Summary

Other than making the people in your life reconsider your relationships, the best part ofMario Party Superstarsis the competitiveness that emerges during the minigames. After everyone takes a turn to move around the board, you’ll play a game together where you stand to win coins - sometimes quite a few of them.

Mario Party Superstars brought plenty of older Mario Party games into the current gen of consoles, with the game offering 100 minigames entirely remade from older Mario Party titles. Some of them translated better to the modern age, though, or receive changes that made them better.

As games get more recent, Nintendo seems to have included fewer of them, meaning Mario Party Superstars offers plenty of games from the N64 and Gamecube games but not so many of them from the Wii or Wii U. For posterity, we’ve limited this list to any game that debuted in or before Mario Party 6, since it launched in 2006. Any game more than two decades old qualifies!

Game Type

4-Player

Just because this minigame looks much prettier in Mario Party Superstars doesn’t mean it’s any easier! In Sneak ‘n Snore, you’ll need to carefully tiptoe toward a button to open a door and allow yourself to exit a closed-off room – just be mindful of the Chain Chomp who’ll wake up and eat anyone not hiding when it turns around.

The controls used to be quite finnicky in the original Mario Party 2, and admittedly, Sneak ‘n Snore does play a lot better now than it used to, even when playing MP2 on the Nintendo Switch Online catalogue. Texture smoothing definitely helped, too!

Mario Party

Appears In

Mario Party 2 Mario Party: The Top 100 Mario Party Superstars

4-Player (MP1, MP:100, MPS) Battle Minigame (MP2) Bowser Minigame (MPS)

One of the more beloved minigames in the Mario Party series (it wouldn’t have been in so many different titles and with so many different iterations if it weren’t!), Face Lift tasks you and your opponents with stretching and smooshing the face of a Mario universe character to look like a photo you’re shown.

The faces you’ll come up with are never anything short of hilarious, even when you nail the scoring. Older iterations used to offer different characters while Superstars only offers Bowser, but the smoother graphics don’t take away from the horrifically hilarious faces.

2 vs. 2

This one isn’t a game I’m particularly good at, but I stand much more of a chance at winning in Mario Party Superstars than I did back in the Gamecube days with Mario Party 4. In this versus minigame, you’ll team up with a partner and work together to make it across an obstacle course, being the first team to escape at the other end.

Maybe it’s all in my head, but this iteration of Dungeon Duos plays markedly smoother than the original. Lakitu definitely takes a solid moment to bring you back up from the depths if you mistime a jump, but the game being easier on the whole to control can’t be understated.

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4-Player Coin Minigame

If you’re behind on coins, Parasol Plummet is one of your best bets to make up for your lack of funds and close the gap between you and your opponents’ cash totals. You’ll all fall from the sky, when you’ll need to open and close umbrellas to control your fall as you attempt to collect as many coins as you can, since everyone keeps what they collect.

Mario Party Superstars seems to be much more generous with the money bag drops than Mario Party 3 was, making this game easier to “win” (even though everyone does). If it’s a double-coin minigame that gets played every five turns, your gains can be enormous!

Mushroom Mix-Up is a classic game from the very first Mario Party, tasking you and your opponents with safely making your way to the color platform you’re shown, as every other color will sink into the waters below – and you’re out if you’re still on them when they do, with the last player standing crowned the victor.

Mario Party Superstars seems to have streamlined the controls a little, making it much easier for you to ground-pound your opponents and control your character’s jump and subsequent descent. I’m still not that good at the game, but it controls much easier now.

  • While Mushroom Mix-Up itself doesn’t show up in Mario Party 2,the Hexagon Heat minigameis functionally the exact same, only with lava below you instead of water.

Rockin’ Raceway is a four-player minigame that sees you and your opponents racing hobby horses around half of a racetrack. You’ll need to monitor your speed to ensure you don’t spin out and face the penalty of losing all your speed, which can be helped or hurt by the speed boost or knock-out carrots along the track.

In the original Rockin’ Raceway, the controls were different, and the changes feel much more natural to me as someone who fancies herself an expert at each iteration. The original game had you alternate between A and either B or Z, while the Mario Party Superstars version uses the L and R bumpers instead.

1 vs. 3

Boulder Ball is one of the games you’ll play when you’re the only one to land on a space of your color, with you at the top hurdling large boulders down a slope at your three opponents as they try to dodge your flying obstacles and make it to the top of the mountain with you. If you stop them, you win, but if they reach the top, the three-person team wins.

Since Mario Party 3 is my favorite of the Mario Party games, I’m no stranger to Boulder Ball, but it feels markedly more difficult to cheese in the more recent game. My brother and I would always win as the solo player by rapid-fire lobbing boulders all the way to the left and right to make a ping-pong of rocks for the other team to avoid, but that strategy doesn’t work so well these days in Mario Party Superstars – the boulders seem a bit slower.

4-Player (MP1, MPS) Battle Minigame (MP2)

One of the original Mario Party minigames that has made it through to reappear in several subsequent titles, Crazy Cutter puts you and the other players onto jackhammers, and you’ll need to excavate the outline of the Mario character hidden in the dirt below. The player whose outline is the most precise wins.

Older versions of Crazy Cutter offered far more characters, but the ones in Mario Party Superstars offer arguably the most challenge with only the three included here. Chain Chomp’s teeth are always a bit of a struggle, Blooper’s tentacles are remarkably detailed, and Boo’s smooth surfaces are deceptive in how difficult they can be to perfect.