It’s been a small eon, but ZoomZike is finally back with the latest in his epic series of video deep dives, Identifying Luck in Mario Party, with a 2½ hour entry on Mario Party 10, being for the Wii U probably one of the least played titles in the series.
We’ve linked to these several times before, and I claim directly to you that they’re about as good as you get when it comes to investigating game internals. PannenKoek goes more into specifics and implications maybe, but ZoomZike has much more ground to cover. He’s now done twelve Mario Party titles, all in this playlist, and as they’ve continued they’ve gotten even more complete and detailed. The shortest of all of them is for MP1 at 1½ hours long; the longest, for MP7, is nearly 5½ hours!
Each video covers all of its game’s boards and events, all of its items and how they work, and all of its minigames. While “Identifying Luck” is the title and ostensible purpose, what we get is more like a complete guide to the internals of each game, includingly the many ways the games put their thumbs on the scales, often in favor of the last-place player.
They take a long time to chew through, oh yes, but if you want to know how the masters of video board gaming put their long-running series together, I don’t think you can find a better source.
