Mario Party 9

First of all, I just broke both both a drought and a streak, both of them fairly impressive. The drought? Prior to just barely tying Shy Guy for first place on the final board in Mario Party 9, I hadn't beaten a video game since April. I don't know how many three-month stretches I've gone in my entire life without beating a video game. Obviously there was a lengthy one very early on in my life, and I'm sure there were several sporadic ones throughout my childhood SNES days, but I think this is the longest I've gone between game beatings since 2006. That was the year I graduated high school and began college, and my lifelong gaming hobby got away from me for a period of several months. And as for the streak? It's been exactly two months now since I logged anything other than books. Ten straight books, I'd logged before today - some 5,600 pages combined - without so much as a single movie in between any of it. I dunno, I just think that's kind of interesting.

But enough about all that positive and negative momentum I just interrupted. Let's talk about Mario Party 9. This should be fairly brief, because, after all, who needs to hear anything more about a Mario Party game at this point? You know the drill. Four players traverse a virtual board game independently, intermittently playing mini-games. Winning the mini-games provides coins, which can be used to buy stars, and the player with the most stars after a certain number of turns is the winner. Half of the challenge is trying not to flip out when the game inevitably shakes up the standings and erases your gigantic lead with two turns left. Really though, you can win every mini-game and still lose the overall game because of some unlucky dice rolls or because some randomly triggered event gave fifty coins to an opponent. Really, Mario Party has always been at least as much luck-based as skill-based, which makes it simultaneously a great party game and a terrible single-player game. When my friend screws me over entirely with a late game comeback, I can get angry and yell at him and lament the unfairness of it all, and it's done in the spirit of having some fun with an obviously heavily random video game. When I'm trying to complete story mode alone on a Thursday night and an AI-controlled opponent does the same thing to me, it only makes me feel hopeless and annoyed. After all, why bother spending an hour on a level which essentially comes down to a coin flip?

The thing is, this Mario Party felt even more luck-based than most. But it was also different in a lot of ways from the previous eight installments, and I appreciate the "innovation" at hand. The first game came out for the N64 in 1998, and by 2005 they had released the seventh in the series. That's a game a year, which means that before anyone could even figure out what worked or didn't work in any given new release, development had already begun on the next entry in the series. It's no wonder the gameplay remained largely unchanged during those first seven games. By contrast, Mario Party 9 came out five years after Mario Party 8 did. That means the people responsible for this game had plenty of time to revamp and overhaul certain aspects of the series. Some of these changes were for the better in my mind, and some for the worse. I'm not going to go into great detail on the various pros and cons, but my point is that merely by making an effort to mix it up, the Mario Party franchise has kept me satisfied even this late into its run. I still can't shake the feeling that games like this one are such insubstantial fodder, a feeling that if I'm going to be spending summer nights playing video games, at least they should be good ones. But, hey, the backlog is the backlog, and every game counts.