Good
Bomberman creator Hudson Soft returns to bring us the next installment of the franchise, and the company does a good job of refining the gameplay. If you've followed the series, you might remember how sometime around game four or five, games would just drag on forever. But like its predecessor Mario Party 6, Mario Party 7 has streamlined the board and the player movement, so that games clip along relatively quickly. A full game still takes a little too long, but at least the action keeps moving. The best of the mini-games have returned, and the new ones (there are 80 new games, although many of them have the same basic gameplay as earlier ones) are honed to multiplayer perfection. If you often entertain crowds of people with your Nintendo, this is a game that'll keep 'em coming back for more.
Every map has its own gimmick, like this martial arts adventure.
Never played Mario Party? Here's how it works: several players gather around and each takes on the persona of a classic Mario character (Mario, Yoshi, Princess Peach, etc.). In the main party-game mode, players take turns rolling on-screen dice and moving around a large game board. After everyone moves, everyone participates in a random mini-game. Depending on what color board space players landed on, you'll play a four-player free-for-all game, a two-on-two team battle, or some sort of challenge where three players gang up on the fourth. Coins are given out as prizes for doing well in each mini-game. You can use coins to buy objects to harass other players on the board, or save them up to buy stars on special board spaces. Whoever has the most stars at the end of a set number of turns wins.
It may look cutesy and sound simple, but don't be fooled; Mario Party is fiercely competitive. The mini-games often involve playing dirty tricks on other players in order to move ahead, and on the big game board you're constantly scheming to steal coins and stars from other players. Competition is brutal, and (at least here at GameSpy) the smack-talk is monstrous. As with other Mario Party games, there's also a lot of blind luck involved in Mario Party 7: sometimes unlucky dice rolls and random misfortunes hit undeserving players. That's frustrating, but on the plus side, it means that anyone can play regardless of skill. Kids can play with their parents, and adults can play at a party no matter how inebriated they are. In fact, Nintendo would never admit it, but Mario Party makes a great drinking game ... just for the record.
