It took few months of off and on play, but we finally hit our goal last week. We were at about 45,500 coins when this idea came up, so we decided to dig into the game and test our theory. After this number is reached, the count must either stop or reset to zero. The maximum integer value for 16-bit storage is 65,536. They noted that the coin count was nearing the maximum value for 16-bit storage, and mentioned that there was a decent chance that that’s what the developers used for the bank’s counter. The idea sprung up one day after finishing a game with one of my friends. The possibility I and my friends saw in Mario Party 2 was that it might have been using 16-bit storage for the bank. Any more would just be overkill and a potential waste of resources. Any less and there wouldn’t enough room to collect the amounts of coins needed to buy mini-games. It could either be 16-bit or 32-bit storage. Whether or not doing so is realistically possible depends on what type of integer storage is employed for the bank’s counter. Theoretically, one could eventually gather enough coins to turn over the bank’s coin counter and trigger one of the results mentioned above. After all the games are bought though, the only thing one can do with their coins is continue to horde them. In the early days of playing it, all coins gained in the board games are sent to the bank so that they can be stored and used to purchase mini-games from the mini-game shop. Well, like most Mario Party games, Mario Party 2 has a bank that stores all of your accumulated coins. “But what does this have to do with Mario Party 2,” you ask. Given how number storage works, encountering these conditions without a cheating device is an extremely rare thing indeed. If there are, then the counter will either stop at the theoretical limit or reset (aka turn-over) back to zero to start the count all over again. If no measures are put in place, exceeding a counter could permanently glitch it out. What happens after that depends on how the system is programmed to deal with it. To turn over a counter though, one has to exceed its theoretical limit.
It’s an artificial limit designed to save memory. Once that limit is reached, then the game won’t allow you to pick up anymore. Most will only let you carry a certain number of a specific item, usually 99 of them. It happens all the time with inventory slots in RPGs. Now, turning over a counter is not the same things as maxing it out.
Partly because of its mini-games, but also because it offered the possibility of doing something kind of crazy: turning over the coin count through dedicated play. For me though the king of the original trilogy has always been Mario Party 2. These games, for reasons both good and unfortunate, have real staying power. The original three Mario Party games are more popular than ever, and Mario Party 3 still commands a $50 price tag on eBay thanks to its brief run and massive popularity. They should have been, but the opposite happened instead. By all rights, Mario Party 2 and its N64 brethren should have been left behind by gamers a long time ago. It’s been 18 years since the game saw release on the N64, and it has seen eight direct sequels in that time. No matter how you look at it, Mario Party 2 is an old game.