A Goomba, Koopa, Boo, Shy Guy, and Toad show up in a Borg cube to assimilate you into the party collective. What do you do?

You play Mario Party 4, of course. Resistance is futile.

I mentioned in the Backloggd Discord server that I've been playing these games while drinking, and I recall someone saying that "drunk Mario Party sounds fun." I promise you that getting liquored up while playing these is less for my own personal amusement and is instead purposeful, not unlike field medics pouring booze down the throat of a Civil War soldier before sawing off a gangrenous limb. It is a measure strictly taken to dampen the severe levels of psychological damage these games cause me, and though I know the only one holding me to the insane commitment of playing through the entire series is me, every couple of months I decide it's time to pickle my liver and enter into the dreaded party zone. I do this so you don't have to. Some would call me a hero, you know.

I've left some pretty harsh reviews for the first three Mario Party games, but I at least had the opportunity to play those with friends and develop an understanding of where Mario Party's true value is. Forcing people to play Mario Party with you also has the unintended side effect of driving them out of your life (strange, I know), so Mario Party 4 is the first in the series that I've played purely solo. Thankfully, Nintendo anticipated that weird losers might want to play Mario Party 4 and designed a whole story mode just for them. It's Waluigi's birthday, and he needs to earn his presents by beating his "friends" in the Party Cube. Can you collect all his gifts, including... A shower head? A calendar where every day is Sunday? What is this crap...?

The thing about story modes is that you want to make forward progress in them, and the thought of losing 40-60 minutes of playtime because you lost a game of Mario Party is just dire. At least Mario Party 4 has the decency to autosave at the end of every turn, but you probably don't want to rely on that too much. There was one instance where I got to the post-game star tally holding three stars to everyone else's zero. In the bag, right? Damn, I'm good at Mario Party - it's a game of skill!

Jump cut to Daisy claiming the What's Happenin', minigame, and coin stars while holding enough coins overall to break the tie and win. Since the game saved right before this, it was unsalvageable. After this loss, I began power cycling my Wii (which requires navigating through several software menus to access the hard drive, so it takes a while) to roll better turns whenever I felt the outcome would otherwise be too disastrous to recover from. According to USBLoader, I have started Mario Party 4 over 60 times. I'd say less than ten of those were me sitting down to start Mario Party 4 for a fresh session.

Despite how frustrating that must sound, the autosave feature does at least make this more tolerable than Mario Party 3, as the lack of seeded turns does allow you to manipulate your fortune to some extent. Were it not for rerolling turns, I'd still be playing this thing, so I'm choosing to internalize this feature as a net positive.

Minigames are overall better here than they were in the previous three games, although you're still able to roll the same minigames multiple times in a map. Ohhhh boy, it's Blame it on the Crane, again. Wasn't fun enough the first two times I played it, gotta dip back in once more! The low quantity of minigames does allow you to become well-practiced at a fairly large number of them - giving you an edge over your AI opponents - but if you're anything like me, the frequency in which some of the more lengthy and agonizing games show up will have you groaning "Bob-omb Breakers, time to reset" more than you'd like.

Ultimately, this is still Mario Party. I still don't like it. These are hateful, vindictive games, but Mario Party 4 is probably the best of the bunch that I've played. Introducing save-scumming to Mario Party is such a game changer.

BUT IS IT A SUMMAH GAME?

The answer to this should of course be a vehement "NO," and I'm not even sure why I thought to include it in my 2023 Summah Games series. I created this weird mental image of me in some sporty Summah clothes, chowin' down on a big slice of watermelon, seeds dripping off of me while a chorus of cicadas meets the whirl of the die, buzzing in my mind a breezy Summah jam. In reality, I was constantly getting up to reset the Wii, trapped in stuffy work clothes on my lunch break, trying to make up for lost time in a frenzied attempt to just be done with the damn thing while a documentary about FX's Breakfast Time droned in the background, volume on my TV off so I could spare myself from the constant cycle of Mario Party 4's soundtrack. That's not a Summah. That's not a Summah at all!

But as the Ministah of Summah I have a duty to uphold, and experiments must be done... I have subjected Mario Party 4 to a series of grueling Summah tests to determine its Summah vibes, which included deleting all the games off my Wii's hard drive and screaming at the top of my lungs while taking a cold bath fully clothed.

While these experiments did make me feel better, by deleting Mario Party 4 I found that I no longer had a game to test, resulting in a 0.1 on the Summah Index Scale, making Mario Party 4 Anti-Summah! This is a classification typically reserved for Wintuh games, but Mario Party 4 is so unfun that it could prove disastrous to your Summah. I am thankfully built of sterner stuff, but I cannot recommend this game to a Summah neophyte. Avoid it at all costs, and if you do stray across a copy at the beach, on a pier, or perhaps under a board walk, report it immediately to the Summah authorities.

My first Mario Party game, and it is probably one of the best ones in the entire series. Most of the mini-games are the best in the entire series, like booksquirm. I love the music and all the unique boards that change up the game. I always played this one with my brother and sister, had a lot of fun.

Also with the game itself, it is one of the most fair Mario Party games. If you are good at the mini games and good at the strategies of the board, then you can win. But also if you don't win, you can still come back with Genie Lamps or chance time. It is really balanced and fun.

Played for the Tarvould's Quest Mario Party League, viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNiBuIKkhNOcetedJo2kjJwenDNYqHsFt

This was actually my first Mario Party. Way early on, after my family got our GameCube, we borrowed this game for a weekend. Truthfully I no longer remember how we borrowed it; I seem to recall it being lent to my father by a coworker, but it just as easily could've been a Blockbuster rental. Anyway, I did a pretty decent amount of the game's single-player offerings during that weekend, but it didn't hold my interest enough for me to clear all the boards while we borrowed it. For years, I always wondered about it, as I'd see the game logo crop up every time I viewed my memory card saves on my GameCube. There it was, towards the top of the list. My family got a lot of mileage out of Mario Party 6, which we'd buy for ourselves a few months later. Would we have had as much fun with 4?

I mention all this because, now that I've had the time to play through and sit with 4, those years of wondering probably represent the most fun I had with Mario Party 4. Maybe I would've liked it okay if I'd played more of it as a kid, but as an adult? There's little for me to hold onto.

Hudson basically cranked out one Mario Party a year from the first to the eighth release, but they took two gaps, one with each console generation gap. I'm not sure how true this is, but part of me imagines that much of this delay was so the team could take the time to adjust to the new console by rebuilding character models, assets, etc. This would've marked the GameCube debut for a lot of these characters, so a LOT of the Mario series regulars would've needed to be redesigned for the console shift (and I know most of these guys appeared in Melee as Trophies or whathaveyou, but they used their N64 designs there; compare Daisy's skintones from Mario Party 3 to Melee to Mario Party 4, for an easy comparison). And I will say that for its era, a lot of this looked pretty good. There's a big focus on photorealism and modeling precise physics and graphics, with something like the mini-game "Makin' Waves" a visual showcase in a lot of the same ways Super Mario Sunshine was working towards.

Problem being that there's little soul to how these characters and these worlds look. There's such a focus on photorealistic, sterile environments that a lot of the game doesn't "feel" very Mario. Since I mentioned it, compare Super Mario Sunshine to Mario Party 4. Isle Delphino aesthetically makes sense in Mario's world, with the Piantas, the Nokis, and so on feeling like characters that could conceivably co-exist in a world with, say, Koopalings or Bob-Omb Buddies. Mario Party 4 would've been developed in tandem, so I don't think it's fair to expect Isle Dephino and its denizens to show up. Still, the island locations we see in some of the mini-games, and the worlds of the boards themselves, don't really feel like places that exist in or around the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario Parties 1-3 were generally great at inventing boards and settings jammed with Mario-like flavor. I think of Horror Land's playful take on an unfamiliar genre for Mario, with its giant ketchup spill, and party of ghosts wandering the highway and its hidden Mad Piano; or Wario's Battle Canyon leaning into lore established in Mario 64 and presenting a war conflict like a stage play; or Creepy Cavern having Dorrie, Swoopers, and those Whomps playing their own version of Mario Party (Matryoshka Party?). By contrast, the Mario Party 4 boards feel less like places that might come out of Mario's world and more like places from the real world that are full of Mario characters. There's a sense of sterility to it all, particularly in the play area being on elevated pathways rather than integrated into the environment. Everything uses sophisticated renders, but it doesn't "feel" right.

This is without even getting into the actual content of the game! Frankly, I think all the boards this time around are duds, save Bowser's Gnarly Party (but Bowser Boards are usually hard to screw up). Goomba's Greedy Gala is funny for how dickish it is, but after the initial joke there's little to hold onto. I can't tell if Thwomp's two Extra Boards are deliberately poorly-designed or what, but I'm not much a fan, short and inconsequential as they are. Everything else is just there to be a big fat waste of your time, ESPECIALLY Toad's Midway Madness, where the nature of the board guarantees that a player will periodically get screwed over in that initial teacup loop regardless of how they actually play.

This is in no small part a consequence of the game's MiniMega system, the first of the series' many forays into ill-conceived gimmicks. It's a decent high-concept, playing into series identity in a way that codifies the existing Mushroom items. In practice, it's pretty terrible. Mega's benefits are pretty straightforward (double dice, squish existing players), but Mini is where the problem lies. The logical offset to something like Mega would be a clear penalty, so naturally the game needs to introduce incentives to be Mini. The way they decide to do this is through Mini-Gates and Mini-Mini-Games, functions of the board you can only access when you're a little guy. A consequence of THIS is that large portions of the boards end up being inaccessible or seeing infrequent use. This combined with the quite uninspired board design makes a lot of the experience of the boards homogenized and going through motions.

I hate to say it, but if I'm having fun with Mario Party 4, it's in spite of rather than because of anything it's doing. That or I'm playing a mini-game, there are a few pretty strong mini-games this time around. But I find myself less drawn into Mario Party's mini-games than I am the high-level board play, and that's pretty frankly lacking in this game. Not hard to see why Hudson decided to switch things up for the next game...

This Mario Party is a mixed bag of things. I like the birthday theme (especially with the presents in story mode), the minigames are some of the best in the series with all time greats like Booksquirm and Dungeon Duos, I love how battle minigames work in the game with letting the person who landed on it to choose between 2 minigames, custom Minigame selection is really awesome and should come back, and last 5 turns has a chance to be a lot more chaotic which I like! That being said I don’t like how reversal of fortune (chance time) defaults to swap coins so often, the item system isn’t great, and most importantly: the board selection isn’t good overall. The standout board of this pack is probably Shy Guys Jungle Jam with has a cool gimick but is pretty standard overall but the boards overall aren’t great such as to Toads Midway Madness which I hate with a burning passion and isn’t even the worst board in this game. The game is good overall and I don’t mind going back to it, but the gameplay has glaring flaws.

I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to review these and I may forego it entirely. I can say that it is enjoyable but not my favourite of the GameCube ones. It takes quite a bit to make these games truly distinct from one another outside of just having different boards and minigames that are also unique from what came before, especially as more and more Mario Party games came into existence. It wasn't until peripherals came into play like the GameCube microphone for 7 and motion controls for 8 and also board mechanic overhauls in the much later ones that things started to feel distinctly different. As an example of how samey these start to feel, I often forget which one is 4 and which one is 5. They are really interchangeable in my mind. Take of that what you will in regards to both 4 and 5 in how I would rate them, 'cos even I'm not sure how to feel.

For me, Mario Party 4 can be summed up like this: Middle of the road boards, but fantastic mini game lineup. The boards are extremely mid. Not even that bad but they're so boring and there's only one of them I consider good. With the mini games tho, outside of Super Mario Party, this might be the best lineup of mini games in the series. However, the item system is a massive downgrade from MP3. Not only are there not nearly as many, but the game's whole gimmick is shoving the same two items down your throat 70% of the time. It gets old. Probably the most "okay" Mario Party I've played to date