The lights are on
What new ideas the game brings to the table and how well old ideas are presented.
How good a game looks, taking into account any flaws such as bad collision or pop-up.
Does the game’s music and sound effects get you involved or do they make you resolve to always play with the volume down?
Basically, the controller to human interface. The less you think about the hunk of plastic in your hands, the better the playability.
Flat out, just how fun the game is to play. The most important factor in rating a game.
Last month, I reviewed Guilty Party, one of the best examples of a party game this generation. It has a light-hearted atmosphere, but it also requires strategy and forward thinking if you want to win. By comparison, Wii Party is unmitigated, uninteresting chaos. Believe it or not, Wii Party is worse than the Mario Party series.
Wii Party’s 80-plus minigames share the same uneven quality I’ve come to expect from Mario Party, which makes sense given that many of them are iterations of games from that series. The metagames are even worse. Whereas Mario Party gave players multiple boards to play through, Wii Party features multiple game types, each less exciting than the last.
Board Game Island and Globe Trot adhere most closely to the Mario Party tradition. If you’re going to play any portion of the game, Globe Trot is the best. You choose how many spaces you move by playing cards in your hand, so you have more control over what’s going on.
Game types such as Spin-Off are full of random crap that keeps determining the winner out of your control. In my first few rounds of this Wheel of Fortune rip-off, the bank filled up with 50,000 coins that I subsequently won in a minigame, making it nearly impossible for me to lose. This wasn’t due to any sort of skill on my part; it was dumb luck. My reward? Having to sit through 10 futile rounds of other players spinning the wheel, unlikely to ever catch up.
If that isn’t enough to put you to sleep, why not try one of the several games based around the thrilling activity of matching Miis who are wearing the same color? There’s even Mii Bingo. Yes, Mii Bingo. That should give you a good sense of the brain-dead crowd this game is targeting.
I can already hear complaints rolling in about how I’m not part of Wii Party’s intended audience, but I don’t think that’s true. I love getting friends together to play goofy games like this, but plenty of other Wii releases have done what Wii Party is attempting in better and more interesting ways – even Nintendo’s own WarioWare: Smooth Moves. The only impressive thing about Wii Party is how Nintendo dumbed down and removed the soul from a franchise that was already as stupid and soulless as Mario Party.