The articlegameplay, story, development, reception
Gameplay
Mario Party 2 is a party video game featuring six playable characters: Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Wario, Princess Peach, and Donkey Kong. In the game's frame story, Mario and his friends create a world built from their dreams and get into a debate over who the new world would be named after. When Bowser arrives and invades the land, the group takes Toad's suggestion to name it after the "Super Star" who defeats Bowser. The gameplay is presented in the form of a traditional board game, and includes five themed game boards.
A sixth board map becomes available later in the game. Mario Party 2 includes multiplayer compatibility; each game on a board map consists of four players, including at least one human player and up to four. Any character who is not controlled by a human will instead be controlled by the game as a computer-controlled character. The skill level of the computer-controlled characters can be individually adjusted between "Easy", "Medium", or "Hard".
Development
Mario Party 2 was developed by Hudson Soft and published by Nintendo. Development was underway as of July 1999, several months after the release of the original Mario Party game. A playable demo of the game was unveiled at Nintendo Space World in August 1999. The game was 70 percent complete at that time. Mini-games that involve rotating the control stick, as in the original Mario Party, are not present in this installment due to potential injuries, such as blisters, from rotating the stick too quickly; this was the subject of a lawsuit in the case of the first game.
In Japan, Mario Party 2 was released for the Nintendo 64 on December 17, 1999. It received a U.S. release the following month, on January 24, 2000. Shortly before its U.S. release, Nintendo donated copies of the game to the Latin American Youth Center.
Reception
Mario Party 2 received a 76% score on the review aggregation website GameRankings. Some critics praised the game's new features, particularly the mini-games. However, some critics who disliked the original game were also critical of the sequel, despite the improvements. Some critics believed the graphics were an improvement over the previous game, while others considered the graphics to be largely the same as before.
Scott Alan Marriott of AllGame wrote that Mario Party 2 "does what a sequel is supposed to do: address the original's shortcomings while offering enough enhancements to make even the jaded among us take a second look." Marriott concluded, "When the books are closed on the Nintendo 64, it will be the multi-player aspect that players will remember most about the system, and Mario Party 2 ranks as one of the system's best."
