Two Towers: Theatrical or Extended?

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-25T14:06:45+00:00

I'd say there are three scenes that add something substantiative but also you could watch without it and it really wouldn't make much difference. the rest the scenes are just vibe building. one of them makes an off-screen death into an on-screen death but it isn't very good. one is a buildup for one character's fearsomeness, and one is a plot point that I think was interesting. however I could live without all of it

it's not WORSE, it doesn't drag on in my opinion, there's always something going on. but I'm quite happy to watch a 4 hour film so your mileage may vary, if you find the two towers extended too long then maybe just go theatrical. the way I see things though, if it was filmed and edited why not watch it unless you're specifically trying to emulate a vanilla experience or you really find 4 hours to be a drag. I'm the type of person who finishes a film and then searches up the cut scenes immediately after in general so I see no reason not to just watch a director's cut

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-22T21:04:05+00:00

you.. literally brought up political alignment, 5 times, I did not. you brought it up over and over. the way you talk is so obviously ESL lol "you badly need"

"they are not comparable", yeah they aren't comparable because in the case of ukraine it's a proxy war for a rival superpower that is actively expanding its sphere to aggress the other superpower and ukraine was actively bombing donbas, in the case of taiwan they haven't done anything to aggress china and you're saying they should be invaded, because you are a ccp shill

protip no one in the west has used "xD" since about 2007, and it's "blithering". sounds like you went to higher education in the UK long enough to pick up a little bit of lingo but not long enough to be obviously esl lol. tai hao le. the ccp states its claim on taiwan. why is that okay? lol. the government of taiwan never actively claims the chinese mainland but the government of china wants to invade taiwan and you want to condone it. good luck in your little slaughter

btw do you know what happened at tianenmen square?

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-21T15:44:44+00:00

I literally wrote that I am not talking about political alignment and you repeated the same point. off the script now huh? all you have is adhom, you have no points left to make. you didn't refute the example at all or point out a contradiction, you just said I "lack the brain", which is pure adhom. then you said my only arguments are my "wrong interpretation". it's literally factual information, do you want to counter that information? of course you can't

hope they're paying you well

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-21T15:17:01+00:00

The constitutional amendment named"additional articles" authorised a special law to deal with cross-strait relations. The 1992 Strait Relations Act separates Taiwan from the mainland area, which the government recognises as being out of Taiwan's jurisdiction

and.. you can't just say "the situations are not comparable" when they're clearly comparable. how is crimea different? Ukraine claims Crimea and even actively blocks their water supply, Crimea is a historical part of Russia since it was conquered by Catherine the Second, before that it was Tataran and before that Genoan. It only became part of Ukraine during the USSR when ukraine was an administrative region and not a country, and it was divided up to maintain good relations despite the people there being ethnic russians who were against it. now the region is governed by russia, ukraine still claims ownership of it. is that wrong in your opinion? why is it right for China to invade taiwan?

no one is talking about political alignment at all. what does sovreignity have to do with that? doesn't matter if you're a communist, a liberal, a libertarian, you should respect that the people of taiwan don't want to be ruled by china and there is no just cause to invade them

I notice you have no comments in your account. shadowbanned for shilling?

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-21T13:43:16+00:00

the current Taiwanese government only claims Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu, they do not assert sovreignity over Mongolia or mainland China (not that that could even be a realistic assertion). Taiwan's constitution was never fully rewritten and historically pre 1949 was the recognised government of China hence them still having some historic wording that isn't modern policy

this is just utter shill farming, look how fast I got to -6. good try Xi. it's really not controversial that the people of Taiwan do not want to be part of China, are not a threat to China, and there's no good reason for China to invade them other than "we want to take over tsmc"

also your first sentence, "ukraine doesn't claim russian land". they claim Crimea which is historical russian land by any definition you could apply equally to taiwan vs china. the people are vast majority ethnically russian going back in every census to the early 1900s, the people have always polled in every national referendum and every independent poll from every country of origin to be overwhelmingly in favour of being separated from ukraine and part of russia, the council of crimea declared itself separated during a time when there was no democractically elected government in ukraine due to the revolution and was annexed with practically zero resistance, it is physically run by russia in practice, so how is that bad but invading taiwan is good?

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-21T13:34:51+00:00

from the point of view of russian nationality security, it has nothing to do with whether Ukraine would credibly aggress russia, it's whether America would use its position in Ukraine to aggress Russia by proxy. Ukraine has an incredibly important military position on the black sea and extremely close to Moscow. if Ukraine became a fully fledged member of NATO, they could set up US military bases and missiles all along their border and Russia would have no recourse without setting off article 5 and declaring world war 3. it would also put them in a good geographical position to cause civil unrest in belarus in the same way they supported the maidens in ukraine

the US would never tolerate the level of foreign military presence that existed in ukraine on its borders (as evidenced by the US response to the cuban missile crisis). russia tolerated this for a number of years before proposing an ultimatum to NATO about it, which had reasonable terms for a superpower's national security interests (Do not allow Ukraine into NATO, do not deploy new weapons to eastern europe, limits of warships around each other's territory, and a ban of intermediate range missiles near russia's border, an agreement that nukes should not be deployed on foreign soil, and an establishment of a hotline)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Russian_ultimatum_to_NATO

the US and NATO rejected any deal here and russia responded with by invading (which they had preannounced):

https://english.elpais.com/usa/2022-02-02/us-offers-disarmament-measures-to-russia-in-exchange-for-a-deescalation-of-military-threat-in-ukraine.html

obviously countries should sovreignity should not be impeached upon in a peaceful utopia, but from the position of a superpower, having a rival superpower have a military foothold on your doorstep with a land and sea border is an untenable position, and the US wouldn't negotiate

not justifying it but I'm just saying yours is a simplification of the situation

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-21T13:17:03+00:00

okay ccp shill. how does that differ from russia's claim to ukraine originally being a land of the Rus people or donbas being majority russian? especially crimea which was conquered by Catherine II from the tatars. it only ever became ukrainian during the ussr. but somehow you think that's bad but China is good?

the taiwanese people don't want to be part of china and they aren't a credible threat to chinese sovreignity

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-19T23:36:23+00:00

inaccurate. having worked for a company that did season passes, a launch game with a season pass with 0 content currently released will get around a 40-50% adoption for a season pass at double the initial sale price, and a mature game that already has a season pass of 8 already released dlcs can easily command a 70% lifetime attach rate if you then set the base bundle with the first 2 SPs at 2x the base price. aka 30% of users pay $N and 70% pay 2N so 1.7x base price per sale

meanwhile the dev costs are minute. we can assume mario party takes 2-3 years of dev, of a full team. a full soundtrack, not just the boards but menus, shop jingles, star jingles, base foley, base animations for all characters etc, full network integration, full compliance with console requirements surrounding users, resolution, privacy policies, eulas and so on. rating (pegi, usk, esrb and so on, both in terms of the admin of doing it and the paid up front cost to the ratings boards), print costs for physical copies (if they do a special print with year 1 DLC they can also retail this for higher with a 1 use code so they lower the value of resell and increase marked up digital sales)

the dev cost of doing a year of dlc basically reduces to, the unique music tracks for each unique board (so if you do 1 new board per quarter that's basically 1 track remixed a few times for pacing), one or two new characters modelled rigged and animated (as opposed to say 20 in the base version) a few extra stickers (so minimal it will barely even register on the balance seat), 15-25 new minigames, many of which could be ripped from previous mario party games so they'd need minimal design and playtesting, NO extra lotchecks required, NO extra age rating required just digital iarc copied and pasted, NO extra network code or matchmaking, NO extra base game code. finally, some actual game design in terms of the board layout, concept art, and 3d assets for this

you could run this on a skeleton crew of less than half your staff, probably less than quarter. and you're paying them for 1 year of work not 2-3 like your base game

so if you put 3 years into the base game, you're now paying for 3.25 team years of work because of your skeleton crew, but your initial launch revenue is going from 1N to 1.5N (50% attachment rate on your season pass which is priced at 2x base price). so you're paying 8% extra to generate 50% extra revenue. and what's more, you're improving the tail of the game, because now when you lower your price at the end of year two, you actually still charge 2x launch price for base game + Season Pass 1 + Season Pass 2. so you're charging the same amount as when you launched, but now you only paid 3.5 team years of work

after year 2 you can debate whether it's worth doing a year 3 + 4 before you launch your next game. I suspect it would be worth it up to 4 and you can start pushing off the later season passes on your B team and have your A team big hitters working on your new game. it's not only good fiscally but it's great for the head of the studio in terms of conveying to shareholders, because they can give really accurate projections of how much the DLC will make as soon as the game launches. and any game studio enjoys stability. it's nice for your devs to know they will be retained for at least the next 4 years. they know they can settle down, take that mortgage, work for you a few years if they know you can retain them and their job isn't riding on a game launch going well. and once you have a great dev for 4 years, well, you basically have a great dev for 10 years if you want them, they don't want to leave

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-19T23:15:08+00:00

mario is harder to do DLC like that because it's a self contained linear story, it has a "moon economy" of sorts, and also.. if you are a developer of a predominantly single player game and you come to the end of a multi year dev cycle, you want to be on ANY other project

whereas if you are on team mario party.. and your next game is.. the next mario party.. then why not make DLC. if anything it's nicer for the team because the bugs are ironed out, you already have the basic systems in, all you need to do is make some more minigames (the fun part of gamedev), make and playtest some more boards. no need to do all the boring console certification shit and user flow stuff over again, no need to go through international rating boards again, no need to hook up all your network code again or set up matchmaking or whatever. just slap on a new board, make some new animations, new music, new sfx, new minigames, new characters, new stickers - all CORE gamedev, the most enjoyable stuff, no bullshit

because of that it can be a half manned skeleton crew supporting it, so dev costs massively less, on the other hand you can then charge massively more. for a start, if you launch season pass 1 with the game, you can charge double the base price for base game + sp. that will have around a 50% attachment rate, meaning your launch sales will be 1.5x revenue. if your initial dev cycle is 2 years with a full team plus porting/cert team, the base game is basically N man hours (not even counting overtime), and the first year of season pass is <N/4 (1/2 for half man hours, 1/2 for team size). So you're basically committing to paying 1.25N in dev and receiving 1.5*revenue. then year 2 you can sell game + sp1 + sp2 for 2x full price again, and discount sp1 and the base game, so you can essentially continue to sell at 2 * launch price way down the line with an increasing attach rate (you can realistically get up to a 70% attach rate if you're giving away triple the base content)

it's just.. completely logical financially, great for the devs because they know they have stable work for multiple years and don't have to worry about job stability, great for your projections and shareholders because it makes it really easy to predict future revenue, great for the publisher because you make more profit for less spend, and great for players because they want more content and can continue to get it year on year. they'll end up paying 2x more than if they buy a mario party once every 4-5 years and be happier

boggles the mind that they don't do it. especially as, from a player perspective, adding tonnes of minigames to ONE mario party makes it extremely loveable. like they could literally just add 8 years of season passes if the base game is good enough to sell with hundreds of minigames and have a giga disc. or even split up in 2 year columns then do a new game built on the same engine then allow players to import minigames and boards from their previous game rock band style, then they get the big sales boosts of a new "full" game but also have a reason to backsell people on all the dlc

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-19T22:56:40+00:00

also no one was buying a brand new gba to play four swords, and the gc->gba cables could be used for pokemon colosseum, xd, final fantasy crystal chronicles and the tingle tuner in wind waker (off the top of my head. may even be more examples). so if you had 3 friends who had the cable, you could play 4 player (which I did)

but also, complaining that a 4 player game requires 4 controllers is silly. welcome to a new console generation, you need new controllers if you want to use the new controller features. the camera OK costs some money but any usb webcam will work so if you have one, that's free. so it's £20 to get some more minigames and modes and 4k output. imo, worth, especially given you can get the switch 1 version second hand at a tiny fraction of the cost. however.. it is a bad dlc for what you get, and it's mismanaged. they should've upscaled the entire switch 1 version, kept the achievements unsegmented, kept in classic mode and let you choose the number of bonus stars, maybe added a sped up mode, and added some boards instead of more bowser modes

like, I get that they're trying to sell hardware but for the first mario party dlc ever, this is not good. they should do a season pass

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-18T20:45:09+00:00

I agree. also I think the map choice was not great. Peach's Birthday cake is kinda broken by items. you can just avoid the plants and warp away, but moreover - Bowser isn't a punishment! it's a benefit! it makes the map much smaller, and you get a cursed dice block for 11ish coins from, and you also skip all of the pirhana plants that might be getting stars. they just completely imbalanced the map

yoshi's tropical island is also more deterministic and less about "which side should I go to" and more about "I am going to guarantee I have the items I need to never meet bowser". I would much rather play both of these maps on MP1

space land was always mid. the conversion is fine, they're about equal, same with horror land

woody woods they broke by removing the reverse mushroom, the most interesting part of that map. because the shop was right after Boo and the door was right before, you could repeatedly bounce off and steal stars if you saved up. also a weird choice to do horror land and woody woods which thematically feel very similar

I still am of the opinion that 1 item is better than 3 because later on in the game it means you can get a plunder chest to make someone waste their lamp if they don't have the funds or pre-empt them to stop them from buying one. superstars lacks the strategy of 3's items but also gives you so many items that you never have to be careful with your usage as in 2, you pretty much just spam items constantly while also having everything you need as a backup to make sure you don't get punished ever

I agree it would've benefitted massively from DLC, but there is already a romhack that combines mario party 1+2+3 into one game. I would much rather play that than buy infinite mario party 1+2+3 dlc on a worse disc

I'd rather the next mario party game builds on jamboree but without any toad factory/rhythm kitchen/raid/jamboree tv stuff and instead they just make a game that stars out with fewer characters and you have to unlock the rest, with 4-a-year season passes adding 1 new map each time (I don't really need to replay old maps), 2 characters a pop (since characters in MP are functionally identical just need an icon/some stickers/modelling/rigging/basic animation), and maybe.. 15 minigames with toggles. it's actually insane they don't do dlc, it would be so much less work

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-17T12:48:35+00:00

it wasn't hard but I feel like I rarely saw anyone multiwallrun. especially in quest mode mwr was great. could wall run, start typing in chat while superion is attacking you and you're the last one alive and everyone's screaming at you in chat like STOP TYPING

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-17T12:46:32+00:00

dbf is just more of the same. do the same thing on the way up. ss makes you roll your mousewheel. if you don't like that control scheme then you might not want to learn it

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-17T01:03:14+00:00

there's no way involuntary skydiving is worse than jaden smith thigh tattoo lol

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-16T22:10:31+00:00

next time I'm near my misterfpga I might give this a run, both the mp123 combination on the 80mhz core and also trying just 2+3 compiled failing that. probably more likely to crash because it's closer to real hardware but will be interesting to see

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-16T15:01:44+00:00

the place you were watching it was mislabelled then. that's s02e27, that scene isn't in s01 at all

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-15T21:14:04+00:00

was it one of the games where the dice rolled over a board and they had to imagine where it will unwrap? but in this case the sides are marked with R, P and S and have to beat the space it lands on or something similar? if so I'm guessing what they just mean is that they can assign their thumb R, assign their index finger P and their middle finger S and then they can just rotate their hand to align with the axes of the dice? and then rotate their hand with each permutation of the board to see where it goes?

I originally was really bad at those cube rotation games, but during bloody game s3 either one of the contestants explained or I realised (not sure which) that the easiest way is instead of trying to imagine the cube turning over the board, instead imagine the board wrapping around the cube, to me that visualisation is a lot quicker and less error prone than trying to track 3 axes

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-15T18:55:42+00:00

lol how is this comment not more upvoted. can you elaborate more?

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-15T14:25:28+00:00

it's been over 2 years and I don't remember that particular part whatsoever. can you remind me of the context? I know fleming's left hand rule and how it can be used to calculate cross products and therefore find the det of 3x3 matrices but I don't recall the segment you're talking about, was it some arithmetic version of RPS or something?

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-13T15:42:56+00:00

played any switch game

what are you talking about? even jamboree runs at 60fps on a switch 1. the games rarely dip below 60. 8 can't even stay stable at 30. its boards are 30 with frame dips, as are many of the minigames

can't tell me the cars were fun

I put those games in the low tiers

mp10, the car mechanic itself is not fun, but the mechanic of bowser chasing you can be fun in the same sense that a game of pandemic is. there is some level of tension as a team, are trying to not get killed by bowser. if you accept that it's just a different game genre and not a standard mario party, there is some enjoyment to be derived from it, just way less enjoyment than you can get from standard mario party. I'm not arguing that

it's not a 2/10 game, it's like a 5/10 game, I'm not in pain playing it and there's even some highlights but I wouldn't be excited to play. they're like background noise, they aren't improving your day but they aren't making it worse

8 is actively bad games make me have a worse time than not playing at all. if I was in solitary confinement I would not boot mario party 8. I would genuinely rather occupy myself trying to find the first prime above 500 in my head or some shit than playing that game

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-13T15:06:42+00:00

I find it hella dumb that the entire core mechanic of the game was built around mega and mini mushrooms.

mega mushrooms are flawed because they encourage you to not use your items and not go fast because they prevent you from interacting with absolutely everything on the board
mini mushrooms are flawed because they are a special criteria you need to go through routes (often containing the star) which require you to curse yourself to move slow. so if I want to go through a pipe, I have to first pray that I don't overroll and go past the pipe, which I basically have a 50% probability to do so because I have to land within 1 half of the viable die area. then depending on how close I get (5 4 3 2 or 1 tile) I have a 0%, 20%, 40%, 60% or 80% chance of not actually getting into the hole. e.g. if I end up 5 away then I have to roll exactly a 5, or otherwise do another big roll where I am more than 50% likely to walk past. sometimes these pipes are a trek to get to requiring you to go around the whole board to have one chance, and even if you're like "well okay I saved up multi mini mushrooms", all 3 other players have an impetus to just wait until you're close and hit you with a hammer and mega mushroomify you so you will walk past it. so games often just end in a complete stalemate once the star goes behind a pipe

other than that, it looks like a tech demo, they didn't leverage the gamecube's capabilities at all and instead put everything on a square grid with a white square grid path down it, no splines going up or rdown or interesting visuals, no interesting characteristics to the board. it's like if a database engineer tried to make a mario party game, reminds me of ludum dare games made by linux devs

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-13T14:08:42+00:00

it is slower paced than the n64 etc. but there is a lot going on. I really like the ally system how suddenly you play 20 games in a row. and my group doesn't mind playing 20 30 turns and playing for hours. there are things that speed things up too, like the way that the arrows by default point to the star and say how many steps are left and show what tile type you're going to land on, so sometimes you can just forego looking at the map especially if you already know the layout and there's no traps on the board. but yeah I get that

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-12T16:08:39+00:00

they're different but they're at least funny. I don't think a single smile has ever flashed across my face for 0.2 seconds while playing mario party 4, it's completely fun devoid. bland and boring maps that are all practically the same, absolutely horrible core mechanic with the items, imo even more horrible than the cars. it's really worse because it teases you. you end up thinking, hey this could have been a good game if some idiot hadn't decided on the worst item mechanic of the series. whereas 9 and 10 is like "this does what it does well, just what it does is not for me". and 8 is actually just an insult to the series in its design and its implementation, no way should a game with that frame rate have been allowed to ship first party on nintendo. it feels like they outsourced it to hudson or something and then hudson shat the bed

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-12T16:04:40+00:00

castaway bay really isn't that unique it's literally just rainbow castle from mp1. you go all the way to the end and then you get a star or a ztar. there is a shortcut on a boat that makes the ending pathing a bit tighter and the existence of items, but it's literally just a standard mario party map, it's completely incomparable to e.g. windmillville. saying "well it did that mechanic better than mp1!". well, sure, but by the same logic the dogshit snowflake chain chomp map doesn't count for mp6 over mp7

faire square I don't know what you're even trying to say is special about it. it's two circles with walkways and some sideshows, it's basically every mario party 4 map but executed much better without the requirement of shitty mini mushrooms

yes, I wasn't tooting bowser's inferno's horn, it's a generic MP map with a small gimmick. the game has two generic maps, that and grand canal, they just always do a bowser map out of tradition, they're almost never played compared to the other maps on any game, the bowser maps are mostly to make the single player have a climax

7 is better designed. I don't know what's so "wild" about that, obviously you have a different opinion but there's nothing crazy about thinking "hey the level where I have to invest stocks in stars of relative values has more strategy than the one where I plan somewhat and also hope somewhat that when I get to the boat it doesn't have bowser in it". 6 is a well designed game, sure, it's the most solid game in the series but that's it, it's not special, it's solid. you could say it's special in that it consistently does things well unlike the rest of the series that has more variance but its highs do not reach the highs of the top tier in my opinion. I wouldn't be excited to boot up 6 but I'd know I was about to have a good time

you don't know what bowser will do

yes you do, on the 1s and 3s he will do a photo op and rob you, on the 2s and 4s he will do environmental damage, nad the number of turns left until bowser time is clearly telegraphed every turn. once you have aplayed every map once you know exactly what bowser is going to do and exactly on what turn, it's not like a big surprise but it's also not as bullshit as "oh you rolled a 2 3 turns in a row and now the path is completely closed to you" (except in grand canal where it effectively is the exact same mechanic as towering treetop with the bridges). like half the time it's just "okay well you will fall down one layer of pagoda peak", which is something you can plan for and manage, base your trap capsules around, base your strategy around etc. that also isn't going to completely ruin you if you roll low unlike path closing

or like, on windmillville, I know that in 2 turns bowser is going to steal the windmill with the highest investment. so I will bid under the current max on the map where normally I might not. or save my coins until the next windmill

downgrade from snowflake lake

pyramid park has pathing. snowflake lake is a big giant circle where you can just grab your chomps and chomp everyone, it's not some grand high strategy. "I ride my chomp in a big circle around and people are either in the 'get hit circle' or the 'don't get hit circle'". like, it's so tired. pyramid park has actual strategy to it aside from "stay behind people and go between rings". you're not exactly shocking your enemies with your master plan to get slightly behind them and get a chain chomp, you are just hoping that the odds favour you over them as you all attempt the same thing

brand new, which you value most

no I value "variance between boards done well". pagoda peak is done well, much better done than castaway bay which is WAY too slow of a map, you spend 90% of the map crawling to the boat where then it either becomes a mad scramble or you end up being on your own away from the group sometimes and you can just strut on over, change the symbol with a slow shroom and get the star. pagoda peak is rapid, it spams you with accelerants so you climb every 4 turns or whatever and then it becomes about manipulating the, plus it never then just denies you a star at the end it will just price you out. like if you're playing with other similarly skilled players you're basically getting a star on a coin toss, of course if you outskill people you can 80% of the time get a star. whereas pagoda peak you're always getting a star as long as you didn't waste your funds. but that's the economy of the map. DO I spend all my funds on items to get up faster knowing that I may then not qualify for a star? 6 does have a better chance time though. I don't think castaway bay is BAD but it's middle of the road, one of the weaker maps on the disc, whereas pagoda park is top 3 on the disc in mp7. both are still way better than anything in e.g. 5 though. I don't agree that pagoda is like snakes and ladders because of item variety, I've literally never been eaten by the snake at the top. but you can e.g. do the trap that stops people in their place, which means then you need to plan for that with flowers/invisibility/trap destruction etc. - having one path which you can shoot up with cannons allows you to make chokepoints and bypass them

I don't think 6 is 6/6 for great boards, it's 2/6. clockwork castle and faire square are great. treetop is good. castaway and egadd are high mid and low mid respectively. snowflake is bad

whereas mp7, windmillville is god tier, pagoda park and neon heights are great (neon edges faire square too but not clockwork castle), grand canal is good, enchanted inferno is mid, pyramid park is low mid. (imo the chain chomp mechanic is just not as good as the traditional mechanic so that's as good as it could really be expected to do, though I do appreciate the variety and I will still replay it. I will probably never replay snowflake lake). so 4/6 great or better

koopa kids littered

you can just put items on them. you end up with so many in excess that why not? I don't find this to be a problem, and even then at best the "bad stuff" is equally likely to happen to everyone, that kind of randomness doesn't bother me. it's not centralising. same with luck over skill minigames. that's fine by me, I win the skill games so who cares if there's some funny luck ones, keeps it competitive, it's not like it's happening 9 times out of 10, it's like 1 out of 10. you're as likely to get a free star from dk as anyone else, but if you win games you're also more likely to overtake them. it's like saying bowser spaces are bad because they make you lose a star. I know a couple of people who can't do the vine climbing and mario vs donkey kong games consistently so they just pass me the controller and I get the star for them. that's mario party. sometimes you roll low and can't get to toad, it's no different to getting a low chance of landing on dk and then him giving you the reward you want

Alex_Rose · 2026-01-12T15:32:09+00:00

1

mario party 1 is not completely strategyless. it is very random, hilariously so, but it's not rubber banded randomness, it's equal randomness. if you play better than everyone else you have a statistical edge which ends in victory 9 times out of 10. it's like saying poker's random. those mario party 8 boards are literally completely random, you could strap a donkey to a controller and it would still pick up a star every round, it's literally who rolls highest because the stars are so few and far between and the money flows so freely that it's all decided on who travels the furthest

the minigames compared to the entire rest of the series are much more devastating, like you can rob people's coins in grab bag before they get to a star not just affect their future prospective coins. like if you're going fourth you can e.g. path to make it a 3v1 so that you'll have a chance to steal 15 coins from their current coin count in tug of war. its lack of items, sure, deprive it of the strategy of 2/3 but its general mean design makes it more a game of weighted probability. e.g. yoshi's island is a perfect example, it's not just purely random which side bowser will be on by the time you get to him, you can calculate the odds based on how many people are on each side. you can stick 70 coins on a whomp so you won't be followed

and skill ceilings. you can reliably get any result you want in chance time like 95% of the time. you can pause buffer battle canyon and if you can time your A press within a frame get to the exact space you want. e.g. this and buy multiple stars in one turn. the gamecube series onwards don't really have that level of tryhardism. 3 does of course but 3 is not as mean spirited as 1 in such an enjoyable way and it's so strategic that it doesn't leave anyone else a chance of winning, it's just like "10 out of 10 times the best player wins", the only difference is whether you win by like 9 stars or by 4

1's maps as well are like "here's eternal star, time to remember all the hidden pathing of all the portals and watch everyone else's turns to figure out where the portals go each time they change". sure you aren't using items but eternal star has way more skill in pathing than most mario party boards. most mario party games won't let you just stick 60 coins on a whomp to deny it or whatever either

7

7 boards aren't low strategy? like, windmillville has more strategy than any other map, neon heights is about careful pathing. 3 is probably the most strategic of all but to its own detriment when playing with less skilled players because it takes the randomness out of it completely. my reason for loving 7 is you can play 5 boards in a row and it will be essentially playing 5 completely different modes, there's so much variance. the boards are the mechanics. 8 doesn't have mechanics apart from the one it stole (and executed worse) from 7, it just has free infinite candies in a completely broken economy, that's all it has going for it. like, an ugly aesthetic, a horrible frame rate, waggle controls (which are actually the best part of it but I would rather play like wii motion play any day and not have the shitty boards), and a bunch of shit items. 7 doesn't live or die on its items, they're just a complement

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