with fun games and interesting levels.

The most impressive aspect of Mario Party DS is the ability to play with four players with just one game card. All of the levels, characters, and minigames are available for four friends to get together and play even if one only person has purchased the game. This significantly raises the game’s value to one of the best titles on the DS if you have people to play it with. While still little more then an excuse to force feed minigames to players, Mario Party DS is better than most games in its series. There isn’t online play, which is a huge disappointment because even The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass had WiFi features. I would love to be able to play this with people across the country, but thanks to what appears to be laziness on the part of Nintendo this option will have to wait for the next party.

Even without online play Mario Party DS is worth a purchase. With over seventy minigames and four maps there is plenty of replay value. It doesn’t break any boundaries in terms of innovation, but if you have the means to play with friends it can be a huge blast.

I give Mario Party DS five stars out of ten.

Oh, wait; Mario Party DS gets an extra star for best download play game since Mario Kart. It now gets a six out of ten.

It also gets a bonus star for biggest let down because of the lack of online play. Now it gets seven stars out of ten.

God damnit do I hate bonus stars.