![]() ![]() There are 50 quests in all, and each time you complete one you'll be rewarded with either mini-games or Gaddgets to play in Mario Party Advance's other main modes: Challenge Land and Play Land. Whether you find yourself bailing an overdrawn owl out of his debts, helping a lovesick Shy Guy pass on a poem to his bashful beloved, or throwing a swim race to help a struggling Cheep Cheep regain its confidence, the situations and characters are all fun and memorable. Mechanically, they're always simple, but they're fun to take on thanks to the sharp, sweetly silly writing that calls to mind the Mario & Luigi RPG series. These missions are triggered by stopping at certain spots in Shroom City, and involve everything from one-shot mini-games to city-wide treasure hunts that will take you across the board. Of course, that's not a necessarily a bad thing - board games can be fun, and even though there's a huge amount of luck involved Mario Party Advance makes moving around the map worth your while through its Quests alone. At times it can feel more like playing parcheesi than the Party experience of the console games in the series. ![]() Mushroom Challenges - which pop up to offer you a random mini-game and a chance at more rolls when you're low - certainly help, but the balance still leans more towards the meta-game than mini-games. Mini-game spaces are relatively rare on the board, and we went through more than one round of unlucky rolls where we ran out of mushrooms before landing on a single one. The only problem with these Shroom City mini-games is that it can sometimes be maddeningly difficult to manage to play them. Mushrooms are the lifeblood of the Mario Party Advance experience - as long as you have a spare 'shroom in reserve, you can move around the non-linear board as you like, but once you've rolled your last one, it's Game Over. You'll move your character across the board by rolling mushroom dice, and in addition to plain yellow spaces you'll also run into green spaces which grant extra dice rolls, red spaces which take away a turn, and blue spaces which let you play mini-games for more mushrooms. Instead of the multiple boards of traditional Mario Party titles, Mario Party Advance takes place on a single map of Shroom City, and though each of the characters starts out in a different area, the whole board is linked by paths and pipes. ![]() Gadd - by helping residents of Shroom City with their day-to-day (and often off-the-wall) problems. In the main single-player adventure mode you'll choose a character - Mario, Peach, Luigi, or Yoshi - and set out to retrieve the lost games and “Gaddgets" - virtual toys built by Luigi's Mansion's Professor E. With his hefty frame and foot-stamping rage, he scatters the games all over nearby Shroom City, and it's your job to get them back. Of course, as the weary residents of the Mushroom Kingdom might have predicted, it's not long before Bowser shows up to rain on the Party World parade. The festivities for Mario's first portable Party kick off when an excited Toad introduces you to Party World - a floating land of non-stop fun with mini-games galore. It's certainly different, but that doesn't mean it's a dud - Mario Party Advance has a feel all its own, and plenty to offer for Party fans. Developed by the busy bees at Hudson Soft - best known as the house of Bomberman - this portable entry is a definite departure from the Mario Party line, with a focus on single-player games and much more time spent moving around the board. Given the palm-rending popularity of the Mario Party series on Nintendo 64, it was only a matter of time before Nintendo brought the festivities to a handheld venue, and in 2005 Mario Party Advance arrived to fulfil the dreams of on-the-go party people everywhere. ![]()
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