Completion Time: 4h:12m:00s
Rating: 7/10

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Meet the Muppets

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Your favorite felted friends are boarding a ship, but instead of relaxing like normal monstrosities, they've decided to destroy the ship and throw food around in a raucous party the likes of which Carnival Cruises have never seen! Or at least that happened at some point in the past, as the framing device for the game involves Kermit flipping through a scrapbook. But that's neither here nor there. Everyone loves the Muppets, and everyone loves Mario Party, so I'm sure folks thought this was a match made in heaven. But it should also be kept in mind that this was 2003. The Muppets as a brand were rapidly fading out of the spotlight once again as the only thing representing them was likely reruns of The Muppet Show on The Disney Channel. More often than not there's something that a game can be tied back into for promotion, but this seems to stick out like a sore thumb and one has to wonder what the actual market was for this? Oh well, I'm far from a scholar of The Jim Henson Company, so perhaps that sort of speculation is better left to the "professionals".

Haha, and this is when we threw Beaker overboard! Good times...

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Raising the Curtains

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As stated before, this is a Mario Party clone plain and simple. Or at least, that's what the general gist of the game is going for. Play through some mini-games and collect tokens until the end, when your results are tallied up and we get a winner. This is nothing new per say, we've seen the like of Sonic the Hedgehog, Pac-Man, and even Mary-Kat and Ashley Olson get in on the trend, and they almost always fall flat. What I can say about this Muppetational version, however, is that it's far from terrible. I hesitate to call it great, but I think it serves its purpose well as far as structure goes. There are only two real complaints that I have, and one of them is just how confusing it is until you get the gist of it. Even the manual struggles to adequately explain what's going on. The game lacks the traditional board structure that most of these clones go for, instead opting for free-roaming across a deck to gain points (this game's substitution for Mario's coins), while you continue unlock doors that will take you into mini-games that you play through in order to win party favors of differing colors. Once someone has enough of EACH color, only then is the game over.

Just remember: the Muppets actually paid to board a ship where the crew just leaves garbage scattered everywhere

My other complaint is the variety of mini-games on display. A lot of them tend to hit the same notes and become a slog to play through just because they come across as... kind of boring. There are multiple driving games and throwing games, including one Dune Buggy game that I really hate, and I always seem to come across those while playing. You can purchase more games to play buy spending your party favors at the end of the game, but the AI get to keep all of theirs so it's going to take a while unless you have friends willing to sit with this for you for the sake of your obsessive compulsive completion streak. Now that isn't to say the mini-games are entirely without merit. There are a couple that I actually enjoy. One of which I had never really seen before, a take on "rapid Bingo" where Bean Bunny just keep announcing letter and number combos without stopping, forcing you to highlight things on your card as quickly as possible so that you can actually get Bingo. I love this idea, and am surprised I haven't seen other variations on it.

Now if only there was a version of this where everyone had different Bingo sheets. THAT'D be a treat!

There's also a bit of unfortunate lacking in variety of the stages too. As you complete games, you'll continue to unlock decks further up on the ship, but since the whole thing is based around a cruise ship it's just one boring locale after another. Even reaching the "top" doesn't provide much to look at. It's not like the game is just generally Muppet themed, at least then we could have the Backstage level or the "Pigs in Space" level or things like that. Something that Mario Party is able to do exceptionally well that isn't really reflected here.

Although this does imply that the Muppet characters were originally sleeping in the Engine Room, which... well, tracks actually

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Completing the Game

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Oh completion. Often times the bane of my existence, especially when it comes to games like this. This one is just a slog, because the party favors that you earn need to be used to purchase mini-games that you can play. But the numbers are absurd, requiring you to play many full games to unlock what you want. That is, if you play single player. If you play multiplayer, then everyone's party favors can be used to purchase these games, as opposed to the AI just taking them and running away with it. If only I had people that actually wanted to play this with me for any extended period of time... oh well, nothing 4 controllers can't fix!

Too poor to afford the food fight, eh? Get back to the party game mines!

Yes, my way around this issue was to just plug in four controllers, start up what could be considered a multiplayer game, and just play as much or as little as I wanted. This was after I did two full games against AI of varying difficulty, so I didn't "cheat" myself out of the experience or anything. But this made things go oh so much quicker than they would've otherwise. I was sliding through that store grabbing things left and right like nobody's business, and wouldn't you know it: I completed the game. And not a moment too soon, as the music was grating on my last nerve, and if I never see that Egyptian Dune Buggy mini-game again it'll be too soon.

What passed for fun in 2003

Surprisingly, this is more competent than I had originally anticipated, but boy oh boy did it annoy me at every step of the way. I can't help but feel that if the game explained itself better and if the variety of mini-games was more interesting, there really could've been something here. It wouldn't have been a Mario Party killer by any means, but maybe folks would look back on this one with some fondness instead of it being blackholed into nostalgic obscurity. I can only hope I'm feeling this generous when I eventually complete Mary-Kat & Ashley Sweet 16: License to Drive. Heaven help me.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 16/652