Shrek Super Party

Fast-paced fun and multi-player action come to your living room in Shrek Super Party!

EU release: 30th May 2003
NA release: 5th June 2003
JP release: N/A
Developer: Mass Media
Publisher: TDK Mediactive
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

With Shrek 2 still a year away, what sort of video game can you make for Shrek? Another platformer with a unique and well designed cast of characters? Or just a really cheap Mario Party clone? And how do you explain why Shrek, Donkey, Fiona and the gang don’t talk? Well, by playing as bobblehead versions of the characters, of course. And make sure you give them creepy, dead eyes. The Magic Mirror is voiced and does narrate things. I thought it was a sound-alike, but it is the actual voice actor from the film, just very unenthusiastic.

At the start of each game, you choose a region or the board to go though. This will alter the minigames that you’ll trigger, and different players can head to different areas. These are just generic areas like woods, swamp and castle and they feel no different. You drop a ball onto a board instead of rolling a dice and it will land on a number. The game does show you which space you’ll land on for each number, which makes paying any attention to the single board utterly pointless.

Minigames are triggered by landing on a space rather than any kind of structure (like at the end of a round), making them sporadic. You’ll also land on dual spaces where you challenge one other player. If you beat them then you’ll take points from them. As there are no specific 1v1 minigames, so the other two players still take part but get or lose nothing. The minigames themselves function, but are all boring and many outstay their welcome. CPU players are also nearly perfect at most of them.

There is one interesting mechanic. At the end of a minigame, each player is given bugs of different colours. You can then swap some bugs with another player, with the winner of the minigame going last. Different bugs are worth different points, and you need to have at least two of that colour to score. Luckily, the CPU is bad at this so you can still win even if you lose a lot of minigames (against other players, they’ll go for the obvious choice). This was a really cheap cash for the Christmas period, except they didn’t bother with the GameCube version until the following May.

Poor

Do not pass go and head directly to jail. Shrek Super Part is bad, boring, and frightfully trite. When is a company other than Nintendo finally going to put out a decent party game? When will all this bigheaded, sloppy-built madness finally end? If you love Shrek (or even if you’ve never heard of him), spare yourself the trauma and divert your ever-living essence in the opposite direction of this terrible abomination.
Hilary Goldstein, IGN

Remake or remaster?

Only if someone really wants to re-release all Shrek games.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get Shrek Super Party.