"Could Somebody Please Get the Dice from DK. He Keeps Shoving Them Up His Nose."

It's My Party, and I'll Cry If I Want To…
Publisher: Nintendo Rated: E

In the world according to Nintendo, all problems are solved through a rousing full-scale board game. Apparently, the previous seven epic board-based wars have ended in stalemate, and the battle is joined once more for Mario Party 8.

Now then, I've just made the game sound very exciting and involved, but it isn't. There's no story to speak of, just Mario and friends gathering at the “Star Carnival” to roll dice and play mini-games. As with all previous Mario Party titles, you collect coins and gather stars in hopes of being the Superstar, and making your friends refer to you as such. In this particular version of the game, there are six different boards to choose from, and each of them is just different enough to be interesting. There's the classic “collect coins and buy the star” board, a board where all the rooms are randomized and shuffled each time a star is found, and a setup in which you invest in hotels that produce more stars as you drop more cash. It's nice to have the variety, but if you've played the previous games, there's really not much new to see here.

After each thrilling turn of rolling dice and moving through squares, everyone comes together for a mini-game. Each game requires you to use the Wiimote in fairly creative and intuitive ways. Sometimes you point and shoot, other times you go with the old-school Nintendo grip, and occasionally you wave the controller wildly like a chimp with ADD. The controls are very tight, and I can't think of a single instance where I lost a game because I felt like the controller cheated me. The computer characters, yes, the controller, not so much. The games are fun when you start, but sadly they grow stale rather quickly. There aren't THAT many games to play, and when I've played the game has had a weird tendency to skew toward 3 vs. 1 matchups. While you'll never play the same game twice in one go ‘round, you'll likely get very familiar with about 6 games as you'll be seeing them come up over and over and over again. The core of the game is fun, but it seems like the developers stopped about 20 games too soon. However, if this is the core from which to build, I am very excited for the future installments.

One thing about the Mario Party series that desperately needs to be abandoned is the board game format. I know it's supposed to be the gimmick that holds the whole thing together, but it's just become entirely too cumbersome. It seems like no matter what Nintendo tries, they can never seem to break up the tedium and boredom of waiting for all the characters to get through a turn. Sometimes when I want to play this game I break out a butter churn so that by the time it's finally over, I can enjoy some nice toast with my favorite spread. This is one aspect of the series that Nintendo should seriously consider scrapping in order to find something more compelling. Furthermore, the board aspect makes a lot of the games boil down to luck rather than skill. The next time Toad gets a star on the last turn to win the game because he “happened” to land on the DK space I'm going to come in there, cut him up, and spread his remains on my pizza. Come on Nintendo, I know you've got lots of smart people sitting around making games, you can do better than this.

The game is cute and colorful, and will appeal to both kids and longtime Mario fans. The characters are lovingly presented, and it looks very nice on the Wii. Granted, the screen is never straining to keep up with fast and frantic action, but hey, at least it's pretty to look at. The music and sound is utterly mutable, which is par for the course. Sure, the character taunts are funny at first, but once you've heard your thousandth Luigi smackdown as you were reaching for your drink you'll wish you had never unlocked that feature.

Really, when you break it down the latest installment of the franchise is a lot of promising ideas that never quite come pan out. The Wii's controls open up a whole new world of potential for the mini-games, but after a while they all seem to play almost the same way. The game looks very pretty, but there's a lot more flash than substance. The game is middle-of-the-road in every sense, and so it gets a truly average score.

Overall Score: 5 out of 10

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/25/07