Tetris 99 - Mario Party Superstars Cup

Apparently, Tetris 99 skipped the entire month of November 2021. Pretty odd timing considering these Maximus Cups tend to be about 3 to 6 weeks after the featured game comes up, and November would've been within that timeframe for Mario Party Superstars. Maybe they were delayed. I suppose we could get the Maximus Cup for Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl just in time for Pokémon Legends: Arceus to come out.

The background is splash artwork with Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Yoshi at Woody's Woods with a Star-giving Koopa in the background. There is also a Bank Koopa, a Monty Mole, a pair of Galoombas, and Toadette ready to hand out a Star to whomever passes by, but you can't see them during normal gameplay as the playfield is in the way. The Minos seem to be original but keeping with the style of Mario Party, though the garbage meter showing Brick Blocks means it may have taken inspiration from Mario's Puzzle Party from Mario Party 3, as nuisance blocks were Brick Blocks there. The background of the playfield, meanwhile, displays icons of various minigames found in Mario Party Superstars, like Eatza Pizza, Shy Guy Says, Honeycomb Havoc, and Inflat-a-Bowser; and of spaces, with a Blue Space, a Happening Space, and a Bowser Space visible. From what I can tell, the KO icons are original but with the Super Mario font, but the explosion animation when you KO somebody depicts a Bob-omb. The playfield font is a standard-issue font found in many Nintendo games and, to my knowledge, was first used on the Wii Menu. Partial Badges are Coins, and full Badges are Stars, fitting as your goal is to get the most Stars on a board and you exchange Coins for a Star. Your target reticule is a Boo.

Though I don't know their names, the music that plays at the start is one used for swimming-based minigames in Mario Party 3, while at 50 players remaining, it's the "tense" minigame theme from Mario Party 2. The top 10 theme is the main theme of Mario Party Superstars itself. Placing 1st gets you the theme of when you become a Superstar by winning a board and its subsequent theme, while placing 2nd or below plays one of the songs when a minigame finishes and a winner is decided, followed by the snare drum when the game distributes Coins. Clearing lines plays various sparkling sounds used for minigames where fitting, while a T-Spin plays the sound when someone enters a Warp Pipe. A garbage block attack sent to you will play klaxon sounds from Space Land.

For the record, I don't have Mario Party Superstars, though I have owned or played all of the previous Mario Party games except the handheld ones (Advance, DS, Island Tour, and Star Rush, and The Top 100 if it counts). I'm waiting to see if they'll release more content for it, like what happened with Splatoon. I got Splatoon several months after release because I felt there was enough content in there to justify its price. (Incidentally, Mario Party Superstars released with an equal number of boards as Splatoon 1 had stages, at 5 each.)

Match #1
Skin: Special Theme 20 (Mario Party Superstars)
Mode: Normal
This was my first match, and boy, was it rough...people here really knew how to stay alive, so elimination of players was way slower than normal.

Match #2
Skin: Special Theme 20 (Mario Party Superstars)
Mode: Normal
This match went by relatively uneventfully due to the surge of defensive players, but things got real heated when I got targeted by 4 to 6 people at once later on and started outputting tons of garbage to them, and not all of my adversaries could withstand that counterattack. The results show that I overcame at least two players who have pulled off three 1st place finishes in a row--you can tell because they have that icon that looks like a golden badge with a "1" on it, a crown at the top, and three stars at the bottom.

Match #3
Skin: Special Theme 20 (Mario Party Superstars)
Mode: Invictus
And as usual, here's the Invictus match in which I make the Top 10 so you can hear and see what it looks like with the glowing embers background. Not a lot of people playing Invictus at that time, with less than 10 per room whereas it's usually 25 to 40. CPU players fill in the rest. By contrast to the long, drawn out Maximus Cup matches, Invictus matches went by real quick, at about half the length of a normal match. It may be the CPU players. I'm not sure. That savage attack at the beginning, though, was definitely from a player. I got hit with a near-immediate Back-to-Back T-Spin Triple.