A lame effort put forth by Hudson and Nintendo to push a potentially franchise-altering game over the edge of mediocrity
User Rating: 7 | Mario Party 8 WII
The Good: Some of the minigames are fun. The hotel map is really fun, clearly made for epic four player 50 turn games. Some cool uses of the Wiimote. The Bad: Those borders on the side of the screen. The NES controller was cool, BUT THE DPAD IS NOT MEANT FOR 3D GAMES. Only 6 maps? WAY too much text. Nothing's really changed since Mario Party 1. After 7 games, a developer should be able to figure out it's game's vices and virtues. While the Mario Party games have always sold extremely well (the Gamecube versions are nearly impossible to find and mark the higher-priced end of used games), nothing really pushed them over the edge to the status of "must-have". Now we have a Mario Party for the Wii. Nintendo's suceeded at a minigame based title named WarioWare, so when I first heard about Mario Party 8 I was in heaven. Here I thought is the chance for them to really do something special with the Wiimote. Mario Party exemplifies everything Nintendo represents from it's party based gameplay (it has party in the title for christ's sake) to a chance for extremely interesting and innovative uses of the Wii remote, but honestly, who wants to wander around (and try to balance on platforms) in 3d with an incredibly small D-pad? NOBODY. So many minigames rely on 3d movement with use of the D-pad. It's ackward, it's uncomfortable, and it's down right embarassing. There are some pretty interesting minigames, but the lame ones out-do the interesting ones. The graphics are so-so. I'm not one to complain about them, and everything looks pretty sharp, but what's with the borders? They're lame, and also pretty irritating to look at. What's the point? Though the maps are pretty interesting, there's only 6 of them. (One of them unlockable, and I'm NEVER playing this game by myself, so we're stuck with 5). But even if you don't like a few, you're stuck with only a couple to use. Closing thoughts:
Overall, Mario Party 8 feels like an extremely rushed and carelessly published title. While it's decent, and any Mario Party fan will enjoy it for the change in gameplay using the Wii remote, everyone who picks this up will end up feeling like this game had the potential to be so much more. Poor effort Nintendo. Come on.
