Mario Party 8 on Nintendo Wii: The Party is Over

Nintendo has been taking heat lately for their new focus of releasing minigame collections. Although the games (Brain Age, Mario Party and Wario Ware) sell well, they are generally swayed towards the casual gamers.

To be straightforward, however, Brain Age and Wario Ware are critically acclaimed mini-game series. However, Mario Party, the series that started the mini-game craze, has been going downhill.

Being the first game in the series to take advantage of the Nintendo Wii's motion-sensing capabilities, the eighth installment of Mario Party hopes to rejuvenate the free falling series. In the end, however, the Nintendo Wii only added more problems to an already problematic series.

Graphics
For a Nintendo Wii game, Mario Party 8's graphics are unimpressive; heck for a Gamecube game, the graphics are unimpressive. The saving grace for the bland graphics is that the game retained the Mario-style we all know and loved.

Sound
Not much could be say in the sound department. The music forgettable and Mario Party 8 has no voice-acting except for noises and phrases here and there. Some of the playable characters' death cries were funny, however.

Gameplay
Let's start with the good parts: Mario Party 8 is a fun multiplayer game. Playing with friends helps secrete some of the game's many problems. In addition, each of the party maps is unique and offers different gameplay experiences. Finally, some of the minigames let you use you Miis instead of the Mario characters.

Other than those few high points, Mario Party 8 is another letdown in a quality-fading series. A new system in the Nintendo Wii could have save the series but, as it turns out, it only gave Mario Party 8 bad controls. Many minigames were made needlessly difficult because motion-sensing was used to maneuver instead of allowing the use of the analog stick or directional pad.