s there anything more pathetic than a grown man reviewing a Mario Party game? Well, I guess I’m going to find out. The task of reviewing a new title in this series is what’s known as a “no-win situation.” Either you, A) decide to push aside your usual standards of game design and deem this mess a perfect party game for tots or B) come across as some bitter, snooty old journalist who’s going around popping balloons at a kid’s birthday party. Let’s see what’s behind door number two, shall we?

First off, I would like to say that there’s nothing wrong with Mario Party that couldn’t be fixed. In fact, Mario Party 8, the first of the series to appear on the Wii, does manage to be more compelling than the last couple editions – if only because motion-based gameplay still has that fresh, novel feeling that’s made so many of us embrace the Wii. While many of the minigames aren’t exactly the most creative contests in the history of video games, they are by and large more engaging than those in past titles. The Wii is great for stuff like this, and it does serve to make these brief sequences at the same time more fun and more intuitive.

Because the Wii is so tailored to these types of brief but entertaining bits of gameplay, I think there was an opportunity for Mario Party 8 to break this series out of the tedious rut it’s been plowing for the last few years. Unfortunately, this chance is wasted.

Mario Party’s problem has never been the minigames; it’s the atrociously paced board game that you have to slog through to get to them. Sadly, this fault has not been righted – although a few steps have been taken in the right direction.

Simply, the board game elements of Mario have never impressed me enough to make the entire experience compelling. While not as often as in the past, winning sometimes feels like a matter of sheer luck. I appreciate the fact that board games do rely on chance, but a good one usually makes you feel that your strategy plays an equal role. Not so here, as certain spaces and scripted events will arbitrarily dump you back several places for no apparent reason. While I like the new “candy” items that allow you to do things like swap positions with your opponents, the board is so random that you never feel like you’ve really gained an advantage.

The best thing they’ve done here are the options to skip over your CPU opponent’s minigame turns and increase the speed of the scrolling text (i.e. making it faster to skip through this crap and get to the your next contest). However, it’s a chore to endure the constant trial and error involved in beating the boards. In an age of the Internet and 200-channel digital cable, I just don’t have the attention span for this. Mario Party should be about fast-paced fun, which is why I prefer to get my kicks with the spastic, oddly humorous Rayman Raving Rabbids.