ZoomZike doesn’t just cover Mario Party games on his channel, and we linked to his video on Sonic Adventure 2’s Final Rush level, but the Mario Party series is probably his greatest achievement, and are like a complete strategy guide and a course on game design all in themselves.

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You probably couldn’t think of one. Maybe Pumpkin Hill, from remembering its rap-based theme song? But one very distinctive level in that game is the last one on the Hero Side: Final Rush.

Wait, what do I mean by Hero Side? None of this paragraph really matters, but…. There’s two scenarios in it, the Hero story with Sonic, Knuckles and Tails, and the Dark story (the game shies away from the term Evil) with series debut characters Shadow and Rouge, and Dr. Robotnik, a.k.a. Eggman, playable. The story scenes from Sonic Adventure 1 were ditched in favor of a level select map, and the varied gameplay of the first game narrowed down to running stages (Sonic/Shadow), searching stages (Knuckles/Rouge) and shooting stages (Tails/Eggman). Gone were Amy and Big the Cat’s playstyles, and Omega’s were given over to Tails and Eggman.

Of course, everyone most loved the running stages. The game’s named after Sonic, after all, even though they had some issues. The issues, they were what many people who played the game remembered. Although the game is arguably an improvement on SA1, gave us more insight into Eggman’s history and motivations than we’ve ever had before or since, and even its lore plays a big part in the Sonic 3 movie, it’s still a 3D Sonic, and so it’s still seen as inferior to the Genesis originals. The 3D Sonic game released after Sonic Adventure 2 was Sonic Heroes, which was mostly about running; the searching and shooting gameplay seen in SA2 hasn’t to my knowledge returned since.

But as ZoomZike reminds us, there are interesting ideas in Sonic Adventure 2! He examines the last of the running levels (if you don’t count the very hard to unlock Green Hill level), in fact the last Hero Side level in the game.

Final Rush takes place in space (there’s still gravity though), and is themed around Sonic Adventure’s 2 new gimmick, rail grinding. You’ve shredded on rails throughout the game up to this point, but most of Final Rush takes place sliding around on rails improbably placed in Earth orbit. The level is rife with opportunities to send your pitiful blue garden mammal through a fiery reentry. My own memories of the level, like most of the game, involve camera struggles and fighting glitches, but I remember Final Rush being entertaining at least.

ZoomZike thinks the level was well-designed (23 minutes). Maybe you’ll agree.

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They’ve gone through the series, trending longer with each one, for each game from Mario Party 1 through 7 (with an April Fool’s stop over at Advance). Even the shortest is at least an hour, and the most recent one is over five hours. That might seem like a whole lot, but imagine how long it took to construct! These are really deep videos, often with odds figured out through exhaustive, and exhausting, trial and error.

Mario Party 7 is the last of the four Mario Party games that came out for the Gamecube, even beating out the N64 portion of the series by one game. The early MPs were notorious controller destroyers, often resulting in the dreaded white dust of death, a result of ground plastic, emerging from the controller after heavy play. The Gamecube had controllers that weren’t as susceptible to wearing out, and so were better suited for the demanding play that Mario Party provides.

Anyway, here is the video, all five hours and 25 minutes of it:

And, here is the direct link:

Identifying Luck in Mario Party 7 (Youtube, 5:15)

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Mario Party is a series that skill will only carry your so far into. After a certain point, only the favor of The Lady (not Peach or Daisy) can ensure your victory. But, how much of the game is up to the rolling of virtual dice? And to what lengths are people willing to go to find out? Well at it turns out, lengths of over 16 hours:

This series is not yet complete, in that creator ZoomZike has yet to produce one on Mario Party 7, or later games, but the one on Mario Party 6 is over five hours long all by itself! This is truly a level of obsession with which my own petty focii cannot hope to complete.

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