So, let’s talk about Mario Party rather than.
Yes, Mario Party. I hear you moaning from here. I’m not a big fan, but when someone says “hey, let’s spend the next hour playing this incredibly capricious and meaningless board game”, I have no objection. I just choose my character – usually a princess, which is probably one of the few times that I choose an openly female avatar – and just let it happen. After all, points don’t matter in Mario Party. Last dead? Here, have a star!
I probably didn’t play one Mario Party title in almost a decade, totally skipping the Wii U portion – but it hasn’t changed much with 2018 Super Mario Party for the switch. Or at least not in concept. There are many bells and whistles added, and it is certainly a more beautiful game now. But the essence of “here’s a bunch of weird mini-games and maybe if you’re lucky with your data, you’ll get a star” is still there. I was a little drunk when I played (safely) with friends and checked quickly, to the sound of “I’m going to land in the unlucky space on purpose”. I lost a lot of coins and I didn’t care. I was only there for the camaraderie.
The games we played were a mix of familiar and new – there was one where I had to draw shapes in cooperation with another player, using a piece of rope on a pin board, and another where I was piloting a pod that the other players were shooting at. darts in But the last one we played was the best, and I would really like it to be a totally separate game: Slaparazzi.
In this mini-game, all players are in a circle surrounded by stools on which Koopas will randomly climb to take a picture. Your objective is to be the subject of these photos, staying as far ahead and center as you can, getting other players out of the way in the process. The game will show each photo as it is taken and score its position on the board.
The photos are hilarious. They are never Good by conventional standards, with characters blocked, blurred or captured at strange angles. But it’s those weird angles, the players caught in the middle of a slap or getting slapped, that make the whole thing a delight to behold. It’s wonderfully trashy in the way that reality shows and tabloids can be, and I’m very, very good at getting people out of the vampire path to the cameras. It was the only mini-game that I won all the time that my friends and I played.
Nintendo
I’ve always loved the photography mode in games like Spider man and Final Fantasy XV, so of course I loved Slaparazzi. And as you can imagine, restarting the Pokémon Snap because the Switch cannot come to me soon.
Except, of course, this is the year I learned to wait. I can wait for a new one Snap, is for History not sung move from alphas and betas to something more finished, to the right mini game in Super Mario Party, for Cyberpunk 2077 to solve your problems and for the spring to come back again in Cross between animals to catch the fish I’m missing. Earlier this week, I wrote about how 2020 was the year of the casual player and these two titles – History not sung and Super Mario Party – showed me that it’s not just games that are casual, but me too.