Mario Party (ConceptTopic, 5)
From Compile Worlds
Mario Party is a series of virtual board games starring, of course, Mario, but also over 9000 other characters as well, naturally as the series progressed. It's also the first game to establish both the Party game and Minigame collection genres, thus effectively leading Nintendo to start a bandwagon. Unfortunately, much like their other bandwagons, Mario pushed everyone 4/4Sonic the HedgehogPacmanRaymanPikachu off the bandwagon, effectively and rather selfishly monopolizing both genres to himself, although he decided to share a little with Sonic later in life.
ANYWAY, Mario Party's game play involves the characters rolling oversized dice blocks to land on various assorted colored spaces to get lots of coins, stars and BOULDERS. To win and compete for coins, the characters play minigames, with the teams being decided by the color of the space everyone landed on (Red vs Blue, much?). There's also Bowser, who appears on the board to steal your precious things or make you play his Bowser Minigames, which usually involve you handing over your possessions to him anyway. Since a minigame must be played every turn, and the various events on the Board Maps prolong each turn significantly, games of Mario Party can take a ridiculously long time, usually no less than an hour, and some times up to even 4 hours, if you're crazy enough to play a 50 turn game. Despite this and other structural flaws later on, the series continues to enjoy moderate success, with 8 console titles, 2 handheld titles, and even arcade cabinets...wait, who has the time and quaters to play Mario Party in an arcade?!
Mario Parties 1, 2, and 3 are generally hailed as the best in the series, despite being on the Nintendo 64, although it is for a variety of game play reasons. Unfortunately, these three were also the ones the competing party games had to take a stab at. The only one that got remotely close to snuffing out it's fat, italian competition is Sonic Shuffle.
