Let's Party With Mario

Plus year of the ninja, Catan and Donkey Konga

Welcome friends to a brand new week of games.

This week I (Alice) partied with everyone’s favourite Italian plumber on a beach in the Whitsundays, while Tim played Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, Catan, and Donkey Konga. Plus we have heaps of recommendations for what else you can play.

Enjoy!

The Mario Party rages on

By Alice

I love Mario Party. This would have been my code sentence to subtly signal that I’d been kidnapped up until 4 years ago, when I played Mario Party Superstars during lockdown and it became one of my core games. I’ve already written about how much I loved Mario Party Jamboree, it’s a great game. So, I have been so excited to play the Mario Party Jamboree - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV upgrade pack (this is the full official title, I am not exaggerating) to enjoy the addition of motion controls and mouse controls.

My feelings about the final result are… mixed.

On the one hand, I absolutely love the new air (shell) hockey mouse control game, and most of the other mouse games are fun. Plus, the new, shorter five-turn mode is a welcome addition for those who want to play a quick game and then get out.

However, it’s very limited, and assumes I’ll generally have four players, instead of my usual two, with a lot of the new content being 2 v 2 (I know you can co-op with or against the computer, but it’s not as fun). What’s worse is that Bowser Live (the new mode that has people using the camera and microphone to play a series of three mini games) highlights why controlling games using a camera never took off: It doesn’t work consistently and it just gets frustrating. I also hate that the third mini game is so make or break, potentially negating the results of the first two games, which just feels a bit gross.

For $30 I would have expected this game upgrade to be more slick, more evenly applied across the games and ways people play. It adds a lot of good stuff, but it also adds some mediocre and disappointing stuff, and then segments the game into Jamboree and Jamboree TV, only applying the graphical upgrades to Jamboree TV, yet not bringing all the content over to that half of the game for no apparent reason. If the new content had been inserted seamlessly into the original game with graphical updates across the board, it would have felt deliberate and well designed. Here, though, it just comes across as a bit haphazard and half-arsed, which is unlike Nintendo.

That said, Mario Party fans who have a camera and three friends will get a lot out of this clunky $30 upgrade pack. Just not as much as they should have gotten.

What to play

• A new month means new PlayStation Plus Essential monthly games, and the lineup’s a bit weak sauce for August. You get puppet souls-like Lies of P, ageing online zombie shooter DayZ and anime arena fighter My Hero One’s Justice 2.

• Nothing new for Game Pass this week, except support for free-to-play shooter Fragpunk. Playing through Game Pass gets you some free unlocks, and cloud streaming capability.

• Free on the Epic Games Store this week are Keylocker and Pilgrims. Keylocker is a turn-based cyberpunk game that looks kinda ok, and Pilgrims is a little adventure game that looks pretty neat.

Year of the ninja sneaks (or rages) on

By Tim

In the 80s and 90s, there was a general understanding that ninjas were the coolest thing on Earth. You could make an argument for dinosaurs, but look through lists of Super Nintendo games or 90s cartoon episodes and you’ll find more ninjas by a ratio of two to one. Their popularity faded in the 2000s with the demand for more grit and realism in media, since almost all the fun ninja stuff is total nonsense, but in 2025 they’re back in a big way.

This year we’ve had Assassin’s Creed Shadows and a remake of Ninja Gaiden 2, and still to come we have Ninja Gaiden 4, a brand new entry in the Shinobi series and the ninja-adjacent Ghost of Yotei. But this week I want to talk about the most recent release, Ninja Gaiden Ragebound.

Putting out three entries of a series in one year may seem like overkill, but to be honest I’m not as interested in the 3D main series. Ragebound is partially a throwback to the Ninja Gaiden games of the 80s and early 90s, in that it’s a 2D game more about platforming and momentum. But thankfully, it doesn’t inherit the ridiculously high difficulty and cruel limitations of those games.

Series publisher Koei Tecmo handed the property to Dotemu for this game, with the French publisher continuing a streak (following Streets of Rage 4, TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge and Metal Slug Tactics) of knowing exactly who to partner with for a given project. In this case, it tapped Blasphemous developer The Game Kitchen.

The end result is a fast and frantic ninja action game where most enemies can be killed in one hit, and destroying certain glowing enemies grants a powerup to instantly kill the bigger or armoured bad guys, so levels can become a flow-state of running, jumping, dodging, slashing and kunai throwing.

The backgrounds, pixel characters and animations are incredible, and I love how new protagonist Kenji evokes the classics with his blue and red getup contrasting the now-ubiquitous ninja black. I’m less enthusiastic about the badass Spider Clan kunoichi being killed off immediately to become a ghost that Kenji can invoke when useful, but the occasional sections where you can play as her directly are still a lot of fun.

Overall this feels like a modern game paying tribute to the classics, rather than a slavishly recreated 90s experience. Bosses are tough as nails but there’s little punishment for failure. The soundtrack rules and feels like the kind of heavy metal ninja vibe the original Ninja Gaiden was wishing for. The game is relatively short, but there are various collectibles and missions to encourage repeat runs.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Tim

I'd never actually played Catan until recently. I'd seen it played, and I was vaguely aware it had a big following, but my most direct experience of it had been people complaining about it or rolling their eyes. People who knew more about board games than me seemed to regard it as a Monopoly-level bore, or something where the only people willing to play it were also insufferable about it. But with the recent release of the Sixth Edition I gave it a shot, and I had a great time.

I started to have some doubts as I read through the rules, as it seemed like a lot was going over my head. But it took literally 10 minutes of play for it to click; it's one of those games where you need to memorise the turn structure and understand the resources and then it becomes very simple strategy. I think this is probably why it has the reputation it has. It's very accessible but I imagine high-end play, where players understand the variables inside and out, would rob it of most of its charm.

If you're unfamiliar, hexes are laid out semi-randomly to create an island, and each is given a dice roll value that effectively decides how often it will be harvested. Players compete to settle near the resources, as they’ll need some of each to keep building and expanding, but they can also go for valuable ancillary goals like settling at trade ports or building the longest road. Trade between players is a major element.

After a few games I had a feel for what to look for in the early turns, how to lock down resources that are going to become scarce or make myself indispensable for future trades. And also how to anticipate and block opponents. But there are enough options and elements of chance built in that there was still room for surprise and turnabout. 

The most notable thing about Catan is its various expansions, which add entirely new mechanics, goals, pieces and concepts. And also oblige die-hards to spend hundreds of dollars per edition. I'm not that invested yet, but then I do like the idea of adding little boats to the setup...

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

What does Donkey Kong have to do with Afro-Cuban music? It's a fair question, but evidently not one given great consideration in Nintendo's offices in the early 2000s. I have no idea how exactly how the DK Bongos came to be, but I imagine Nintendo wanted to make a home version of Taiko no Tatsujin, and when they were pondering how to integrate their own characters someone had the most inspired brainwave of their life. 

"Donkey Kong, Donkey Bong! Donkey Conga! DK must be in this thing!"

And given the resulting game, Donkey Konga, is only barely DK themed, I'm guessing that happened somewhat late in development.

The DK Bongos are up there with the strangest and most hilarious peripherals Nintendo has made, and they're extremely simple; two big squishy buttons you can hit, one regular button to act as "start", and a microphone to detect clapping. But I think the four games that officially support them are fascinating.

Donkey Konga is a little like Guitar Hero (which DK beat to market by several years) but a lot like Taiko. The Japanese version features classical music, Nintendo game tunes and some J-Pop idol songs, while the US and European versions have distinct and absolutely wild track lists. The US version for example has Rock Lobster and Whip It. The EU version has Tubthumping and Lady Marmalade. They both have All the Small Things (!). If you do really well on the songs you earn money to buy alternate sounds for your drums, which makes the whole thing even funnier. And I love that there’s a multiplayer mode for use with multiple bongo sets (up to four), and that the game actually separates the track so that each player gets a different part of the song to play, turning the Legend of Zelda bongo medley into a weirdo drum circle.

Donkey Konga 2 is just as cooked, but a must-play if you've ever wanted to slam out an REM or Britney Spears song on some plastic bongos with DK's unfocused and expressionless face in the corner at all times. Unfortunately Donkey Konga 3 never made it outside of Japan, but we did get one more bongo game from the brilliant mind of Yoshiaki Koizumi (director of Mario Sunshine, Mario Galaxy, producer of Mario Odyssey).

DK Jungle Beat was an early taste of Nintendo in its Wii era, with traditional game design pared back to as few inputs as possible. It's a 2.5D platformer where you hit a beat on either drum to keep moving in that direction, hit both to jump, and clap to interact with stuff. It has to be one of the least-played first-party Nintendo games, given the drums (though you can play with a controller, and it was re-released for Wii), but for sheer creativity it's an A-tier.