Mario Party 7 [GC]

Most families have a few board games around the house, like Monopoly and Scrabble. But when a six-hour Monopoly session isn't in order, Mario Party 7 is a great alternative. It's not deep or taxing but there's enough variety inside to kill an hour here and there.

This edition doesn't mess with the formula at all. A collection of Nintendo characters move around a game board and engage in a variety of mini-games, over 80 in all. Some games are solo, some head to head, and others offer group challenges that pit the entire party against one another. Most are simple using only a control stick and one button, and the theme can be racing, action, or some puzzle variant.

The goal is invariably to collect stars, which can be found either randomly on the game board or at a specified point far from the starting line. Along the way players collect coins, which can be stolen from one another and won in mini-games. Coins also buy orbs, which either offer power-ups or traps to confound other players. That's all familiar ground to anyone who owns one of the other yearly Mario Party releases. Even the microphone games introduced last year make an encore appearance; a microphone is packaged with the game for those without Mario Party 6.

Even with seven releases under the belt, however, developer Hudon is still coming up with new ways to combine Nintendo characters and short bits of gameplay. It's not as fresh as any of the WarioWare releases, but since the goal is broader family entertainment, that's not a surprise. In the spirit of consistency, Mario Party 7 looks like every other Mariom title in the past decade, which means bold colors, gently rounded objects, and slightly goofy characters fixed with perpetual smiles.

There is a thin story, in which Mario and friends go on a vacation cruise without inviting Bowser. The spiky turtle gets mad and resolves to cramp their style. It's not much of a tale and is only worth mentioning because it's the rationale for the Bowser meter which fills after every full rotation of player turns. When the meter is full, Bowser will take action, stealing coins or stars or generally bedeviling the players.

With four players, the game is fast and fun, with the brightly colored boards playing host to just enough back-stabbing shenanigans to keep kids interested. The pace is frequently leisurely, but once a few traps are laid on the board, the audience participation kicks in. The mini-games fall into several different categories, all of which are rather gentle and cuddly. The only exception is the group featuring games the haunted house maze, where players have to wander the darkened hallways of a spooky house in search of the exit. There is an option to specify what categories of mini-game will be played, however, in case players want to be selective. None of the mini-games are very taxing, especially since there's always an option to practice and learn the rules and pacing.

With fewer than four players, however, Mario Party isn't as much fun because the CPU will always add enough AI-controlled players to bring the roster to four. We'd expect the AI characters to move at a brisk pace or an option to skip right to the end of the AI turn but that's not the case. The humans must watch every move the computer makes. This takes a lot of time -- it's like watching another player move, only without the person there.

Thanks to that terrible design decision, Mario Party stumbles badly when it tries to be a single-player game. In short, there is no way to play a quick game alone. CPU players always intrude, except for a single one-on-one mode where it's possible to play with only two characters. But even there, to avoid the CPU a second controller and player character will have to be used, making one person play two characters.

The one new gameplay addition is eight-player support. Playing with more than four, however, requires that players share controllers, typically with one person taking the left stick and shoulder button and the other the right. It's a strange setup which forces players to work together even as they're competing. In that respect, the feature is really quite cool, but it's rare that you'll have eight players ready to go at once.

Over the years, Mario Party has become the franchise that many fans buy solely as a reflex action. But at this point it might be time to recondition that reaction to a new release. For new players or rabid fanatics, Mario Party 7 is a respectable addition to the series. But for anyone expecting to have a great time with less than four people, this release can kill the party instead of starting it.