playhooky's Full Review: Mario Party 8 for Nintendo Wii
Here's a game little kids seem to love but makes adults suddenly need to go work on their taxes. Probably because its mostly based on chance instead of any strategy like those early childhood games like Sorry! and Trouble.
How The Game Works
This game works sort of like a board game mixed with a lot of cartoon action. You roll the dice by punching a dice box and then your character moves along and lands on various squares the might jump you forward or backwards or give you the chance to buy special candies that can do things to other players. In our test group of two nine year olds (1 boy/1 girl) and two adults, the little girl seemed to like the idea of buying things.
After each player has a turn then its time for a mini-game. These mini-games can be fun especially if you are new to the Wii experience but some are kind of dumb. Like for example the first time you get to shake a soda can as fast as you can to make it explode its a lot of fun. The second time its kind of boring.
The good thing about the mini-games is that there are a lot of them. 70 or so with a lot of variety so different players will find various games that suit them. One fun one we had in our game was a 3 against 1 situation where the other players tried to shoot me off a platform while I tried to reach the top. It was fun although it only lasted about 20 seconds.
At the end of the number of turns you select (we selected 15 turns each and with four people the game lasted two hours!) its time for awards. The game give awards for things like landing on the most bad spaces, eating the most candy etc before bestowing the grand prize winner. Unfortunately the person in our group who can in dead last (the nine year old girl who brought the game over for us to try out), didn't even get any of these booby prizes which I would have thought was the point of them i.e. to make everyone a winner.
Annoying
One of the most annoying things for any adult in the new high tech world is realising that the kids know more about these things than you do. Its even more annoying when the kids have already played this game a few times and tell you what to do - when to buy candy and when to go, and skip through all of the instructions before you can figure out what's going on.
And this game seem to have a lot of dialog boxes to read! There seems to be endless dialog boxes to read and each mini game requires one to read the rules and control instructions. Unfortunately the younger kids this game is aimed at probably will need an adult around to read the dialog or you can have an annoying nine year old girl (a neighbor) read you all the words.
Overall
This is a game best played with friends although you need to set aside a lot of time to play it. The mini games are fun and there are a lot of them unfortunately the board game part doesn't have any strategy to it. Its basically left to chance so if you are in the mind set of chance games like Sorry! and Trouble instead of games that require you to think strategically like Chess or Blokus then you'll probably think this game is rather lightweight.
The world s most popular party video game franchise is getting a lot crazier in Mario Party 8 for the Wii. Whether you re shaking up cola cans or lass...More at Buy.com
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