Mario Party 6 | DJcube

Party with Mario and the gang all day and into the night.

JP release: 18th November 2004
NA release: 6th December 2004
EU release: 18th March 2005
Developer: Hudson Soft
Publisher: Nintendo
NGC Magazine Score: 60%
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

It’s another Mario Party and I’m not sure what to say any more. For the most part, it doesn’t feel all that different to Mario Party 5, especially with the capsules returning. The main difference is that the boards feel smaller with the stars much closer – to the point that in one game, all four players got a star in the same round.

The minigames are fine, but none of them really stood out to me as great examples. They’re fine, but that’s about it. There’s a lawn mower game, one where you have to survive in a whirlpool, one where you need to fall as quickly as possible and another where you are in hover tanks trying to take each other out. The game has a night and day system, which alters each minigame, so that does help with replaying them.

However, there is one significant new feature in Mario Party 6. The game came bundled with an accessory: the GameCube microphone. It plugged into the memory card slot and players would have to pass it around. There are a few modes dedicated to the microphone

Speak Up

This feels a little bit like the DVD part of Scene-It games. You’ll have blurred pictures, have to count or memorise a little scene and will have to answer a question about it. The game isn’t particularly good at recognising words, so you can press the R button to choose instead – all of the minigames let you do this, making the microphone itself feel very redundant.

When you pick a question, you have a random chance of getting a bonus – a star gives you two guesses while a mega mushroom will triple the number of points you get from a question, which seems like a bit too much.

Star Sprint

Give commands to your character, tell them to run faster, move up, move down and sprint. Annoying when your character doesn’t understand what you said and frustrating to use the menu for.

Minigames

A small collection of 1v3 minigames with one player using the microphone. You can control a mech that everyone has to battle or call out fruit with all the other platforms falling – these minigames are some good examples of 1v3 minigames in Mario Party, as long as you just use the menu.

So, it’s another Mario Party. They tried to do something different with the microphone, but in most cases it’s easier to just use the controller instead, so the experiment didn’t work too well. The night and day does change things up slightly, and does help keep the minigames fresher for longer.

Fine

This time around, Mario’s chronic case of sequelitis has spawned a mic peripheral, which you’re supposed to use to bark instructions at the game. sounds interesting – and it would be if the damned thing worked properly. In the wider world of PCs, voice recognition is an unstable technology at the best of times, requiring multiple repetitions before stumbling on the exact combination of pronunciation and inflection the computer was listening for.
Martin Kitts, NGC Magazine #105

Remake or remaster?

The mic stuff would be interesting to see with better technology.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Mario Party 6.