Every time I play a Mario Party title, I miraculously get fucked over in some of the most spectacular ways. Generally much past the point of recovery. Today, that almost happened again; in two turns I already landed a red space and a Bowser space back to back. I didn't have any expectations for it to get any better than that.

I played this game earlier today and won my first Mario Party session in over five years.

God.

Still fucks me up that this game technically released before Sonic Adventure 1 and still somehow managed to be a more consistently entertaining experience.

I haven't played it in a long time. It's had many updates since my last fair go. But, man.... mastering the stage layout and rocketing through as Sonic without the game EVER taking control away from me is something I wish the official entries offered.

I had my issues with it, but I really can't blame the devteam if they had so few games to take as a reference point. It's lovely. That's all I really have to say, but on top of already being a solid base experience, the modding community is thriving- adding more to this game even to this day. It's so nice!

Fuck Egg Rock though.

I haven't finished this one yet, but the amount of dialogue is so dense that it's actively hurting my enjoyment.

I suppose there's always been worse fangames out there with this kind of thing, but the attempts at humor here don't really jive with me or seem all that in-character for anybody that's speaking. I audibly groaned when the game felt the need to ENTIRELY stop me in my tracks and prevent me from picking another level, just so that I could talk to some shady cloaked OC... that Mega Man even asks "Why are you cloaked?" to.

Like, what's the joke there? Is the joke that Mega Man's stupid? Hahahahaha???
Cool, can I play another shitty Tier 1 level instead and get them over with instead of having this filler inbetween? Why would you even add a plotline to a level contest with no cohesion anyway? How can you possibly justify all of this with a story? And if you could, why would you WANT to?

I don't understand it. I took a break because this game's already long enough without the unskippable cutscenes. :/

Doesn't help that the game refused to let me map my controller, but whatever.

I think the spritework and animations in this game are very well-done, but the core gameplay loop's simplicity doesn't justify the length of this game. I didn't get far into it before it became really obvious that they didn't have many ideas of how to progress the plotline.

I dunno. I do think that the sheer existence of this spinoff's premise adds a lot to the Pokemon universe, and that that's great- but as a whole, it just feels kinda half-baked.

Also fuck whoever thought to make the unskippable tutorial sequences span that much of the game. I figured everything out before I was told about any of it, why do minutes of my time need to be wasted explaining every minute detail? I get they make these for kids, but no kid is THAT dense, sheesh.

I love this game too much to have any type of unbiased review for it. So I'm not gonna bother, I'll just tell you some cool tricks I've learned after replaying the game 50000000000000000 times. I've finished it on Mania in one credit, for christ's sake.


There's a 1up in the bottom left corner of the screen as soon as you start stage 1. You can't see it because of the sign in the way. Just walk down there and grab it, it's free!
There's another one behind the truck in stage 2, and another one under the alien head in stage 3. Remember where they are and you're GUARANTEED to make it to the end.... you know, unless you suck or something.

If you're ever thrown, you can land directly on your feet if you hold down Up + C. You can abuse this in multiplayer by intentionally setting up the second player for a back throw to clear out a bunch of enemies (unless you're Max; he'll just suplex them and they'll lose a huge chunk of HP!)

Speaking of multiplayer exploits, there's a TON, but the most notable to me are relatively simple.
Accidentally hitting your co-op partner is not actually that big of a deal. They only take 1/8th of the normal damage from friendly fire attacks, so what that means is... if you interrupt their special attack with a jab, they will actually take less damage than they would've from just doing it. If you synergize well, you can get some impossibly high damage combos for less than half the normal cost.

There's also this weird bug where, if two of your hitboxes overlap, the game will freak out and repeat it over and over again for every frame. If you and your buddy jab a guy at the EXACT same spacing, he'll just die instantly and not be able to do anything about it. Goofy!



Play the game some more! Try it on harder difficulties! Melt healthbars with Axel's Grand Upper! Pummel people's heads in with Skate! Knock 'em dead with Max's backswing pipe! Be REALLY LAME and spam Blaze's jump kicks, I don't care, you do you!

Play Streets of Rage 2!