Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Mario Party 8



Party games are not about bloom lighting and polygons. Play this with your parents and they will think it looks great, but Mario Party 8 is decidedly GameCubey. The newer character models we’ve seen from Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros. Brawl are not used here. Instead, Mario and company look like they have for years. Aside from an occasionally bad case of the jaggies, that’s well and good, but it would have been a nice treat to get an early look at the new models. Still, a few less used characters show up in this one, like Dry Bones and a Hammer Bros.

The minigames remain clear and recognizable without sacrificing style and color. Visually, most give a somewhat new spin, even on familiar games. Characters add a little flare with some special item animations, and every stage is full of bustle and life. The viewpoint is a little closer to the action than years past, with some levels having a near 3rd-person vantage. The boards may have familiar settings – a Donkey Kong jungle, a Boo haunted house – but they look fresh enough and at times are quite pretty. Besides, the boards do well to make this series work better than it has in a long time.


In the most basic sense, if you’ve crashed one Mario Party you’ve crashed them all. Up to four players take turns moving on a game board, which is followed by a minigame. Winning minigames wins coins, which are needed in some fashion to purchase stars. The player with the most stars at the end of a set number of turns wins. You are then very awkwardly dubbed the superstar and do it all over again.

The key to most Mario Parties is the quality of the minigames. More than 100 populate Mario Party 8, and it’s no surprise that most use the Wii remote’s motion and pointing functions to add a little newness to the title. Games like Swing Kings Baseball are quite similar to some past Mario Party minis, but the remote adds that level of interactivity. Mosh-Pit Playroom shows off the colorful visual style and tilt happy newcomers like In the Nick of Time give off that "hey that was fun" vibe. While a few are still left solely to luck, the developers did a good job making skill the required element in the vast majority of the games. Unlike some earlier games in the series, however, Mario Party 8 usually chooses minigames you haven’t yet played, an appreciated addition.

The real surprise, however, is how the boards manage to steal the show from the fancy motion games. Most of the game boards in the GameCube titles were little more than cosmetic changes over a generic set of spaces. In Mario Party 8, the boards finally add strategic variety to keep things exciting. In King Boo’s Haunted Hideaway, the path to the star is hidden, and the path changes each time a star is found. The Shy Guy's Perplex Express, the path loops through train cars that can be moved and shuffled to change the balance at any moment. The best may be Koopa’s Tycoon Town. In a Monopoly-Mario Party combo, players invest coins in hotels. The more total coins put into a hotel, the more stars that hotel is worth. The player with largest investment gets the stars, but they can change hands as players add more and more coins to the building.

For once, every session of Mario Party is not a carbon copy of one another. It’s understandable that after 10 or so games in the series the minigames begin to look a little common each year, so rather than depend on the Wii remote, Hudson expands the series in a better way.


Posted by wii-play at 3:31 AM
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