Coupla Wii micro-reviews

[prog]

Mario Party 8 - After owning it for a few weeks, I must revise my earlier opinion and recommend this title, especially if you've got friends or family to play it with. The first couple of boards are boring - one, with a repetitive and unskippable animation, is especially painful - but the later ones are quite clever, and after you play through them once in single-player you can just stick to them in multiplayer.

Big disappointment in how irritating Daisy is, though. She's generally my favorite character to play in Mario games, but she sounds and acts like an annoying 4-year-old in this one.

Mario Strikers Charged - No sir, I don't like it. Playing it makes me feel like a transported caveman, confused and angry and not understanding most of what I see, whether I'm alone or with a friend. After many plays, it's still not clear to me why various things happen. This is not good.

Playing online against people who know what they're doing is even worse; I'm reminded of trying to play Hearts online, except that this would be a Hearts variant where everyone plays at once, and the cards sometimes explode. (But never on the person schooling you.) (Except that "schooling" doesn't really work because I honestly have no idea how they're doing that...)

And again, Nintendo doesn't know how to do online play right. The actual act of playing goes OK . and I like the presence of a worldwide daily leaderboard, but the UI elsewise is crap. You can see your own ranking, but you can't get meaningful context. And unless I missed something, there are no ELO-style ratings, even though they'd be entirely appropriate. Boo.

Bah. Probably I will ebay it.

Comments

mario party

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

I was disappointed by Mario Party 8, honestly - it seems really rushed compared to the GameCube ones, which seems odd since it's the same company and almost the same technology! Mario Party 6 is BY FAR the best of the series. They got a really nice consistent theme with the changing of Day and Night that ties all the levels together, the visuals are spot-on right down to the design of the menus and in-game display elements and the pace of the game is the best so far.

Who wins and loses is still completely arbitrary, of course. :)

Re: mario party

[prog.livejournal.com]

It's the only Mario Party I have played so I dun know any better.

Re: mario party

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

If you like this one then you should like 6 even more! We only stopped playing it because we burnt out on all the mini games.

Re: mario party

[prog.livejournal.com]

This would also require getting Game Cube shizzle, controllers and cards n such. Maybe I should anyway so's I can play mrmorse's vast library of GC stuff.

Re: mario party

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is a crying shame they didn't at least build in some sort of GC save emulation into the main memory of the Wii. And I really don't know why the Wii "classic controller" doesn't work as a gamecube controller. At least GC controllers are pretty cheap.