Wii Party: Sean’s Impressions
I’ve never been a huge fan of the Mario Party series so I was happy to discover that while Wii Party uses some of the same ideas, it has a whole lot of new ones too. While I didn’t play these modes (the airstream was too small) there are at least two minigames where you hide Wiimotes around your house or living room and then have your party guests hunt for them, depending on the noises they’re making.
Other modes include a sound-identification round where the TV displays a specific animal and players have to dive for the single Wiimote out of four making the correct sound. Supposedly there’s also a pass-the-Wiimote game called “bomb” where each player must press button combos and hand the controller off to the next person, until someone messes up, sets off the bomb and the Wiimote “explodes.”
Chad and I played a grab-bag of minigames, where we were given the set task of balancing a boat with increasingly disproportionate Miis. In between Mii placing we were given various minigames, some co-op, others competitive, and depending how we did in the minigame, we were given an easier or harder time at balancing the boat.
There was a good variety of fun, simple games, including one where Chad and I had to build robots by picking same-colored parts off two assembly lines, and another where we had to step on switches to cooperatively navigate a maze. Color me surprised that I’m actually looking forward to another minigame collection—apparently Nintendo knows that creativity and quantity are the only ways to sell party games to the largely jaded and saturated Wii market at this point.
