For a while now, we've been getting yearly Mario Party updates. The game that started as a fresh take on board games during the Nintendo 64 era quickly turned into a hit. Like every company, Nintendo and Hudson like money, so the sequels kept popping out like kids from a trailer park "socialite". After a while, though, the magic died and we were left with sequels most well-informed gamers didn't care about.

What's so different about Mario Party 8? Why should anyone on Nintendo-Play care about another sequel? Well, just like most "revived" franchises on the Wii, the controls are the agent of change that we care about.

There's the ability to have your own file separated from that of your brother's or sister's. You'll link your profile to your Mii, too, so you can easily identify which is yours if you find it difficult to remember  if you chose file #1, file #2, or file #3.

The game's new setting is a carnival. In here, you'll quickly meet a man and his hat friend. They'll be your guide through the whole game, so you better get used to their little skits.



The main menu is just a screen with the different modes displayed. In my opinion, Hudson lost a great oportunity here. Just letting you explore the carnival with your Mii or your favorite Mario Party character would have felt so much better than the mode picking. Still, the menus are good enough, although there's some obviously questionable decisions in there.

Let's get to the meat of the game. The party tent. In this tent, you can choose to either go on Battle Royal, which is your classic Mario Party four player game; Tag Battle, which is a regular game except you pair up with someone and at the end of the game your stars and coins are summed up to see which will be the Super Star Team; and finally, there's Duel Battle, which is a two player game. Personally, I still prefer the classic Battle Royal, but with friends, Tag Battle can be pretty good, too.

The game plays as usual. Jump to hit the dice and see how many spaces you'll move. The main goal is getting stars and coins and after every turn a mini-game will put the four players against each other in a competition for coins. You can use power-ups, now called Candy to help you get to the stars faster and help steal coins or stars from your rivals. It's still the same game from Nintendo 64, but if you liked it then, you'll still love it now.



The boards have stopped using a top-down view. Now, each board has a different view point which may be confusing for veteran Mario Party players but you'll get used to this soon enough.

The mini-games are where the game suffers. Some games work well, but for the most part, the developer insisted on using the Remote controller style, which doesn't quite work. In fact, some mini-games will be very hard to control because you're expected to twist your wrist to the right 180 degrees (the awkwardness will be twisting to the left for those of you who are lefties). It's like the game expects you to break your wrist for it. In these mini-games, I've found that using Wario Ware's "sketch artist" position works best, so if you see one of these awkward mini-games, quickly change positions and hold the Wii Remote like a pencil.



The control awkwardness doesn't stop there, though. In some games, you're just supposed to point at a place and shoot, but the cursor moves a lot slower than you do. This ends up costing you some precious seconds and eventually you'll lose 'cause of this. Another way the controls fail is that in some airplane mini-games, the Wii Remote will cursor out the screen quite often, which will make you lose control of your aircraft. Sadly, there's no reason for this to happen since both Rayman and Wario Ware have managed to make similar mini-games work perfectly.

On the graphics side, the game is still just GameCube. In my 10 hours of play, I've seen nothing that makes me go "cool" or "woah, the Wii can do that?" The game actually looks the same as Mario Party 4, which was released during the beginning of GameCube's life. I understand that Hudson may have wanted to keep its style, but style doesn't mean they can be lazy at the graphics department.



Music is just generic. There's few songs that fit the mood of the game, actually. It's like they just decided to randomly pair up tunes and boards.

Extras is a place where Mario Party 8 is better than most. In the "Fun Bazaar", you can buy around 40 extras. To do this, you'll exchange the cards you get after playing one whole session in the Party Tent. There's also figurines to collect, music, sound effects, and even some items that will affect gameplay.

Closing Comments:

Mario Party 8 is definitely not crap, but it's not anything that excels "good". It just falls inbetween. This game will definitely appeal to gamers looking for party games, and if they can get over the fact that the game's controls don't work all the time, they'll definitely have a blast. In the end, it's your decision, but with games like Wario Ware: Smooth Moves and Rayman: Raving Rabbids out there, I see no reason to buy Mario Party 8.