Nintendo
Family Party: 30 Great Games
By George Damidas
Feb 4, 2009, 7 :01 am

Party games are a tricky lot. It seems that no matter how many poor games that are included, there are a few that manage to rise above the rest and manage to provide some rowdy times. Separating the wheat from the chaff has become easier, thanks to the proliferation of the genre on the Wii and DS. The novelty of buying a dozen or so wacky mini games has worn off, but that hasn’t stopped companies from trying their hand at usurping Nintendo’s place as genre leader.

A party game needs a catch, though, otherwise it will hit the market completely unprepared for Wario’s menacing mustached gaze. With Family Party: 30 Great Games, Tamsoft embraced the party-based aspect and the popularity of the Wii among familities by offering a collection of mini games being played as a competition between a family of four; the publisher, D3, went with a budget price. In the end, neither is enough to stave off the yellow and purple monster.

The standard trappings of a party game are present. Each area is themed, based on locations unlocked by accumulated victories, such as beaches and castle motifs. The areas tend to be named as if they focus on a particular ability – strength, shooting, athletics – but the games are largely the same, just with different coats. You will balance on a stack of cushions while a mock earthquake shakes a house, toss barrels over walls, balance on a variety of rocking platforms, and moonlight as a trapeze artist - whatever might result from a combination of the World’s Strongest Man and American Gladiator. Since the game is based on a family competing against one another, quite a few of the events are split-screen so that each member has their own view, which might go towards getting a digital and real family involved but can also make navigation a bit of a problem. In general, the presentation and theme seem to encourage light play with colorful, simple game show effects and whimsical sounds, but the control schemes do not.

The title screen provides a perfect example for how the awkward controls are: you must press A and B to proceed. Granted, on the surface that doesn’t sound too bad, but it’s indicative of the unnecessary steps involved with every aspect of the game. Every event requires unnecessary presses and waggles to get anything done. Many of the simple games have instructions that go on for four or five pages; the pages might be tiny, but without reading them you will have absolutely no idea how to play most of the seemingly simple games. There is still a good chance you won’t know exactly what to do even after reading the directions, because many of the instructions are too general, requiring you to lose a few times to get the hang of things.

You think you can just tilt a controller to lift or lower each side’s corresponding flag? Wrong. You have to use the control pad for one flag and the two button for the other, then lift or lower the entire remote. Want to jump while running? Have fun waggling as quickly as possible while trying to time your button-press just right, otherwise your character falls flat on their face. I’d say over half the games have unnecessary motions involved, be it hitting a button, tilting the remote, or combining multiple moves to perform simple actions. And this is supposed to be a family party game. I don’t see many grandparents having a good time trying to work two buttons on the remote while wiggling it. To add a little salt to the wound, events cannot be restarted: you have to finish the entire area before trying again. None of the events requires true skill, just enough patience to know the difference between what the game says it requires and what it actually responds to.

The events, however entertaining in theory, are hampered by the controls. Some of the games, such as crossing a bridge while evading dodgeballs (or shooting them), are decent, but there are many that aren’t. There were some that were so poorly designed that no one, not even the AI, completed them – looking at you, log roll. Multiplaying party games tends to make them shine, but a key component is that people like and want to play through the games. As a single-player experience, it’s even more painful, since you can’t simply pick the events you like, but instead must trudge through them all. The ones that provide some entertainment aren’t worth wading through the drivel for.

Overall: 3/10

I’ve read all of the arguments concerning budget titles and the kind of treatment they should receive: a good game is a good game and price shouldn’t matter, or price should be kept in mind when a game falls short. I understand the relationship between price and expectation, but even when keeping the $19.99 MSRP in mind, Family Party: 30 Great Games is still neither a good game nor value. At the end of the day, $20 is $20, a poor game doesn’t lessen money’s worth, and in this case the cash can be spent on a number of far more entertaining options. The mere handful of adequate mini games can be handled in a rental, but that’s only if you’re so hard up for some multiplayer action that you’ve exhausted the numerous, superior alternatives.