GENRE
	Party
	DEVELOPER
	Hudson Soft
	PUBLISHER
	Nintendo
	NUMBER OF PLAYERS
	1-4
	WI-FI ENHANCED
	No
	DS COMPATIBLE
	No
	BUY NOW AT

It’s not uncommon for Nintendo to take a poison mushroom for its rehashing of long-running franchises. Nintendo once explained that certain consumers expect certain games to continue, especially those with Mario characters, and especially Mario Party. The series will soon go handheld on DS, but it makes a successful 8th stop on Wii.

visuals

Party games are not about bloom lighting and polygons. Play this with your parents and they will think it looks great, but Mario Party 8 is decidedly GameCubey. The newer character models we’ve seen from Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros. Brawl are not used here. Instead, Mario and company look like they have for years. Aside from an occasionally bad case of the jaggies, that’s well and good, but it would have been a nice treat to get an early look at the new models. Still, a few less used characters show up in this one, like Dry Bones and a Hammer Bros.

The minigames remain clear and recognizable without sacrificing style and color. Visually, most give a somewhat new spin, even on familiar games. Characters add a little flare with some special item animations, and every stage is full of bustle and life. The viewpoint is a little closer to the action than years past, with some levels having a near 3rd-person vantage. The boards may have familiar settings – a Donkey Kong jungle, a Boo haunted house – but they look fresh enough and at times are quite pretty. Besides, the boards do well to make this series work better than it has in a long time.

audio

Never spectacular, but never out of place, the soundtrack keeps pace with the ups and downs of the action. Characters do not speak, so there is plenty of reading to do for the first few times through, but host gibberish and Mariospeak is as silly as ever (I swear Daisy says “tomato” after she rolls). The most interesting usage of the stereo speakers is the character taunts, which add a little more humor to the lighthearted circus-themed fare.

gameplay

In the most basic sense, if you’ve crashed one Mario Party you’ve crashed them all. Up to four players take turns moving on a game board, which is followed by a minigame. Winning minigames wins coins, which are needed in some fashion to purchase stars. The player with the most stars at the end of a set number of turns wins. You are then very awkwardly dubbed the superstar and do it all over again.

The key to most Mario Parties is the quality of the minigames. More than 100 populate Mario Party 8, and it’s no surprise that most use the Wii remote’s motion and pointing functions to add a little newness to the title. Games like Swing Kings Baseball are quite similar to some past Mario Party minis, but the remote adds that level of interactivity. Mosh-Pit Playroom shows off the colorful visual style and tilt happy newcomers like In the Nick of Time give off that "hey that was fun" vibe. While a few are still left solely to luck, the developers did a good job making skill the required element in the vast majority of the games. Unlike some earlier games in the series, however, Mario Party 8 usually chooses minigames you haven’t yet played, an appreciated addition.

The real surprise, however, is how the boards manage to steal the show from the fancy motion games. Most of the game boards in the GameCube titles were little more than cosmetic changes over a generic set of spaces. In Mario Party 8, the boards finally add strategic variety to keep things exciting. In King Boo’s Haunted Hideaway, the path to the star is hidden, and the path changes each time a star is found. The Shy Guy's Perplex Express, the path loops through train cars that can be moved and shuffled to change the balance at any moment. The best may be Koopa’s Tycoon Town. In a Monopoly-Mario Party combo, players invest coins in hotels. The more total coins put into a hotel, the more stars that hotel is worth. The player with largest investment gets the stars, but they can change hands as players add more and more coins to the building.

For once, every session of Mario Party is not a carbon copy of one another. It’s understandable that after 10 or so games in the series the minigames begin to look a little common each year, so rather than depend on the Wii remote, Hudson expands the series in a better way.

multiplayer

Mario Party 8, like every party game, is meant for groups. The main game still requires four players, which means computer controlled characters will fill any human vacancies. Unfortunately, even at the toughest difficulty, the computer cannot keep up with even an average player. It’s still fun with three or even two people, but if you only play games in a dark basement alone and secluded, find a real party before you play this one.

overall

Mario Party may never be a fun single player game, but it was really never intended to be and it shouldn't be discredited for it. What Mario Party 8 tries to do it does, with fun Wii-centric minigames for four suddenly diverse boards. It may be subtle, but they add a spritz of freshness to what many feel is a stale series, and is reason enough to purchase Mario Party 8, especially for those holding out for something new in the franchise.

8.0/10