So you’re chilling at your place, just you and three of your friends, and one has just told an awkward joke that killed the conversation and has opened the gates for the terrible party killer “The Awkward Silence.”  What do you do?  Well, generally you wait for someone else to suggest something so the tension breaks BUT, lets say for the sake of argument… and convenience… someone says “Lets play a board game!”  You could rifle through your old favorites, Monopoly, Trouble, Sorry, Candyland, even Chutes and Ladders, or you can boot up your Wii and pop in Mario Party 8, because it’s got all that and more.

Yep, the party game of party games returns to the Wii, continuing the Wii’s tradition of hit titles with fun assortments of Mini-Games, and this time its better than ever, and by better than ever I mean its almost exactly the same as Mario Party 7, but with motion controls.  Mario Party was never really known for its varying gameplay.  Other than a few arbitrary rules thrown into the mix, the core game has always remained the same: hit a die, move some spaces, play a mini game, gets some coins, buy some stars, and screw over your friends.  Traditionally, you would run as fast as you can all over the board to reach a “star space”, at which point you would exchange 20 coins for a star.  However, in some of the later releases, that has changed, with Mario Party 7 including boards that include: searching for a star in an unknown location, running a single track to the end, buying and selling property to gain and lose stars, and stealing stars from your opponents.  In Mario Party 8, surprise surprise, the boards are centered around  searching for a star in an unknown location, running a single track to the end, buying and selling property to gain and lose stars, and stealing stars from your opponents.  But I am getting ahead of myself.