“Super Mario Multiverse” – Mario Party 8 (Wii) by the Regional Exclusive Mage

It’s time to party! Let’s party! Hang out with yourself and have a crazy party!

Hey you, let’s party! Have a killer party and paaaartaaaay!

– Andrew W.K.

Let’s talk about Party games: specifically, the genre of board-games that are intended to be played on your video-game console. These have been around for quite some time; in fact, I clearly remember my parents playing games such as Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit on their Amstrad CPC back when I was young.

The Mario Party games, premiering on the Nintendo 64, took this idea to the next level. It gave the players a board, had them roll dice for movement, and presented them with a series of mini games along the way. It was quite a novel concept at the time and, truth be told, my 13-year old self could not have been any less interested.

I just didn’t get the appeal… this was the age of game changing N64 titles such as Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye and Hybrid Heaven! I certainly wasn’t interested in a board-game, even if it was hosted by Nintendo’s famous characters and sprinkled with a healthy amount of that trademark Nintendo polish that turns games into works of art!

Coupled with the advent of Sony’s PlayStation, my focus was certainly elsewhere at that time. Final Fantasy and Resident Evil were well and truly on my radar (Wait… I am talking about the late 90s here, right?) and paying full-price for what was essentially a digital game of snakes-and-ladders seemed utterly ludicrous to me.

I was eventually converted to the Party Game fan-club, but it wasn’t until the sixth generation of consoles rolled around. Searching for co-op and competitive games to play with my family, the owner of a local game shop pointed me in the direction of one specific PlayStation 2 title that would convince me of the format.

When all’s said and done, my love for Party games came from a very unlikely source…

Shrek.

The PlayStation 2 game Shrek Super Party became a mainstay during game nights at my house. All my friends and family would be hooked on the simple mini games, would come to learn the entire layout of the (single) board and would recite quotes from it off by heart. “Off to the Evil Bog!”

Of course, the real beauty of Shrek Super Party was that it was so simple to break. In fact, once we discovered it was harder to lose than it was to win, my brother and I invented a new spin on the game which we dubbed ‘Shrek: 2005 Rules’! In this game, you would purposefully aim to have the lowest score by the end of the game. This is where it got tactical!

You had to win mini games in order to win swaps. You would then swap bugs with opponents to change their “hand”, so to speak. In the regular game, you’d want three or four of a kind to gain points. In ‘Shrek: 2005 Rules’ you’d want to give opponents good hands and screw yourself over. The first to 200 points lost and the player with the lowest score at this time won!

Suffice it to say, Shrek taught me an awful lot about Party games, how they work and how to break them. So, when we got around to trying other similar games, other PS2 titles such as Muppets Party Cruise and Jumanji sort of scratched the itch but were missing something essential… and no, I don’t mean playable Thelonious.

It was then that I really discovered the Mario Party games. The fourth and fifth entries were the perfect entry-point into the series after Shrek had provided months upon months of suitable warm-up. After that, I started building up a library of games in this genre and, most importantly, stockpiling new controllers for those times after my friends and I started getting a little too competitive.

Mario Party 6 and Mario Party 7 introduced another new feature: the microphone! Here we had an extra device that allowed a new way of interacting with the range of mini games on offer. It was clever and made for some innovative twists on classic challenges.

It wasn’t perfect: I do remember one instance where one of my friends cockily gave a correct answer to a mini game that was basically ‘Name the Fruit’ but in an amusing voice. “Appllllllle” he exclaimed, only to be told: “Incorrect. The correct answer is ‘Apple’. You lose.” Oh, how we laughed.

When Mario Party 8 was announced for the Wii, we were all delighted! Here was even fresher technology for even more unique and entertaining mini games… what could possibly go wrong? Not much, really. Well… a few things, but let’s start at the beginning.

The Nintendo Wii itself was seemingly purpose-built for the joy of participation. After all, what other game got entire families up out of their seats on Christmas morning quite like Wii Sports? I still, to this day, think that a dedicated ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ game would have worked wonderfully on the Wii, with each player having full control of their character with their own Wii Remote.

But to take that format and apply it to Mario Party seemed like a logical step but also a stroke of genius. Each player grabs their Wii Remote for some good old-fashioned Mario Magic! Only… the game didn’t turn up on shop shelves on the day it was supposed to. Where had it gone? The shop owner I mentioned earlier explained the situation to me:

“There’s been a product recall” he shrugged, “Apparently there’s a word used in the game’s text that’s mega-offensive and Nintendo have had to grab all the discs back.” So many questions buzzed around my mind. How on earth did family-friendly Nintendo let this slip through the net? How long would the delay take? What was the offending word?

To address the latter question first, I’m not going to write it here for fear of causing upset on a family-friendly site. However, if anyone is interested it’s a simple Google search away. Go on, have a look now if you really want to. I’ll be right here.

Back? Alrighty.

The word in question slipped past Nintendo’s eagle-eyed localisation teams simply because it’s not an outright swear-word. In fact, as far as I’m aware it’s not a particularly bad word in most other regions. Here in the UK, however, it has seriously offensive and derogatory connotations and should not be used at all.

Even more interestingly, despite Mario Party 8 grabbing gaming headlines over here by being quickly pulled from the shelves, it was not the only game to suffer from the use (or should I say ‘accidental misuse’) of this word. Ubisoft’s Mind Quiz on the Nintendo DS also included it as a player ranking if they did badly on a round of questions.

To be fair to it, at least Mario Party 8 only used the word to describe a train rather than outright abuse the player in the way Mind Quiz could have. Regardless, the word itself should never be used on these shores and I believe the correct move was made in recalling both titles to reprint with a safer version.

When listing videogames that have been effectively banned from sale in some form or other, it feels odd to include a Mario Party game alongside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Manhunt 2… but there you go!

I suppose only one question remains: was the game worth the wait? Well, when the game eventually did release a month later than was originally planned, my family and I played very little else through most of the summer of 2007. It was an absolute triumph! In fact, I’d go as far as saying that Mario Party 8 is up there with my favourites in the series, if not the genre! It’s even better than Shrek’s!

The roster of characters had grown to include playable characters such as Blooper and Hammer Bro, as well as being able to use your own Mii. The story mode was substantial and even offered the reward of unlocking an extra board for use in multiplayer games if Bowser is defeated by the end, bringing the total of game boards on offer to six. Five more than Shrek could handle!

The boards themselves were fantastic and each offered a fresh twist on the tried and tested formula. King Boo’s Haunted Hideaway is a personal favourite, and Koopa’s Tycoon Town twisted the entire formula into something more akin to Monopoly or Boom Street. (Incidentally, if you haven’t played Boom Street – aka Fortune Street – on the Wii, trust me: find a copy and play it as soon as you can!)

Then there are the mini-games. Using the Wii Remote freed up a lot of the gameplay from being restricted to simple button-mashing games such as controller-killers such as ‘Domination’ in the Gamecube’s Mario Party 4. Here were activities such as ‘Swing Kings’ where you had to swing the Remote in time to hit a baseball; or Speedy Graffiti where you paint shapes in the air in front of you.

Everything just came together in Mario Party 8 so perfectly that it’s hard not to recommend it to anyone looking for a fun and competitive couch multiplayer game. In fact, I would still choose a round or two on this title over playing subsequent entries in the series. It’s one of the main reasons the family Wii is still set up in our living room, after all.

Wahoo! You are a Super Reader! But the adventure doesn’t stop here… There’s more of this project in another castle! This article is just one level in an entire Super Mario Multiverse, a galactic collaboration between writers around the world sharing a bit of our hearts and memories about our favorite Mario games. Visit the Center of the Multiverse to see more: