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By Keith B (5th Sep 2007)

When the first installment of the Mario Party series appeared for the N64 (a looong time ago!), it seemed at first that Nintendo was simply looking for yet another way to capitalize on the successful cast of characters from their older games. But right away, it transpired that wasn’t all that was happening. As it turned out, the kind of multi-player party game that Mario Party represented was actually new, innovative, and all around a pretty awesome thing. Now that the first Wii release of the series has swung around, let’s see if the party’s still as hot and bumpin’ as it used to be.

Well, with regard to innovation, it should be said right away that this is one category that Mario Party 8 does not excel in. Which shouldn’t surprise us �" after all, the game is simply the continuation of the same old successful concept on a new console. But that’s not a bad thing. This newest installment is as much fun as all its predecessors, and it will keep you busy for many many hours (at least if you have enough friends to play with). If you want something brandnew, something that the world hasn’t seen before, keep on looking. If, however, you want to rely on a well tried and excellently designed game concept, you’ll feel right at home with this virtual board game, on which you can prance around with your good old pals Mario, Bowser, and the whole rest of the gang.

As in each installment of the series, Mario Party 8 is basically made up of an array of boardgame-type scenarios, and the ultimate goal in each is to pile up as many coins and stars as you can. The winner takes it all. There are different ways to get a hold of the valuable loot. Coins can be found along the way, they can be awarded in mini-games, or they can be stolen from your opponents. The stars, in turn, can be bought using the collected coins, they can be gambled for, or snatched from mini-game bosses encountered at the end of individual game rounds. But it’s all a little harder than it sounds. First of all, it’s not just about skill: If you’re out of luck in this game, you’ll get nowhere. You can be as dexterous as you could ever hope to be, and outsmart your friends all you want - if the lucky dice-throwing fairy smiles on your opponents rather than on you, you might still end up being the sore loser in the end.

Surprisingly, this isn’t so frustrating at all, and the luck-factor makes for a great part of the appeal of this game. Just like the game design and the soundscheme, the rules and the algorhythms according to which they play out are a bit crazy �" so you can play Mario Party 8 again and again without being able to reliably predict an outcome.

Once you and up to three of your friends have picked one of the 14 popular characters from the Mario universe the fun begins. Roll that dice, and begin making progress through the different scenarios. Some of them will be familiar terrain to veteran players of Mario Party, while others are entirely new, and some of them you’ll have seen before in other Nintendo games. Hence we have a sunny beach to play on, a system of creepy caves, and lots of other engaging places. Each board features an elaborate (if sometimes short) minigame waiting to be played at the end. In these, like in the earlier games, you can team up with your fellow players, fight against everyone, or pair up with one of them for a show-off with the other pair. Altogether, Mario Party 8 has around 70 minigames to offer (by my count), plus the different scenarios and all the things that can be done there. So there’s lots to do!

The mini-games are short and very, very simple. Just about each everyday activity that you can think of will appear in some way or another in this game. In a way, you could say that the Mario Party series simply picks up where Wario Ware left off: There’s a stronger focus on the friendplay aspect here, and the lame pseudo-narratives we know from Wario Ware are replaced by the more complex and more interesting contest-setup. Unfortunately, some of the activities will appear as all too familiar. Well, it seems that even the Wii’s great input system offers only so many ways of simulating the hacking, punching, sawing, slapping, steering, picking, pulling and slapping that we love about these games.

One of the real innovations in Mario Party 8 is that you can temporarily upgrade your character by snacking on little pieces of different-colored candy that become available along the way. Some of these will give you special abilities, others let you jump aheada few fields, steal coins, and so forth. When you find the bonbons, you can decide to use them right away, or to hoard them for later use. Altogether, there are so many ways of getting around in Mario Party 8 that you really end up being rewarded with a pretty deep gaming experience. Some of the things here are harder to figure out than they seem, and, accordingly, also more fun.

The controls, overall, are a breeze. Wiimote and Nunchuk respond to your input as precisely as ever you could wish them to, and the developers at Hudson did an excellent job designing a control scheme that is sometimes realistic, sometimes silly, but always highly enjoyable. The same goes for the graphics and the sound scheme. Since there’s obviously no need for hyper-realistic NextGen environments in a virtual board game, the designers focused on perfecting the nutty and absurd look we’re used to from the Super Mario franchise: Colors are intense and crazy, and the coherence of the individually themed areas is very tight and engaging. We’d have liked to see the textures rendered a bit better, and overall this looks (yet again!) like a Gamecube release from the early 2000s, but the game is overall designed so well that the few flaws matter very little. An annoying aspect is the lack of a 16:9 mode �" what did we buy that huge flatscreen for, darnit!

At least the people at Hudson tried to make up for this with the funny soundtrack. It’s a party game, and it comes with a party soundtrack, that will appeal to kids as much as to adult players. You won’t fall in love with it, but you won’t mind it either �" and isn’t that the ideal party soundtrack? Clearly, the developers took note of the fact that there is a good chance you’ll have music running in the room, friends chatting, and bottle caps popping while you’re playing this…

As a final note, we’d like to point out an inherent paradox in this game series: On the one hand, it is a party game, so the assumption is, obviously, that you won’t play it by yourself (as noted before, it’s dead boring when you play against the dumb AI characters). On the other hand, the only way for friends to join in is to physically be present with their input devices. Why on earth isn’t Nintendo beginning to support the implementation of online Wii gaming? A game such as Mario Party 8 would have been a perfect candidate for such an endeavor, since it would be easy on the resources and data transfer speeds. Well, one day, one hopes! Until then, make sure you have a bunch of buddies to come over. This game is big enough for many, many hours of good clean board-gaming fun. As a matter of fact, I’d say it’s the perfect game for all those Mario fans out there who need something to that they can play absent-mindedly while they dream of the release-date for the famed Super Mario Galaxy…