Mario Party DS

Mario Party DS sticks far closer to the tried-and-true format of the console games, unlike its GBA predecessor, which is to collect stars in order to obtain Superstar status and play against a boss. There are 5 playable maps and 72 minigames. This is also the last Mario Party game to be developed by Hudson Soft.

Minigames List

This entry loads a menu for testing minigames and it can be navigated using the D-Pad, as a minigame can be selected using Up/Down and the current page can be changed using Left/Right.
The selected minigame can be started by pressing either Start or A.
To return to the main debug menu also Select can be pressed.

Time Attack (Boss Bash) mode can be enabled or disabled by pressing R and, if enabled on non-boss minigames, it affects only the button that must be pressed to exit from the minigame explanation screen (Y must be used instead of B).

Pressing Y displays four "result coin" values, one for each player, and they disappear when the button is released.
Each value refers to a specific player by its internal number and they change depending of the true type of the last minigame that was played and completed.

Known displayed values:

• 0 if a player was defeated in a Boss minigame, 1 if the player won.
• The rank of the players if it was a Battle minigame, from 0 (first) to 3 (last).
• All set to zero if it was a Score Scuffle minigame.
• Glitched values if it was a Puzzle minigame.
• The coins awarded to each player in any other case.

Without MultiBoot new records from Player 0 are saved even if its type is set to COM, but no Mario Party points are awarded.

Choosing a Puzzle minigame and exiting after starting the minigame will lead to the final Puzzle Mode menu rather than back to the debug menu.
Triangle Twisters can be unlocked in both Frenzy and Focus Mode by selecting its entry and starting a game, but this is not saved into SRAM.

Settings#

Minigame settings can be adjusted in a submenu by pressing X and pressing it again will return to the minigame list. These settings also affect Extra Draw & Catch and Extra Color Territory entries.

Customizable settings:

• The minigame type can be changed by pressing L or R and it can be cycled between 1 Player (Puzzle), 2 Players (Duel), ALL Players (4-Player), Decathlon (Score Scuffle mode, if the game is an actual Score Scuffle minigame it also cannot be paused) and Battle (enables Duel mode on Battle minigames). Setting the wrong type for a minigame and starting it will not crash the game.
• For each player the character (the same character can be chosen more than once), type (HUMAN or COM), difficulty level (applied only if the type is set to COM) and team (BLUE or RED, used to group players in 2-Vs.-2 or 1-Vs.-3 minigames) can be customized by selecting the corresponding entry with the D-Pad and using A or B to adjust it.
• The players' order can be shuffled by pressing Y (single players or teams, depending on the minigame type set).

Internally the players are numbered from 0 to 3.
For some reason the minigame type selector is a bit buggy because, on the explanation screen, the name, color and number of players of the chosen minigame type is updated only if the Duel type is selected or if the main debug menu is reloaded without resetting the game.
Without using the MultiBoot, every HUMAN character is controlled simultaneously by the player and setting every character as COM allows to see the game being played by Player 0 (its type resets back to HUMAN when exiting from the minigame) but it doesn't work for some minigames.
Toad is named by his Japanese name, KINOPIO.

Boss and Puzzle minigames use Player 0's character and type.
Playing Feed and Seed with Player 0's type set to COM reveals that the player that normally can only be controlled by a human has an unused and very basic AI programmed to play the minigame.
Interestingly, to advance the introductive text for Feed and Seed when using a COM character, A or the touch screen must be pressed physically.

All the others, including Puzzle minigames, simply force the character to be human-controlled.

Viewer#

Crashes the game.

It's unknown what kind of in-game content was meant to be viewed using this menu.

Attakeda#

Crashes the game.

The name refers to Atsushi Takeda, one of many people credited as "Program".

Hakamada#

Crashes the game.

The name refers to Syun Hakamada, another person credited as "Program".

Hnishi#

Begins a Party game on the desired map.
Exiting a Party game started on this menu will lead to the final main menu, not back to this entry, and the current progress is saved into SRAM.
For some reason it crashes in the American and Japanese versions.
Strangely it doesn't read the settings for the Minigame entry but without MultiBoot it sets the first player as a human-controlled Mario and the other players as AI-controlled "Normal" Daisy, Luigi and Wario.

There's an option called Boardmap Debug, probably for a debug map, but there isn't any reference to it in the file system, so it crashes when trying to load it.
Also, the Tutorial entry displays the tutorial instructions, but can't be played.

The name probably refers to Hideki Nishimoto, credited as "Program Director", or Syuuichiro Nishio, credited as "Planning".

Miyawaki#

Crashes the game.

The name refers to Hidenori Miyawaki, again one of many people credited as "Program".

Takasima#

Crashes the game.

The name may refer to Tetsuharu Takashima, one of many people credited once again as "Program", or to Suguru Takashima, credited as "Planning".

GUI Menu#

Crashes the game.

Probably this entry was used to test in-game menus.
Another instance of the internal use of the word GUI is in the name of the dependencies for the boards' minimaps, as they're named "mbgui_dep_LZ.bin".

Message#

Crashes the game.

Probably it was used to test in-game messages like previous Mario Party games developed by Hudson Soft (e.g. Mario Party 8).

Build Date#

The debug menu features a build date which differs between versions.
It can be found in the ARM9 binary along with the other debug menu text.

For the sake of consistency, Revision 1 denotes the revised version of the game for the corresponding region and, when using Revision 0, the first version released in the corresponding region is intended instead.

Sep 14 2007
17:40:25

Sep 29 2007
21:25:51

Oct  5 2007
10:21:51

Oct  9 2007
18:48:22

Nov 28 2007
09:29:56

Nov 28 2007
11:17:34

Dec 11 2007
14:34:28

Mar 21 2008
19:02:16

Unused Graphics#

Boo Mugshot#

In data\cfi_data_LZ.bin and data\cfi_128k_data_LZ.bin, among the graphics for dialogue box mugshots, an unused image of a Boo can be found. While a Boo has been playable in previous Mario Party games, the fact that only a dialogue graphic exists suggests they were meant to be an NPC instead. In the final game, Boos only appear in two minigames, Boo Tag and Peek-a-Boo, and as a collectible figure.

Hidden Objects#

Music Box Speaker#

The music box from "Call of the Goomba" has a speaker that can't be seen during the minigame.

Test Songs#

In the ROM's main SDAT archive (MPDS_sound.sdat) there are three distinct unused songs that are duplicated many times under various names.
All of them have "MPDS_BGM" set as their Wave Container (in this case instrument sample collection), the one that is also used for the background music of the game.

Probably they were used to test various aspects of the game's sound engine.

Each unused song, excluding duplicates, can be identified by a distinctive Sound Bank (instrument set) name, so below they are listed and analyzed into a sub-section named after it.

BNK_DUMMY#

Many copies of a simple four note test song can be found in the data for in-game jingles.

It can be found under the name of:

• JN302
• JN303
• JN305
• JN406
• JN407
• JN408
• JN409
• JN410
• JN504
• JN505
• JN601
• JN602
• JN603
• JN604

BNK_DUMMY2#

Placed among used songs related to the boards, many duplicates of another unused song can be found:

• MU003
• MU004
• MU111
• MU112
• MU113
• MU201
• MU202
• MU203
• MU301
• MU304
• MU305
• MU401
• MU409
• MU410
• MU501
• MU502
• MU504
• MU509
• MU512

Another batch of duplicates of it can be found after the minigame music:

• MU701
• MU702
• MU703
• MU704
• MU705
• MU706
• MU801
• MU802
• MU803
• MU804
• MU805
• MU806
• MU807
• MU902
• MU904
• MU905

It resembles the beginning of the background music heard in underground levels in the SNES version of Super Mario Bros..

The song itself is prerecorded in a sound sample, as the corresponding SSEQ file consists in only a single note playing it.

Interestingly the same Super Mario Bros.-esque reference is also made by the songs used in the minigame Boogie Beam.

BNK_MMDUMMY#

An unused song that is completely different from the other two can be found three times consecutively in the ROM, before the music used for the minigame results screen:

• MU614
• MU615
• MU616

The song itself is made by repeating many times 2 prerecorded samples, then altering one of them at the end.

Regional Differences#

Due to South Korea banning gambling and its elements in video games, there are a number of changes made to the Korean version of the game.

• Bowser's Pinball Machine's three-slot jackpot game has been simplified into a game where the player has to hit the UFO when it lands on the center (and when it lands earlier, the player gets more coins)¹. The coin roulette game also has been changed into a Whack-a-Mole game where hitting Bowser or Bowser Jr. gains coins,² and hitting a Bob-omb temporarily stuns the player.³ Both changes are reflected in the Story Mode cutscene.
• Two minigames, "Shuffleboard Showdown" and "Chips and Dips", were removed.

Title Screen#

Japanese	English

References#