Mario Party 2 is a party video game developed by Hudson Soft and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64. The second game in the Mario Party series, it was released in Japan on December 17, 1999, in North America on January 24, 2000, in Europe on October 12, 2000 and in Australia on November 6, 2000. The game received mostly positive reviews, who praised the improvements they made to the original, the multiplayer and minigames, but criticized the lack of originality, while graphics received a better but otherwise mixed response. Mario Party 2 features six playable characters: Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Yoshi, Wario, and Donkey Kong from the Mario series and the original Mario Party, who can be directed as characters on various themed game boards. The objective is to earn the most stars of all players on the board; stars are obtained by purchase from a single predefined space on the game board. Each character's movement is determined by a roll of a die, with a roll from each player forming a single turn. Each turn in Mario Party 2 is followed by a mini-game, which is competed to earn coins for the character, used to buy items and stars. Mario Party 2 was followed by Mario Party 3 in 2000, and was later re-released on the Wii Virtual Console in 2010, and for the Wii U Virtual Console in North America in 2016.