Disabling bonus stars is a good point. For the difficulty, not sure if that would work well: The problem is some of the players are inevitably casuals, so increasing the difficulty just means the very narrow part of the game that isn’t as random - the mini-games - becomes not fun for them. And the Monopoly-style turn-based board play takes sooooo long, you can’t really strategize where to go.

I really do think a Mario Party game with only mini-games so everyone plays all the time would be incredible. But again, maybe I’m just describing Warioware…

I’ve seen that, so yeah, I get it. But I’ve also see the game award bonus stars or other random finger-on-the-scale benefits to the player in the lead, which can be even more demoralizing to those that lose. I don’t think it’s Mario Kart rubber band mechanics, unfortunately.

A related question: What is the least random Mario Party? We often end up playing this when friends come over since I guess I’m the only one who feels like it’s too random for anyone to meaningfully “win.”

Not to rain on anyone’s parade or anything, I’m glad you all and others have fun with it, I just would like to see if there’s a version that’s more like it’s a game of skill than chance.

Or maybe I just want WarioWare…

Strange, I wonder why it shows 7.5m views for me (5 hours after you saw 10m). I wonder if Youtube gives different view counts by region, which would be…interesting.

We do have other parties.

The problem is FPTP voting which (just to explain for anyone who hasn’t heard this a million times) makes it irrational to vote for a third-party, because every vote for a party that isn’t the closest-to-center-bell-curve-left party is more likely to split the vote for left-leaning voters, and therefore functions as a vote for right (in the US’s case, fascist) party.

And the problem with that is, we need to implement ranked choice or similar voting in state- and nation-wide races for the situation to improve, which takes years of planning in every locality, and our attention is absolutely destroyed by constant crises.

This isn’t really showing what the display is like. It apparently can adjust viewing angle on a per-pixel level, so for example only apps and notifications you set will have limited viewing angles.

Here’s a story with a better leaked visual: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-S26-Ultra-display-may-have-more-tricks-up-its-sleeve.1214117.0.html

Frankly I think it’s still a bit gimmicky for privacy (why not just do the full screen, which you can do with a $10 polarized screen protector to all phones already), but it’s legitimately neat tech.