The Gamer's Quarter

[kirkjerk]

Man, maybe I'm just getting out of the loop in my encroaching middle aged but I was actually startled to see Mario Party 8 in the store. I hadn't heard much about it. I guess when a series gets to frickin' 8, it's tough to drum up a lot of fanfare. (Are there any games besides sports games that get that high? Maybe some of the King of Fighters or whatever..)

The other sign of my encroaching middle age is that I didn't even open the game for like a week. On the other hand, I didn't have a bunch of gamers ready to go with it and it really is a multiplayer game.

So far I've only played the full board game once and the head to head version of the board game once. The minigames seem solid; I guess the selection is smaller than before (not that I've seen a repeat yet) but each one seemed to have a good play mechanic.

I am extremely undelighted that they seem to have removed a semicrucial feature: setting all four players to COM control and letting them unlock all the damn games in the free play mode. This seems to be a deliberate omission. In hindsight, the previous iterations that allowed this must have *deliberately* allowed it, because the game was smart enough not to get hung up on those general information screens where any player has to press the A button to continue (a COM player won't click those screens when humans might still be reading it, but some coder put in logic that said click it if no human is actually playing.)

Which is I guess the fundamental tension in the Mario Party series: between the people just looking for at most a light wrapper around minigames, and others who dig the boardgame elements. Which are cute, in a "Mousetrap!" kind of way, and this game does better than some of its predecessors at reducing complexity and keeping up the pace, but still. The only truly acceptable board game was the Minigame Stadium in the pot of the first game, which was simple laps around a star-shaped track. (hell, "Pac-Man Fever" did a better job of keeping the action going, and awarding game performance in a meaningful edge, and balancing "good player trounces n00b" with "metagame is so randomized it doesn't matter how you do in the minigames"

It seems like a kind of arrogance to force the boardgame aspect so much, or ignorance about the appeal of their game (at least for some people-- I love minigames, feel like they're fun wrappers around 2600-style gameplay)

I have to find out if I can download someone else's save like I did with ExciteTruck, or if the way each save is tagged w/ a Mii somehow screws that up.

Still not sure if the Wii will ever quite live up to its multiplayer minigame potential. Most games (Super Monkey Ball, Rayman Rabids, WarioWare, Mario Party 9) manage to mess it up in ways small or large. I still have pipedreams about some homebrew that would allow the creation and sharing of minigames via those SD cards...
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[dessgeega]

my sister played mario party 8 with her boyfriend. she thinks it's awful.

as far as i'm concerned, 2 is the peak of the series. the boards are both excellently designed and have a strong sense of theme (reinforced by the costumes - which have never appeared since - and the duels, and the little stories that play out). the items allow for just the right amount of strategy. and the actual games are fantastic, because with only one game predating this one, the developers have the liberty to make games with worrying about retreading what's been done before. hexagon heat might still be the quintessential mario party minigame.
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[kirkjerk]

[Ethoscapade]

no question, two is the best. it's a goddamn shame that it'll probably take them two years to get it on the virtual console, because if ever there was a game worth ten dollars (when i was never able to talk myself into sixty for it eight years ago) it's this one.

[Harveyjames]

[Lockeownzj00]

[kirkjerk]

Mega Man 2 comes to mind.

Some people would argue Empire Strikes Back...
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[Scratchmonkey]

Deffo Empire Strikes Back. Godfather II is also cited, although that's certainly up for debate.

Games, it seems like there should be a greater chance of a sequel being better because they are pretty different from mediums that are driven by exposition. Let's look at some canonical seriesesesees:

SMB - Actually, I would say that you should really compare SMB and SMB3 because SMB2, as everybody knows by now, wasn't actually the official sequel. Although I'm sure there are plenty of people who might prefer the clean basicness of SMB, SMB3 is, I would argue, a pretty clear example of a sequel that takes what was good about the original and refines it and builds on it.

Zelda - On the other hand, this is a frequently-cited example of the first sequel getting it "completely wrong", in that it's pretty much a completely different game from the first one, with the main carry-over being thematic in nature. It's not a bad game at all, it just suffers because it's a sequel that drastically changes so much from the original that it really flummoxed people.

Castlevania - My personal favorite of the big NES series sequels, Simon's Quest was the fairly unchanged mechanics of Castlevania applied to a completely different underlying structure, this being a nonlinear adventure-style world to explore, as opposed to the linear and distinct stages of the original. I expect that the general reaction to it was closer to negative than positive, since Castlevania 3 returned to the original formula with changes as to how the stages connect.

[kirkjerk]

Lethal Weapon 2
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[dessgeega]

riven. and the disk system super mario bros. 2 is super mario bros. distilled into a lethal dose.
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[mechanoriINtransit]

Capcom has a habit of making excellent sequels.

Mega Man 2

Mega Man Battle Network 2.

Resident Evil 2.

Street Fighter 2.

But then again, there's Devil May Cry 2.