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Wii Party

Wii Party

Nintendo is once again throwing a party, but this time Mario and the rest of the gang from the Mushroom Kingdom get to stay home. The Miis are the only ones invited...

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There was a time when me and my friends gathered every week, year in and year out, to play Mario Party. Every year there was a new version that put a new golden shine on these evenings, until Nintendo suddenly had enough after Mario Party 8, despite the fact that it was the most successful of them all. The Mario Party-games were fantastic, they allowed happy amateurs play against people that live for games on equal terms and everyone could have fun together.

Anyone could win, especially with a bit of luck and a dose of Nintendo's sadism when a single roll of the die could turn the tables completely. It was an era, but after about 2 years after Mario Party 8 came out we started to get bored with it. Not Mario Party in general, but Mario Party 8 itself - we needed new levels, new minigames and some new rulesets to play around with.

I don't really know what happened, but we never saw a Mario Party 9. Nintendo retired the series and it took until this spring for them to announce its spiritual successor - Wii Party. Even if I found it pretty sad that Mario Party was gone, I have been looking forward to having my friends over for some minigame-entertainment, party-stylee, again.

So is Wii Party simply a Mario Party but with Miis? No, actually not. After having played countless rounds of Wii Party I've gone from cautiously sceptical to fully embracing the changes Nintendo has made. What the developers managed to do, I realize now, is to fix the problems Mario Party had; problems I didn't even know it had. And it's still as entertaining for everyone, including those that never play games or isn't of the "correct" age.

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And all this without making it worse that spend at least a few hours every day with a controller. That's something that I don't think any developer besides Nintendo would be able to pull off. The big difference between Mario Party is that Wii Party is a lot faster to play. You get started quickly, a normal round doesn't need to take two hours and the number of slow parts during the game has been kept to an absolute minimum.

It's kind of a "back to basics", if you want to put it like that. There's about 80 different minigames, but now the board and playpieces are no longer central to the experience. Instead there's more ways to enjoy the minigames, which might not be new, but the games have been moved into focus. It becomes more interactive, faster tempo and easier for everyone to understand.

For the person who absolutely needs to play Wii Party with Miis dressed up like Mario and pretend that it all takes place in the Mushroom Kingdom, there's always a game mode called Globe Trot that is a lot like Mario Party. The main difference is that without all the extra stuff going on around the game, there's a lot more skill to it here and the better player is also the one that will end up victorious.

But Wii Party is filled to the brim with different forms of party variants that will entertain you no matter how many players are present. There's simpler races with go-carts, pizza deliveries, vegetable cutting and even a zombie-variation with zombified Miis. For two players there's Friend Connection where you can find how good friends you really are. And then there's the thing that Nintendo hyped the most - House Party. Here you're playing more with the actual Wiimotes instead of the TV, and it's something that wouldn't have been possible on another console.

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There's for example a game where you hide the Wiimotes from the others, which will then make sounds every 10 seconds while your friends try to find them. There's also one where you put all the Wiimotes on a table and have to figure out which one of them is making the correct animal sound. Simple stuff that everyone - you and old - can enjoy and that technically can't really be called a "video game". Which is something that Microsoft and Sony so dearly want to copy, but won't be able to come close to.

But everything isn't perfect, and Wii Party isn't really what I had hoped it would be. Sure, it's a disc filled with entertainment, but it's so streamlined that a lot of depth is lost. The replayablity isn't nearly as great as with the Mario Party-games and despite the Miis' inherent charm, the graphics are incredibly sterile compared to when Mario and Donkey Kong face off against each other over stars in a game of skipping rope. There's also a lot of monotonous music with some really annoying sound effects.

Wii Party can be recommended to more or less everyone, it has a place and a clear purpose in any Wii-collection. But it isn't anything more than shallow entertainment when you're not so game-interested friends come over and I still hope that Nintendo will do the only right thing and release Mario Party 9 already.

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06 Gamereactor UK
6 / 10
+
Very intuitive, a lot of minigames, several game modes
-
Lacks depth, sterile feel, annoying sound effects
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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REVIEW. Written by Jonas Mäki (Gamereactor Sweden)

Nintendo is once again throwing a party, but this time Mario and the rest of the gang from the Mushroom Kingdom get to stay home. The Miis are the only ones invited...



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