I’ll preface my post by saying that, prior to Wii, I have not had a Nintendo system since the NES (well, a GBA, but certainly nothing that plays on a television). And even when I had friends with the various other systems, none of them ever had any Mario Party games. So I’m coming into MP8 fresh, and have no idea how it stacks up with others in the series.
But I will say that MP8, for being ridiculously simple, is also ridiculously fun. The various party maps require different strategies (I have a feeling my favorite two maps will end up being the Boardwalk, which is very straight ahead with no detours or special conditions to get Stars, and the Tycoon Town, which is nothing but strategy, having to own majority share in a number of hotels, each of which gives you stars, and which can be stolen by other players if they invest more). The Wii remote seems to provide a nice variety in how the minigames are presented, but having already played out Warioware and spent a fair bit of time with the minigame multiplayers of Sonic and Rayman Raving Rabbids, another compilation of minigames just doesn’t offer much new. Thankfully, MP8 keeps things compelling with collecting stars as a win condition, both in keeping things tense throughout the game, and in the utter randomness of the endgame star handout (warning on obscenity, if that’s a bad thing for you).
The “story” mode where you do a series of 1-on-1 duels through the various stages is not nearly as compelling as the party game, though you need to play through it at least once to unlock all the stages, and at least twice to unlock all the characters. The Party mode is better, but not nearly as fun as it could be when it’s you and three computer players; I fired up the game for the first time last night while having a party, and we had four humans duking it out. Og that was fun.
There is not much in this world that is more fun than four people playing Mario Party, especially while under the influence. We just got 8 and have only played one game so far. It’s great. Mario Party 6 is measuring stick for the series, so after we’ve had an extensive evaluation period, I’ll compare the two.
Mario Party was a ton of fun for me back when things were a little more skill based and a little less completely dependent on random outcomes… say… MP4, or so. Mario Party 6 was intensely frustrating to me because there was so much of the game where what I did had no meaning at all, because the result was going to be random anyways. It’s one thing when the roll of the dice determines who gets to what space, or the star randomly appears in front of someone… it’s entirely another when the “mini-games” and “battle-games” are just a crapshoot. I guess I can see how this is fun if you’re someone who always loses when skill gets involved, but to me, it’s like the communism of video gaming
That said, I look forward to giving 8 a shot at some point, and quite hope that the balance between “it’s a party game so anyone should have a chance to win” and “it’s a game, there is a way of keeping score (stars) so it is by default a competition, and someone who doesn’t even know what’s going on should have some natural disadvantage” is, well, correctly balanced.
I’ve unlocked about 90% of the games (most that I haven’t are 2v2, which hasn’t come up as much), and so far, there’s all of about three that are entirely random. Of those three, two are duels, and the other is a 4-player battle. The dice rolls and distribution of candy are random, but no more than, say, Monopoly. And I don’t know if this is the case in past versions with post-game stars, but you can turn off whether bonus stars are awarded or not.
