Mario Party 8 for Wii

[Guaranos]

This is my first delve into the Mario Party series, and man am I underwhelmed.  I'm not seeing how this could possibly be any fun at a party.  In order to unlock any of the mini-games, you have to play the tedious board game until your eyes bug out, or in my fiancee's case, you quit and fall asleep. 

I love my Wii, and have enjoyed all of my other game purchases for it, but this game is easily the most disappointing one I've purchased for any console in a long time.  I saw the mediocre reviews ahead of time, but the vast majority of them cited the fact that it wasn't all that much different from the previous games as the main reason for the low score.  I figured I could deal with that, since I had never tried any of the previous ones, but if this is how the older games were, I can't understand how it got to be a popular franchise.

Were the other games in the series like this?  If so, what do you have to do to squeeze some fun out of this game?  So far I'm feeling like I just wasted $50. 

[Guaranos]

Never mind.  I just saw sirwoogie's thread about the same thing.  I guess I did throw my $50 out the window.

[GlennM]

Well, I happen to really enjoy Mario Party 8, and yes, while you have to play the Battle mode to unlock some stuff, I quite enjoyed it.

So I suppose it depends on what you like in games.  Anyways, it is always a hoot when another couple is over and we play guys vs girls and such.

[pointdablame]

There are save games online that you can download to unlock all the games.

That said, I've never been a fan of the Mario Party games.  My sister and a few of my friends love em, but I always found them to be extremely boring.

[Samstag]

It's more a family game than a party game.  It's really no good for gamers, but where it shines (a little) is when you add some non-gamers or children.  There's enough randomness that everyone has a chance to win.

[NightGod]

I've been thinking about picking this up for my summer party at the end of this month, since there will be a ton of kids there and I've yet to find kids between 8 and 12 who don't love the hell out of the series (interestingly enough, the MP series take forever to drop in price, even used at places like Gamestop-seems the things just DON'T get sold back).

The only thing I'm really curious about is if it does a good job of taking advantage of the Wii controller? Since the series otherwise seems roughly the same across the titles, just wondering if I should drop the extra $20 or so to pick up a new 8, or should I save the cash and buy a used 5 or 6. Use of the unique control scheme of the Wii is really the deciding factor.

[GlennM]

I think it does, the games are pretty basic and easy to pick up, but truthfully, if the players are newer to the series, I would say an old one would be easier to pick up for the kids.  Sometimes the games are hard to understand by just reading the screen, and you have to select multiple pages to read the rules and view the controls, which is kinda clumsy.

[NightGod]

Nah, I'm not worried about them figuring out the games-in typical kid fashion, they pick that stuff up by osmosis. As long as it uses the Wii controller, I'll definitely be going with MP8 for my party.

[Guaranos]

Some of the controls are pretty weak.  For example, the bowling one is weird, and completely different from Wii Sports.

Anyway, I ended up downloading a saved game file that has everything unlocked.  That seems to make it a bit better, since now I can play something other than the stupid board game.  I still much prefer the minigames from WarioWare.  Mario Party 8 still ranks dead last in my game collection, slightly behind Warriors of Might and Magic for the PS2.