Another fast-paced, fun Mario Party game. Although lacking some depth, the game is a delight to Mario fans.
User Rating: 8 | Mario Party 3 N64
This game in my opinion is probably the best Mario Party game. Although very fun, it lacks some action that all Mario Parties seem to have. The boards are very interesting, with fun themes and surprises to keep the players on their toes. The mini-games are very well designed, with the mixed feelings of fun, craziness, and, a little more than actually needed, luck. The crazy factor comes into play with chasing chickens, hurling snowballs at each other, banging coconuts at players, and swinging through a forest of vines. The luck factor comes in many a time with games like Winner's wheel, merry-go-chomp, Picture Imperfect, Locked Out, and a few others. Although a few mentioned, like Picture Imperfect and Locked Out can be stated that are not luck based. However, there are some features on them, such as the random placement of keys in locked out and the incomprehensibly fast last facial aspect in Picture Imperfect, may severely alter the outcome of the game. The fun factor comes in on just about everything with the mini-games, I have to say. None of them that I can see aren't fast-paced or enjoyable one way or another, so the min-igames turn out to be pretty nice. One risky feature Nintendo put in to this game was duel mode. In this mode, two players are assigned partners and roam around the board trying to attack the other player. The whole process is pretty awkward, and I think Nintendo saw the rather negative feedback from players and excluded the mode in further installments. So, duel mode is a mode you probably won't be finding yourself playing very often. One last subject is the AI, otherwise known as CPU. The computer players are very shaky in this game. If you play a game by yourself(which I do not recommend, for the game is very boring when you have no other humans to talk to while playing, which decreases the excitement of gameplay more than you'd think)with one easy, normal, and hard AI, The Hard AI has a shockingly poor chance of actually beating the other AIs. In fact, I have seen myself several cases where the Easy AI wins and the Hard AI loses. If you play mini-game mode, the hard AI will probably win overall in mini-games, but the other AIs may beat him a surprising number of times. All in all, though, Mario Party 3 is a very good game and I continue to play it with high spirits and perpetual fun.
