Mario Party 8

 

    A bright sunny day shines upon the Mushroom Kingdom, blimps and hot air balloons adorning the skyline as the Mario Party 8 logo gets carried along by a pair of Paragoombas. What they fly over is the Star Carnival, circus tents everywhere as balloons fly up, everything with oddly realistic textures applied to it considering that it's a Mario game. No time to dwell on that, though, because moments later, a creature that looks like a cross between Caine from The Amazing Digital Circus and the background characters in Monkeybone flies right up to the screen and welcomes you to the Star Carnival. He and his sentient hat invite you to try any of the modes and have fun, flying away as the odd mix of ideas in Mario Party 8 gets set in stone.
    Mario Party 8 was the last of what's deemed the original run of Mario Party games, what with the first eight entries being developed by Hudson Soft. It's not one of the most glamorous Nintendo series by any means, but in terms of multiplayer games, they're pretty unmatched in both their ease of accessibility and how insane they can be with how unfair they are. They're the perfect games to get out at where else but a party, watching as your friends slowly go from getting chip crumbs all over your couch to fiercely screaming mad about how Yoshi got three stars in a row. While they're all surprisingly consistent in quality considering they were released year after year, 8 seems to be one of the more divisive entries, both at the time it released and now, for specific ways it tried to change up the formula, if to a lesser extreme than later games.
    The first and most obvious difference is that it's played with motion controls; it's a minigame collection on the Wii, it was bound to be this way. Pretty much every minigame now has an extra page of rules showing how to control it, and pretty much any use of the Wii Remote you can think of is represented here. In a game with seventy-three minigames, whether or not those controls are intuitive is always on a case-by-case basis, but I don't really mind that here. Mario Party has always dealt with randomness to an extent, whether it be the boards deciding to send players' progress back on a whim or a minigame that you just don't understand. Adding in motion controls levels the playing field even further, as even if someone gets really good at one specific control style, they won't necessarily be good at the rest of them. Plus, even if you do hate the motion controls, or wanna play the game online through emulation and netplay, there's a mod that lets you use GameCube controllers if you really need to.
    The second change is that every board is designed rather differently compared to previous Mario Party entries. While previous Mario Party boards had board-specific gimmicks, they still kept the general layout structure; 8 takes it much further and gives each board a completely different structure and a different method of obtaining stars, and the end result is a mixed bag. The worst boards are easily the ones that are just straight lines to the finish, Goomba's Booty Boardwalk and Shy Guy's Perplex Express, with the latter being only slightly better due to the unique train setting and the fact the train cars can switch places. Bowser's Warped Orbit, the lone unlockable board, isn't much better; it's entirely circular and the only way to acquire stars is by stealing others' stars, and it results in very lopsided games where one person leads for the whole thing. The other boards, however, are far more replayable and fun, with King Boo's Haunted Hideaway having you find the stars in a randomized, secret layout each time, and DK's Treetop Jungle being a standard Mario Party romp through and through.
    I haven't even gotten to the best board yet, which is so noteworthy that I'm dedicating an entire paragraph to it. Koopa's Tycoon Town is far and away the most in-depth and unique board in the game, and might take the crown as the greatest Mario Party board ever made. The gist of it is that it's Mario Party crossed with Monopoly, as you invest coins into hotels that reward you with stars. Certain amounts of coins will upgrade a hotel to give you more stars, but who the stars go to depends on how many coins you invest into it, and that means others can steal hotels away from you, gaining more stars than you ever had. It injects a new level of strategy into the game that wasn't there before, while still retaining the luck element core to the series, and it results in games where the entire dynamic of who's winning and who's losing can change in an instant.
    While certainly more flawed than some of the previous entries, Mario Party 8 still provides a very high-quality party game option even among the seemingly endless number of party games released for the console. It's quite bizarre than Hudson Soft didn't see the need to follow up on it considering they used to produce the games yearly and would probably sell like crazy on the Wii if they kept at it, though the lackluster half of the boards indicate to me that perhaps they were starting to tire of the series by this point. Indeed, the series went on a lengthy hiatus, after which it would be picked up by Nintendo subsidiary NDcube, where it would flounder for a decade before getting back on track late in the Switch's life. This game is still a good send-off for the classic era of the series, and if you manage to grab some friends willing to accept some of this entry's quirks, it can still provide a fantastic night of people yelling expletives because Peach stole everyone's coins again.

Carnival Games

 

    Chances are, you've heard the term “shovelware” before. It's a catch-all term to describe low-budget games that are quickly made and, for lack of a better word, shoveled out to store shelves just as fast to make a quick buck. They're usually released at a budget price and made to appeal to people that aren't particularly into gaming, taking the form of licensed games, mini-game collections, cash-ins on trends, and so on. Understandably, with the Wii's guaranteed audience being those outside the normal gaming crowd, it got hit with a flood of these types of games, and a lot of people wrote off the console entirely because of it. However, while a fair few of these games were pretty worthless, some were pretty unfairly written off even though they were by no means all that good, like Carnival Games.
    The game is exactly what it says it is, a collection of a bit over twenty games that are based on the kind of thing you'd see at a sketchy traveling carnival. It's split up into five zones, each with their own selection of mini-games to play, and they're about what you'd expect based on the premise. Everything from skee-ball, a dunk tank, strength testing, throwing darts at balloons, knocking down milk bottles; a lot of the most popular types of games make an appearance. The majority of them can be played in either single player or multiplayer, with the single player mode awarding you tickets and prizes for completing each game, which can be used to eventually unlock special variants of games and clothing pieces for your avatar.
    The thing with all these games is that, for at lot of them, the controls can kinda suck. They're responsive enough, but each game has its own bizarre quirk with how exactly it controls. Some of the throwing mini-games are timing-based, but whether or not the aiming reticle will move in a simple motion or swing around randomly is completely up in the air with each game. Sometimes you're able to lock onto a target, but sometimes you're not, turning the balloon popping and football passing games into a lot of hand flailing. Also, physics are not always as they seem, as tossing a coin or a ring can turn into one big guessing game on where they'll slide or bounce to. Most of these result in the process of winning a game coming down to sheer luck, hoping that the planets suddenly align and everything works out in your favor.
    However, I think to some extent, that's kind of the point? If you have ever been to a carnival before, you'd know many of those games are rigged so they're almost never in your favor, leading you to get into that “just one more try” mentality, hoping luck is on your side. In that sense, Carnival Games emulates that pretty much perfectly. A lot of the games, simplistic and unfair as they are, are addicting to replay because you wanna beat the odds. There's no doubt at least some of it is intentional, as for example, the game where you shoot out a paper star with a BB gun has simulated recoil on it to make it way harder. It doesn't excuse every control decision, strength testing requiring swirling your wrist around before swinging the hammer might be a guaranteed way to get carpal tunnel syndrome, but it puts a lot of the game into context.
    Helping the game is that, even though it's a low-budget title, it's got a strange bespoke charm to it that really helps sell the traveling carnival feel. The characters all have this somewhat uncanny quality, looking as though they were pulled right from a vintage circus poster, and the games themselves are made to look as though they've become quite run-down and worn. The announcer has an appropriately old-timey flair to the way he introduces the games, and while you're playing the games, other carnies will heckle you and egg you on to try and do better. It's not amazing by any means, as the music is pretty generic and some sound effects feel like they're missing, but again, it works for what the game sets out to do.
    Carnival Games isn't that great, most wouldn't even dare call it good, but I find its ingenuity with its presentation and the way it works with its limitations to be at least a bit admirable. It managed to invoke a lot of nostalgia in me, both for my own visits to actual carnivals, and for these kinds of fun if mediocre games in general. This is the kind of game that thrived on rentals, bringing it home for the weekend and having a decent time before returning it and not giving it much thought afterwards. In that sense, it truly mimics a day trip to a carnival, and I can't fault it for that. Now as for how it sold over a million copies, I don't think even a rigorous scientific study would explain how that happened.

Wii Zapper + Link's Crossbow Training

 

    So I've been wanting to get around to playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, as it was pretty much the biggest launch title for the Wii that wasn't Wii Sports, but I've always had a bit of trouble getting into Zelda games. It's the same problem I have playing RPGs, where I'll play one for a few hours, really like what I play, forget to play it for a month, and then try to jump back in wondering what the heck I was doing before never playing it again. As such, I probably won't be reviewing Twilight Princess for a while, but then I realized I could play something Zelda-related that I actually could finish and would be funnier to write about. As such, I sat down to play Link's Crossbow Training, and then after roughly an hour passed, I stood up again because I had finished it.
    The game is a pack-in for and made to sell people on the Wii Zapper, the first of many, many, many plastic shells for the Wii Remote that try to make things more immersive. Of course, when thinking of those, most people's minds go to the completely useless ones made by other companies that only changed its aesthetics, so the Wii Remote can kinda look like a tennis racket or golf club or something. Nintendo's own shells were never that impractical, as they always changed the grip of the controller in some way to make things more comfortable for specific games. The whole premise of the Wii Zapper, then, is to make things more ideal for playing shooters of most any kind, but personally, the end result is very, very mixed.
    The initial setup process to get the Wii Remote and Nunchuk correctly attached is unusually complicated, especially compared to other Wii accessories. You have to pretty much dismantle the entire thing to slide them in, unplugging and re-plugging the Nunchuk so that the wire can be stored in the back cover, and it's incredibly temperamental trying to get everything to stay in its proper place. Once everything's attached, actually holding it does kinda feel more gun-like, but also not. The trigger feels appropriate and has a good click to it, but something about the way it's stuck together with the double grips makes it feel downright goofy to hold. Having the Nunchuk attached means you have to move both it and the Wii Remote around to aim and shoot, and while I was able to get used to it, I still say that only having to move the Wii Remote feels better.
    But that's just the accessory itself, it of course also comes with Link's Crossbow Training. It's ostensibly an asset flip of Twilight Princess, taking the environments and enemies from that game and rearranging them all to fit a high score based third person shooter. It's an incredibly bizarre concept; for something like this, I'd imagine something like Metroid or Star Fox would be better suited to gunplay, since placing Zelda into a shooter results in a lot of strange concessions having to be made. Sure, Link shooting things instead of using his sword can be hastily justified with it being a crossbow, but then in some levels, you can gain power-ups like a fully-automatic crossbow, and I'd like to ask the dev team how much sense that makes. Those notes of weirdness combined with the asset re-use makes it feel only one step removed from those fan-made mods where they give Mario a shotgun or something, and it results in the game being unintentionally darkly hilarious, watching the grand mythic hero of Hyrule decide to just shoot down everything in his path.
    The game is all around fine for what it is, even though it's incredibly short. There are nine stages, each with three short sub-stages, and each have you doing something different. Sometimes you break targets, sometimes you defend against enemy hordes, and sometimes you gain full control of Link to kill a certain number of enemies. The game's length means you're mostly just gonna be going for high scores were you to play it for any longer, and fair's fair, the game does have a pretty addictive combo system that rewards methodical and accurate shots. However, the fact that it took me five paragraphs to even talk about the actual gameplay says a lot about its brevity, I feel.
    So far, this is the one pack-in game I've played for the Wii that feels the most like a pack-in. It doesn't really have the infinite replayability of the others I've talked about, although the fact that it came with an accessory makes me wanna treat it a bit kinder than I did other games with a lackluster amount of content, like Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree. However, the quality of that accessory itself is debatable, as even playing the game completely designed around it, I found the Wii Zapper to be okay, but not great. The fact I never knew anyone that actually owned this thing back in the day speaks to how it never really caught on, but compared to the aforementioned completely useless accessories, the Wii Zapper proved to be only semi-useless.

Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree

 

    The Brain Age games were some of the most important titles on the DS during its heyday. Based on the research of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, who appears in the game as a polygonal floating head (truly the form we all aspire to be), it sounds pretty boring in concept, just a collection of minigames focused on math problems, brainteasers, the sort of thing most people would associate with homework. However, something about the way it gamifies those aspects – the pacing of it all, being able to write out answers with the stylus, the fantastic sound design – it somehow coalesces into something both fun and helpful. It won't make you smarter, as some were misled to believe, but it can help keep your brain more active in general. On that note, Big Brain Academy is also a series that exists.
    The whole concept of Big Brain Academy is somewhat perplexing, especially considering the original DS entry came out within months of Brain Age's release. It's based around pretty much the same concept, playing some minigames each day to help train your brain to be sharper, and doesn't seem to do a whole lot different on the surface. It is more colorful and cartoony than Brain Age, granted, and perhaps the intent as some point was to make it more game-like than Brain Age ever was. The thing is, I think doing that without adding much to the idea to make it more different highlights how wafer-thin the entire experience is. The one I played, Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree, ends up feeling like something of an unhappy middle ground between Brain Age and WarioWare.
    Doing one of the tests, you'll find five categories: Analyze, Compute, Identify, Memorize and Visualize. They're all roughly self-explanatory, Memorize has you remembering patterns and faces and such, Visualize has you do some forward-thinking, and so on and so forth. Once you complete all five categories, it gives you a “brain mass” based on how many you completed correctly and the speed at which you completed them. Here's where the crux of the issue comes in: each of these categories has only three minigames each (four in one of the multiplayer modes), all of which can be completed in mere seconds. They all charitably require slightly more thought than your average WarioWare microgame, but they still aren't that much more substantial. It makes it so the amount of stuff to do runs dry very quickly, and the game knows it, since it expects you to practice and play the same minigames over and over again.
    This even extends over to the multiplayer mode, which has three different modes in Mind Sprint, Mental Marathon, and Brain Quiz. Mind Sprint has two players completing a set amount of minigames the quickest, and Mental Marathon requires players complete as many of the minigames as possible without messing up. The one unique mode is Brain Quiz, which presents the minigames in a game show format. Each player take turns flipping over a tile with a minigame category on it, getting assigned a difficulty level when they flip it over and the amount of minigames they complete awarding them points. I guess Brain Quiz could prove to be fun for a bit, if only because it frames the minigames a bit differently, but you'll still end up wondering why you aren't playing other party games with more to offer.
    That's my main issue that I hope I've managed to get across, is that Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree suffers from a lack of content. It doesn't really work as an alternative to Brain Age, because while that game is light on stuff to do also, the puzzles it presents are longer and more involved, it has basis in actual scientific research, and it has a sudoku mode if you're one of those freaks that likes sudoku. In comparison to WarioWare, the comparison is unfavorable as well, as even with Brain Quiz adding one more game to each category, the total number of minigames only comes up to twenty, which puts it about one-tenth of a typical WarioWare game, not counting any of the unlockables. Even considering other Wii games with a small amount of content, like Wii Sports or Wii Play, there's still a fair amount of depth you can find with what's included. While all of it functions as intended, it's just incredibly insubstantial, and you can find more fulfilling options than Wii Degree elsewhere.

Red Steel

 

    The mere concept of motion controls makes imaginations run wild, as pretty much any movement can be turned into a game in some way. Of course, some ideas end up being far more popular than others, and it didn't take long for people to look at the Wii Remote and go “could this be used to shoot things?” Some of the most common ideas tossed around for the controller from the moment it was unveiled were to either use it as a gun or use it as a sword, and with it the desire for more hardcore games on the Wii that would go with those ideas. In comes Ubisoft with Red Steel, a launch title that combined both ideas into a first person shooter, excitedly showing the game's possibilities with unintentionally hilarious trailers in hindsight. Of course, when the game came out, I'm pretty sure that's the moment where most interest in hardcore games for the Wii completely evaporated.
    You play as the rather generically named Scott, a pretty typical silent protagonist that lives in New York and works as a bodyguard for a Japanese woman named Miyu. One day, Miyu is kidnapped by a yakuza gang, and holds her for ransom in exchange for a sword from a rival yakuza gang, the also rather boringly named Katana-giri. The rival gang entrusts Scott with the sword because he shows great prowess with it or something, and he goes off to Tokyo in search of his girlfriend. If this plot is already hinging on the side of uncomfortable, don't worry, it gets worse. Every single Japanese character speaks with exaggerated stereotypical accents, and will randomly insert stock Japanese phrases into otherwise English sentences, like a middle schooler that just discovered what anime is. It's all just grossly dated in a way that isn't even worth dwelling on long; were it a film, it'd be a two dollar DVD at the bottom of a Wal-Mart bargain bin.
    So about the controls, since it's what the game was sold on most. Credit where credit is due, the shooting controls aren't actually that bad, and are mostly standard to how FPS games on the Wii would be controlled going forward. You use the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, using the analog stick on the Nunchuk for movement and the Wii Remote for pointing and shooting. To turn, you point the Wii Remote towards the edge of the screen you want to turn to, and you can perform auxiliary interactions with a simple flick of the Nunchuk. It's a setup that actually works rather well with an FPS, especially since it grants the unique advantage of being able to aim at targets without having to physically turn, like with a mouse and keyboard. To get one thing about the game clear straight away, the game is at its best when you're in smaller rooms with enemies close by, since you can find creative cover spots where you can pick off multiple enemies at the same time; it's in those moments where Red Steel becomes at least decent.
    Unfortunately, the game isn't at its best most of the time. The game as a whole is very drab and ugly-looking, with muddy desaturated textures and unimpressive character animations. Despite this, the framerate is constantly chugging trying to maintain it all, and in larger levels with more enemies, it can sometimes slip into single digits. This makes any more open area an absolute nightmare to deal with, as not only do you have a bunch of enemies all shooting at you, but the framerate makes it impossible to react with the speed necessary to counter it, if the enemies don't decide to just teleport behind you. When the game introduces sniping sections, it can become almost unplayable, as not only do you have to deal with the previous issues, but the enemies are placed way out in the distance, meaning you're often left sitting in one location for minutes on end trying to find the one single speck of pixels that keeps instantly killing you.
    Of course, that's not all that's offered on the one-way train to mediocrity station. Sometimes the game will randomly stop you from using your guns to have a one-on-one sword fight with someone. During these, you swing the Wii Remote to swing your sword, use the analog stick to dodge, and fling the Nunchuk to parry attacks. The game tries to introduce more complexity on top of it with special moves and maneuvers to use against stronger foes, but I found that simply flailing the sword randomly was the most effective strategy a lot of the time. When you defeat an enemy, it brings an element of moral choice to the game, as you can choose to either kill them or spare them, with sparing earning you “respects”, plural noun. From what I can tell, this respect system effects absolutely nothing, so it makes me question what the point of it even was.
    I think you get the point by now that Red Steel is simply a buggy, poorly-aged FPS that was clearly rushed to make it out in time for the Wii's launch. Even if they had had more time to fix up things like the framerate, it would probably still be a pretty sour experience on both a story and gameplay level. On that note, I should bring up the bug that made me stop playing; during one of the many combat encounters, one of the enemies clipped through the floor and remained there indefinitely, long after every other enemy was defeated. Something about this enemy must have been important, because not being able to kill them meant I couldn't progress any further, effectively softlocking my game. I guess he must have been desperate to escape from this game, and honestly, I can't blame him.

Super Paper Mario

 

    Be prepared for anything except an unbiased review, because catch me on one of my more pretentious days, and I'll say that Super Paper Mario is my favorite Mario game of all time. I always hold it up as a rare sparkling diamond of storytelling amidst the dirt of tradition Nintendo usually finds themselves in, and admire how forward-thinking it was in terms of that very storytelling and the various games it would come to influence. It has been my favorite for a while, and I assumed for the longest time that a lot of other people loved or at least liked the game to some degree. That is, of course, until I search for the game online, and see an entire cottage industry of GIFs mocking every single minute aspect of the game in frankly astonishing succinctness. Yeah, turns out, Super Paper Mario is more divisive than I initially thought, and even though I still love the game, I can see why someone would bounce right off of it.
    The gist of the gameplay is that unlike the games preceding and following it, Super Paper Mario is a 2D platformer with elements of real-time RPGs and adventure game puzzle-solving, combining the format of the former Paper Mario games with platforming reminiscent of the original 2D Mario games. From the 2D Mario games, there are eight chapters with four levels a piece, each of which are tied together by a unifying theme, and you go about stomping baddies in real-time and maneuvering obstacle courses. Everything else mostly comes from the Paper Mario games; talking to NPCs, leveling up your character's strength, exploring around open areas and finding partners that help solve contextual puzzles. Exclusive to this game is a dimension-flipping mechanic, where you can switch from a 2D to 3D perspective at any time to explore areas you might not be able to in the other, as well as the ability to also play as Peach, Luigi and even Bowser, each with their own abilities. I assume that's what's got some people down on the game, as people expecting a 2D Mario adventure will find huge piles of story and bizarre new mechanics, and those expecting a Paper Mario game will find a considerably shorter, more fast-paced experience.
    Having said that, I wonder if the switch to real-time combat spooked the developers a bit with how much it speeds up things, because I will fully admit that the one major fatal flaw with this game is when it goes to frankly extreme lengths to pad out the runtime. A fair few of the puzzles are just lock-and-key hunts, nothing that bad in and of itself, but you often have to backtrack across pretty sizable chunks of level in order to get what's required, and it becomes easy to forget where the heck you were going when the levels start getting more maze-like. On top of that, there are also a couple instances where it'll stop you in your tracks entirely to have you do some mundane task just to make sure you don't get through the game too fast. There's one bit in the second chapter where Mario accidentally breaks an expensive vase and ends up in massive debt because of it, and the game requires that he get inside a giant hamster wheel and continue running in one direction for a solid fifteen minutes at minimum. I get that it's meant to be a parody of level grinding in typical RPGs, but it's still cheap.
    I don't think any of these isolated incidents are enough of a dealbreaker to detract from the overall enjoyment, though, as the core gameplay itself is still inherently fun and well-realized. For every kinda boring or tedious moment, there's at least five more moments that provide a good challenge, serve an interesting story purpose, or are just wildly creative and funny. On that note, the main reason why Super Paper Mario still sticks out in my mind among the Mario series, and even among most Nintendo games, is that it's far and away one of the most surreal, inventive, and genuinely daring games the company has ever put out, and probably ever will. The developers have gone on record saying that they wanted to evoke the feeling of traveling to a world that was entirely unusual from the norm, and you can feel that in every step. Every world is lovingly realized, with some absolutely insane amounts of writing and interactions within, and seeking it all out is always worthwhile. Even the most unimportant NPCs have something funny or interesting to say, and the sheer amount of effort and unique one-off mechanics it puts into its big comedic moments is second to none.
    The game's tone overall is what strikes me, as it feels very much like a step on the evolutionary ladder that would lead to the modern indie RPG. There were plenty of quirky RPGs before this game, the Mother/EarthBound series and Moon spring instantly to mind, but Super Paper Mario is one of the earliest examples I can think of that has the modern blend of emotion-driven existentialism hiding underneath a distinctly Internet-y sense of humor. The fourth wall simply does not exist in this game; the game routinely replaces terminology like “death” with “game over”, even in the most serious instances, and moments like the third chapter within the nerd castle feel prototypical of the kind of thing Toby Fox would write. It calls attention to the artificiality of its universe in interesting ways with how the visual aesthetic is wholly in its own zone, environments made of vector art and new characters being made from simple primitives and mouse pointers. It uses it all as framing to a greater story lurking underneath it all, setting up its pieces so that it can take a pretty dramatic shift to the dark two-thirds of the way through. I seriously don't want to spoil it, but all I'll say is that Tippi, Count Bleck and Dimentio are some of the most detailed and artfully written characters to come out of any Nintendo game, and it's no wonder they remain fan favorites to this day.
    This is all leading up to the idiomatic other shoe dropping, and that's that while I adore the risks this game took to tell the story it wanted, I can pretty clearly see why it's something Nintendo wouldn't want to repeat. From their perspective, I can understand why seeing a game in the Mario series that raises questions about the inevitability of death might not be something they'd want the series to become known for. It's no wonder that midway through the Wii's life, any game in the series would be put under something of a creative lockdown, with any attempts at intricate stories or brand new characters being throttled in favor of catering to nostalgia. They've eased up on that initiative considerably in the Switch era, but it's still interesting to look back on this game as the weird, miraculous masterpiece that it is. It's definitely flawed in a few key areas, but I still say it's worth playing at least once for the sheer audacity of its writing and to see Luigi become an insane robot-piloting caped crusader.