Monthly Archives: April 2014

Top Ten Frustrating Moments in Mario Party

Mario Party, the destroyer of friendships and families alike. While it is a joy to play for the most part, there’s always those little moments where you want to throw your controller to the moon. These are the top ten frustrating moments in Mario Party. I have one rule: no moments from Mario Party 9 or Island Tour, unless these moments appear in other Mario Party games. I do this because frustrating moments are really common in these two games, as they stray from the normal formula.

# 10

Getting the Bowser Bomb. Thankfully, this item only appears in Mario Party 2. When you get the Bowser Bomb, you cannot get rid of it. At the end of the turn Bowser appears, rolls three dice blocks, and if he comes in contact with any of the players, he steals ALL their coins. So you could go from having 100 coins, to having nothing.

# 9

Rolling 1’s constantly. We have all had times where the Dice Block is your worst enemy. It’s even worse when this happens while using double or triple dice blocks.

# 8

Going in circles. When a board is designed badly, it can lead to you going absolutely nowhere the entire game. An example of a board like this would be Toad’s Midway Madness, and this can cause a game to drag.

# 7

Someone else finding a hidden block, and getting a rare item like a magic lamp. Hidden blocks are going to be a recurring theme on this list, so get used to it. Sometimes while running around a map, you might run into a hidden block. When this happens, everyone else immediately crosses their fingers and clenches up, hoping it’s only coins. After breaking the block everyone will sigh with relief, laugh madly (I’ll explain later), or scream their lungs out.

# 6

Bowser Pinball Machine Malfunction. In Mario Party DS, in the Bowser Pinball Machine board, there is a group of spaces, that will cause the victim to be put into the bumper that usually launches a ball at the start of a normal Pinball game. They will then be launched into the Bowser Zone, and will usually lose all their coins AND stars. However, once in a blue moon the Machine will malfunction and the player will instead be brought into the Star Zone, where it is possible to win THREE stars! It is so frustrating to be beaten by a CPU player set to easy because of this.

YOU DON’T DESERVE THAT!

# 5

Losing a pathetically easy minigame. This one is more the player’s fault, but it’s still frustrating.

# 4

Losing by almost nothing. This one is really frustrating when it pops up, especially if it’s because of Bonus Stars. Not much else to say here.

# 3

Someone else getting a star from a hidden block. This actually seems to be the most common result from a hidden block, but really this brings winning by doing absolutely nothing to a whole new level. In Mario Party DS, you can get three stars from a hidden block!

PEACH WINS BY DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

# 2

Finding a hidden block…. and getting a Ztar. This only occurs in Mario Party DS, and when you get this everyone else laughs themselves unconscious as you LOSE a star!

That face will haunt me forever.

NUMBER ONE!!

Chance Time. In earlier Mario Party games, you could trigger an event called Chance Time. ANYTHING can happen here. You can give all your coins to someone else, all your stars, swap coins and stars, really is it any surprise they took this out?

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Gaming History: The History of the Playstation!

Look at the video game industry today. There’s Nintendo with the Wii U, Microsoft with the Xbox One, and Sony with the Playstation 4. Four Playstations? Boy have things changed since the first. How? Let’s take a look at how Sony became a major company in the gaming industry.

-Nintendo’s Regretful Decision-

Let me set the scene. The Super Nintendo is performing greatly along with it’s competitor, the Sega Genesis. Nintendo and Sega are in steady competition, but technology was advancing, cartridges were starting to show their age, and many saw CD’s as the future of gaming. Nintendo saw the advantages and possibilities of CD technology and contacted Sony, striking a deal in the process. The two worked together to produce a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo called the Play Station. Unfortunately, Nintendo saw a problem, as the deal gave Sony most of the control over the add-on. Nintendo cancelled the deal with Sony, and instead struck another deal with Phillips, who were already developing their own console, the CD-I. After seeing the failure of the Sega CD, Nintendo cancelled the idea entirely, but Phillips had managed to obtain the rights to Mario and Zelda via the deal.

Whoops.

-Sony’s Revenge-

Sony took the information they had gotten from the research they did while making the Play Station, and made their own console. Unfortunately, Nintendo had a trademark on the name “Play Station”, so Sony combined the two names into one.

Do you do that with a troll face?

Sony also realized why other consoles had failed: lack of third party support. So Sony made it both incredibly cheap and easy to produce games on the Playstation. By the time it was launched, many games were already planned for the system.

-The Console Itself-

The console was big and grey, it had two controller ports (unless you used the Multi-Tap), and had a disk drive right on top.

The controller is grey, has a D-pad, four buttons, and two shoulder buttons. For a console with a focus on 3D gaming, not having analog sticks can be troublesome (Sony did later release a Playstation 1 controller with analog sticks). Instead of the typical A, B, X, and Y buttons that were common at the time, the Playstation controller used symbols. The “Cross” button is the “A” button, the “Square” button is the “B” button, the “Triangle” button is the “X” button, and the “Circle” button is the “Y” button.

One of the disadvantages of CD’s however, are their inability to store save data. Thus, the Playstation required Memory Cards to store data. To this day consoles are still incapable of writing data to CD’s (the only console that could write data to a disk was the N64 Disk Drive, which allowed it to do amazing things, but it didn’t use CD’s, just disks), they just use built in system memories. There was also a link cable, very similar to the one for the Game Boy. This is almost pointless.

-The Makeshift Mascot-

I say makeshift because he was never really the mascot, he was just often featured in Playstation commercials and associated with Sony in general. After the Playstation launched, a small company was looking at the various systems to decide which one to publish their new game on. After seeing that the Sega Saturn would be dominated by Sonic (Ha!) and the Nintendo 64 would be dominated by Mario, this company decided on the Playstation. Who was this company?

Naughty Dog eventually produced Crash Bandicoot, the killer app of the Playstation. Crash Bandicoot became the makeshift mascot of Sony, but it wasn’t long until various contract issues forced Naughty Dog to abandon Crash.

-The End-

The Playstation was a fantastic system, and it put Sony on the radar as a major video game company. It was the first console to truly use CD’s correctly, and it paved the way for many other developers to follow. Here’s to another Playstation, and another battle with Nintendo!

Update!

Hackers. No, I’m not talking about ROM hackers again, I’m talking real stinking hackers. This website was recently hacked so that it redirected everyone who visited to a porn site. This problem has been resolved and I’m sorry to anyone who had to experience the effects of this hack. Not much else to say, but I hope this never happens again.