Now you’ll be able to unjustly rob stars from your friends by doing absolutely nothing over the internet. Hooray!
If anything, it’s surprising that this little feature is coming to the fore during what I think many people are considering to be the end days of the global pandemic. Nintendo announced yesterday that it was expanding the online offerings of its popular Super Mario Party on the Switch. Let’s be real, coming together in person to shout at a video game hasn’t been a good idea for a while but the internet has been allowing people to do that for ages now. The update will allow Nintendo Switch Online subscribers to play the virtual board game (alongside all the mini-games it comes with).
How this will work is rather simple. You can play a Friend Match (with friends, obviously) or you can play a Private Game wherein you “can play with anyone using passwords”. The actual content you’ll be able to play online has increased drastically; previously only 10 of the game’s 80 mini-games were available for online play but now every mini game can be played over the internet. The mainline Mario Party mode and Partner Play mode can now also be played online, which marks the first time the board game aspect will be making the jump to online multiplayer.
Of course, this being Nintendo, there are some weird caveats to all of this. You can play with up to 1 player per system (between 2 and 4 players) or up to 2 players per system (between 3 and 4 players). If two folks are playing Super Mario Party on their own system then players 3 and 4 won’t be able to play using a single Switch. Who know what that would be case but it wouldn’t be an online Nintendo game if it didn’t have some inexplicable nonsense that prevented easily accessible play.
Last Updated: April 28, 2021
