After six appearances on the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, the Mario Party franchise makes its first appearance on a Nintendo handheld. While the focus of the console versions of each Mario Party has been on the multiplayer mode, Mario Party Advance for the Game Boy Advance concentrates mainly on the single player aspect. It’s odd to think of a single person party, but Hudson Soft has tried hard to make it fun and appealing. So does this party hop, or does it fizzle? Read on to find out how we felt.

Facts and Features:

• Focus on the single player aspect
  
  
• 50 mini-games to take on the road
  
  
• Dozens of unlockables, including “Gaddgets,” two-player Duel Games, and more
  
  
• 1-4 players can compete via GBA link cable (no wireless adapter support)
  
  
• Playable characters include: Mario, Luigi, Peach and Yoshi
  
  
• Tons of cameos by popular characters from the Mario franchise
  
  
• Trade items and mini-games via GBA link cable

There’s a Party in my House, and I’m Invited
Mario Party Advance has a strong single player focus that has been semi-streamlined for a portable experience. First of all, the gameplay board has been custom tailored for a single individual player to roam around on. You start with 5 mushrooms, each representative of one turn, and you make your way around the game board in any direction you want. Each turn will cost you one mushroom to roll the dice, but there are ways to earn more mushrooms as you play. If you should run out of mushrooms, the game is over. Along the board there are different buildings where a quest is offered to you if you choose to stop. By completing these quests you will earn new mini-games, items, or Gaddgets (oddball mini-games ranging from cool to useless). There are four different types of spaces you can land on: a yellow space that does nothing, a dice space that gives you a free roll, a minus space that takes away a turn, and a mini-game space that triggers a game where you can earn or lose turns based on your performance. Unlike previous Mario Party games, there isn’t a star space on the board that will be your clear cut goal. Your main goal is to pass quests and unlock mini-games. This may sound like great fun, and at times it is, but just as often it feels like you are just playing for the chore of collecting.


Start!

There is a lot of conversational text that breaks up the action, and that can be somewhat annoying for those of us that just want to play for five to ten minutes and don’t want to spend a third of that time reading. The action provided in the mini-games is a real mixed bag. You have some games that are great fun, and you wish you could repeat immediately, but there are also those that you hope to never see again. The majority of the mini-games fall somewhere in the middle; they aren’t particularly great or bad, they just won’t excite you all that much. With so many mini-games and Gaddgets to unlock, you will find reasons to keep coming back to this game though, and the gameplay is fun enough that it won’t deter you from trying to unlock games just for the sake of knowing you did it. Far too often games tend to make getting all the unlockables an annoying chore, in Mario Party Advance, it’s more like a regular chore.