Stille85

’ve been playing video games since the NES era, and Mario Party Jamboree is only the second Mario Party game I’ve tried. Back in the GameCube days, neither I nor my gaming crew could really get into Mario Party, and in 2024, as a father of two daughters (3 and 6 years old), I decided to give it another **** first frustrating thing happens right at the start screen—you're prompted to press L+R, which I do, and... nothing happens. Why? Because I’m using the Joy-Cons in handheld mode. I assumed my family of four would be playing together, and it makes sense to use the Joy-Cons in vertical mode. Unfortunately, this means the L/R inputs aren’t recognized (unless all six of my Joy-Cons are defective). Only when I dock the Joy-Cons to the Switch does the game finally react and start.Regarding the game itself, there are 4 boards to play (I read that 3 more are unlocked later), and as a 39-year-old, I found them to be really underwhelming. My girls didn’t mind, though. The problem is, it’s not possible to play with fewer than 4 players. When my wife didn’t have time to join, we had to use the CPU, and even on the lowest difficulty setting, the CPU crushed my 3- and 6-year-olds. Of course, they don’t have much experience, but if I could play without a CPU as player #4, I could let them win naturally without having to set their starting star counts ridiculously **** top of that, the flow between mini-games is really slow. The dialogues are unvoiced and require constant clicking. This means that when my 3-year-old is taking her turn (yes, she’s a little young for gaming, but when her big sister is playing, she wants to join in, and we only have two 30-minute gaming sessions per week), I’m stuck navigating her through shop dialogues or confirming that she got 10 coins for completing a round.After two board game sessions, we decided to check out the other options in Mario Party Jamboree, and to my surprise, most of them are single-player only. The only two-player modes are flying and a tricky "use your Joy-Cons as machines" mode in Toad's Workshop. Unfortunately, more interesting-sounding options, like bombing stuff, aren't suitable for couch **** seems like the whole game is designed with single-player in mind... Hello? Mario Party? I honestly can't understand how this game was nominated for "Best Family" and "Best Multiplayer" at the Video Game Awards. I suspect that none of the people responsible for the nominations actually played the game themselves.I’m extremely disappointed. I bought the digital version, or I would have already sold it.