Mario Party Superstars

This one was, and remains, one
of my favorite DS games of all.

I would say I have a love-hate relationship with the Mario Party series... but to get there, I’d need to have played more than three games in the series. I absolutely love Mario Party DS, I am not a huge fan of Mario Party 2 despite it being a fan favorite... and the third was Mario Party Advance, on an emulator, but talking about that one is like talking about the Sonic franchise by bringing up Sonic Chronicles (a turn-based RPG, yes, really).

This sub-franchise went through an awkward period in the 2010s. In its ninth and tenth entries, characters travelled together on the board in the same vehicle. Whatever happened to competing for Stars? It feels like something’s missing if you can’t be cruel to the others on the board as well as in the minigames. This led to an uphill climb, which I’m not entirely sure the Mario Party series has finished – newer entries work to win back the crowd, whether it’s the minigame-only “The Top 100” for the Nintendo 3DS or the back-to-basics “Super Mario Party” for the Switch.

Also back to basics is today’s entry, Mario Party Superstars, which features five boards selected from the first three games in the franchise, as well as 100 minigames. Developed by NDcube and released on October 29th, 2021, Superstars is a celebration of the subseries’ long history, perhaps the best yet. Let’s see how that goes.

You are the superstar!

Ten characters come to the Village Square, formerly known as Mushroom Village in the first Mario Party, to duke it out on boards and in minigames. The classic six present since the series’ inception (Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Peach, Wario and Donkey Kong), two regulars who joined early on (Daisy and Waluigi) and two later additions (Birdo and Rosalina).

Only 10 come to the party? That's rookie numbers!

I envy the Yoshi sleeping in the melon slice.

There are five boards: Yoshi’s Tropical Island and Peach’s Birthday Cake from MP1, Space Land and Horror Land from MP2, and Woody Woods from MP3. Would it have been too much to have a second board from MP3? Several items from the franchise’s history have been added, and some boards were updated. As an example, items weren’t in MP1, so its boards are revised to include them, as well as an item shop. In a few cases, a board’s path was modified, with one example being Peach’s Birthday Cake.

Gaming Memories: B.O.B.

B.O.B.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

June 1993

No, not the flat-earther rapper.

I said before that when I got my SNES, it was a gift from cousins leaving for university, so I inherited their collection as well. Some classics, and some stuff I had never heard of. Heck, stuff that's barely heard of. Like today's game.

B.O.B. is a part of the run-and-gun genre - same genre as Contra, but this is the funny cousin in the family. B.O.B. is a teenage robot taking the family car to go on a date. However, the teen gets distracted while driving in an asteroid field and crashes the car, landing on a large asteroid with alien bases and enemies on the way. He makes his way through, finds a new car, and heads onwards to his date. Guess what? Another crash, another landing. This happens a third time, poor guy. Oh, he does get to his date in the end. But he's gonna be a few hours late.

Our protagonist has access to six different weapons, and you can cycle through them with the L button of the SNES controller. All guns have ammunition, and you can run out of ammo... though if you do, B.O.B. can still use his fist to attack. The standout mechanic here, however, may be the Remotes, six items you can pick up and use. One's a trampoline, one is a mini-helicopter, one is a protective force field, one is an umbrella that slows his fall... These add nice variety to gameplay, and when necessary to beat a stage, they'll be plentiful. You can cycle through Remotes with the R button.

You run and shoot your way through 45 stages. It's been a long time since I last played this game, so I don't remember all of it, but I do know there was a nice variety in terms of dungeon types. Further down the line, stages can get downright labyrinthine. Some levels have memorable moments, and I recall the use of a floating ship to get through some of them, so gameplay changes now and then. The bosses all look friggin' cool, as well: Robots, aliens, fire elementals, ghosts... Also of note is the comedic tone from the story, retained in the many ways in which B.O.B. can die. Exploded to bits, melted into a puddle, disintegrated... 

The game worked with a password system­. When you finish some stages, you got a password made of six digits, and you could input that password from the title screen to get roughly where you were at. I don't remember ever beating the game in a single sitting, I do remember playing through its stages and eventually beating it thanks to the passwords. Because, damn, was it really tough. It's a difficult game. I still consider it a point of pride that I did win in the end. Critics consider it average, and maybe with the added time since I would think so as well, who knows. I probably should get an emulator and play it again... But I have fond memories of it, so maybe you'll enjoy it too.

Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves

I don’t get to discuss my culture as much as I’d like to on this blog. The province of Quebec is home to many notable studios, large and indie. I make a point to mention it when I know a game I’m reviewing was Made In Quebec. But even then, very few games show our folklore.

Plaid shirts, beards, axes and determination are a
mandatory part of the package.

I know we don’t have the luster of the more famous mythologies out there, but you’ve gotta give us a chance. Only in this part of the world will you see stories of Christian lumberjacks defending their cabin and sister, in the dead of winter, from an army of werewolves conjured by the Devil himself. That’s metal. We Canadians get stereotyped as nice guys. You see what our ancestors had to deal with? We channel our aggressivity where it matters; hockey, and kicking Satan's ass.

Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves was developed by Artifice Studio and released on April 5th, 2013. Its story was co-written by Quebec author Bryan Perro, known for the Amos Daragon and Wariwulf book series and a major advocate of our folkloric tales for the world at large. The game is now free on Steam and GOG, though I reecall purchasing it several years ago.

Don’t expect us to put on the kiddie gloves. We’re showing our mythology, warts and all. Pack your winter gear, there’s gonna be a lot of snow. Silver bullets and holy water might help, too.

Sang Froid, lit. Cold Blood

In the introduction, we witness a man, Doctor Lamontagne, killed by wild beasts before he could find the refuge of the nearest cabin. When we begin playing, we choose one of the two Irish-Canadian O’Carroll brothers: Joseph (Jos) or Jacques (Jack). Jos, a big, burly guy, has more stamina and higher base attack, while Jacques is more lacking in both. Jos is the normal difficulty option, and Jacques, the high difficulty one.

Considering what we're up against...
I'm gonna go with the muscle.

For Honor

Ubisoft is no stranger to games dabbling in Alternate History, though they’re most famous for their use of it in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Other franchises of theirs that utilize the concept, like Anno, go a little looser with it. No matter how much they play with historical events and time periods, there is an attempt at depicting details with as much accuracy as the setting and gameplay can allow. Today’s game is, as a result, a very bizarre beast because it’s going for insane historical accuracy while, at the exact same time, depicting something completely fantastical.

If knights and samurai fought at some point in our long
History, I'm sure it's never to the extent that they do here.

Developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released on February 14, 2017, For Honor’s genre is hard to pin down. At its core, it’s a third-person melee fighter, which sees you mowing down weak enemies and using strategy to take down stronger ones. Like a 3D beat’em-up with swords. While the game includes a single-player campaign, it puts a lot more focus on its multiplayer options. There, you can take part in fights as a member of one of the available factions, earn points for your group, and help conquer territories in this endless war.

For, yes, this game is about war. War never changes... Wait, wrong studio. But the spirit is the same. I’m not huge on multiplayer, but I’ll do my due diligence and discuss that part before focusing on the single-player campaign. I’d usually do this in the opposite order, but I’ll probably spend a lot more time on the campaign, so multiplayer first. Or, wait, no. First, I guess I’d better explain the setting.

Fighting Spirits

The base concept of this endless war is that multiple warrior races live next door to each other at the same time and, since that’s all they really know, try taking over each other’s territories. At launch, only three “clans” existed: The Legion (medieval knights), the Warborn (Vikings), and the Chosen (Samurai). Later updates add two new clans: The Wu Lin (based on Ancient Chinese warriors) first, then the Outlanders, travelers from other cultures, who don’t fit the other four and chose to team up against them.

There's probably an entire thesis to be written about every
bit of equipment worn by every member of every
character class. I shall not be the one who writes it.

An interesting aspect of these clans is that they all span several centuries of our world’s History, and it’s reflected in their various classes. And yet, at the same time, classes are about all as time-displaced as can get; an example would be the knights, who feature Centurions and Gladiators based off Ancient Rome fighting on the same side as multiple types of knights who existed anywhere from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. The same goes for armors and weapons, as most if not all of them are inspired by very real equipment worn by each class, to say nothing of techniques and strategies co-existing despite having been invented several centuries apart. Anachronisms is the name of the game, not just within clans, but sometimes within a single character class. I’d probably need a few years of historical studies to understand everything that’s featured here and all the ways in which they shouldn’t make sense when put together.

These anachronisms fly by so easily because the setting is blatantly fantastic. Either way, you’ve at least got to hand that to Ubisoft Montreal, they put in the work.

Gaming Memories: Super Mario Bros. 2

Super Mario Bros. 2

Nintento Entertainment System

September 1988

Still to this day, what the American continent originally got as a sequel to the first Super Mario Bros. on the NES stands as one of the oddest entries in the franchise. It's not much of a secret that this game was made by taking another game, namely Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, and slapping Mario characters on it. Actually, I think it's the most-repeated "mind-blowing fact you don't know!!" (clickbait look intentional) in the history of gaming. The reason this was done was allegedly because the actual Super Mario Bros. 2 ("The Lost Levels"), which Japan got, looked identical to Super Mario Bros. 1, with the main difference being that its difficulty was through the roof.

Since it adapts a game with four playable characters, SMB2 marks the first time we can actually play as Princess Toadstool (who wouldn't become known as Peach in the English version of Mario games for a few more years) or as Toad. All four characters play a little differently, as well; Mario plays like usual, Luigi jumps a little higher, the Princess can float thanks to her dress, and Toad has greater strength so he picks items up faster, but his jump is abysmal as a tradeoff.

With its bizarre inception, you could think that this game struggles to fit with the remainder of the franchise, and... well, with its gameplay that involves uprooting plants and tossing things to attack, you'd be right. In this case, it's fairer to say that the Mario franchise retroactively accepted SMB2 (often referred to as Super Mario USA to differentiate it from Japan's The Lost Levels) into its canon. Mainly by transplanting some of the enemies into the larger franchise; Subcon, the game's dream world, is where we first met, among others, Bob-Ombs, Ninjis, Pokeys, Shy Guys, Snifits and Birdo, some of which reappeared as early as SMB3. However, its major bosses have remained divorced from the series, with fewer in-game references to Wart than you can count on one hand. (He does appear in other places of Nintendo canon however, with one notable appearance in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening!)

This game's other major secret is also well-known; namely, that this game was Mario's dream. Beating Wart shows a quick cutscene of Mario sleeping, thinking up the events. Gives Wart's appearance in Link's Awakening an interesting double meaning. However, as far as I can remember, I don't recall ever actually getting to the end of this one. Blame it on the weird mechanics that felt too different from classic Mario fare, but when given the choice, I would usually go for SMB1 or 3 instead. Probably 3. It's been a while so I don't remember perfectly, but I think I never got past Fryguy, the fourth boss and the most annoying of them. Which doesn't mean it's a bad game; it's pretty good. Just not what I was looking for in a Mario game, I who also had access to Super Mario World, making it sit in its corner as the oddity it is.

I definitely played it a lot more than I played The Lost Levels, though! That one's a masochist's game.