Jamboree TV is launched from the starting menu as its own thing, and styles itself as a live studio environment complete with an audience of Yoshi, which is a cute touch. From the stage, you and your other players choose from one of the new mode offerings: Bowser TV, a short competition showcasing the new camera and microphone-based minigames; Carnival Coaster, which has players shooting koopas from a rollercoaster using mouse controls with a few minigames thrown in; and regular old Mario Party with two new rule sets. All up, there are about twenty new minigames that utilise the Switch 2’s new features. It’s a good amount of new content, but some offerings are less than they appear.

You’ll only play Bowser’s TV and Carnival Coaster once or twice before you realise that they are just a small curation of minigames with padding in between. Carnival Coaster at least has some basic arcade shooting between the games, but Bowser TV only has showiness to make up for its lack of substance, which ironically makes it the only one of the two modes that I would bother showing to a new player. Styled like a live music performance, Bowser picks the players out of his crowd to play three minigames from a randomised pool of either microphone or camera minigames. (Yes, microphone OR camera — despite the comically small pool of minigames available in each, you can’t combine them.) Neither type of game feels like a lot of thought went into them, and they often don’t feel very responsive, like the way I move and shout didn’t register on the screen. This may be because I simply wasn’t willing to shout my whole apartment building down just to impress Bowser, but who knows? The mouse minigames fare so much better, feeling very responsive to the smallest movements of my wrist, even using my knee instead of a perfectly flat surface. These felt like proper minigames.