Hudson Soft (Nintendo)

Grade:

B

In this fourth installment of the ever-popular video-board game Mario Party, Nintendo surprises us with awesome graphics and four-player fun. Sitting down with a group of people is hard enough to do when you are in

college, especially when it's coming down to the end of the semester, but when you do, try this game out.

The game is fairly fast-paced and played like any normal board game, with rolls of the dice. It also continues the Mario tradition of lots of mushrooms. Of all the characters to choose from, Wario has to be the best because it's so darn funny when something bad happens to him.

Laughter aside, though, the mini-games are the feature of this game. MP4 boasts 50 new mini-games, in which players earn the majority of their coins, beating their friends with spike-balls and dynamite.

At this point, you are probably wondering why you would ever want to play a kid's game. Although, on the outside this may seem like a kid's game (which it can be) there are always ways of making things more interesting for the older crowd. Let's say when you ask your friends to come over, you say, "Hey guys! Let's play Mario Party!" and then they look at you like they just lost their brains.

Blank stares and drooling commence.

My advice would be to change the question up again to something like, "Hey guys! Let's play Mario Drinking Party!" Then you play the game with a group of people, get trashed and try to run around on the screen to outrun King Koopa before he steals all your coins.

So, hey, now the game is fun, the graphics are cool and you are inebriated. This game is great!