Wii Party for Wii: Modes, Minigames and Reviews

Wii Party is a 2010 party game for the Wii, developed by NDcube and published by Nintendo. Metacritic prints a score of 68 out of 100.

Overview

Wikipedia describes it as heavily borrowing from Mario Party, and it was the first game in the Wii series that Shigeru Miyamoto did not produce. Several designers from Hudson Soft, who had worked on Mario Party 8 and Mario Party DS, moved to the Nintendo subsidiary NDcube. In an Iwata Asks interview the team said that Miis would make a player feel they were playing alongside friends, which is why Miis rather than Mario characters serve as pieces.

Satoru Iwata revealed the game in May 2010 and hoped people would play it for years as a standard party title.

How it plays

There are nine modes in three groups, built from 80 minigames. Party Games, for up to four, include Board Game Island, where dice rolls move Miis up the board, and Globe Trot, where cards and vehicle cards carry players between airports and seaports and souvenir photos decide the winner. Swap Meet, called Mii of a Kind in PAL regions, and Spin-Off complete that group.

Pair Games are for two, cooperative or competitive: Friend Connection asks five questions before a cooperative minigame and needs two humans, Balance Boat has players keep twenty Miis level on sails, and Match-Up pairs shirt colours.

House Party Games focus on the room itself and mostly skip the wrist strap. One has players listen for animal sounds from several Wii Remotes lined up; another has someone hide up to four remotes for the others to find by sound; two more use a single shared remote that is passed like a bomb or handed over gently. A card-grab game exists only in Japan and South Korea.

Release and credits

Japan received the game on 8 July 2010, North America on 3 October, Australia on 7 October and Europe on 8 October. Metacritic repeats the US date and prints an E rating. Nintendo later reissued it under its Nintendo Selects label. A sequel, Wii Party U, followed on the Wii U on 25 October 2013.

Reception

Metacritic’s score is 68 out of 100 across 42 reviews, which it places in the mixed or average band. GameSpot gave 8 out of 10 and called the multiplayer a blast, rating it faster and better than Mario Party. Nintendo World Report also gave 8, noting that turns move quickly. IGN gave 7, calling the graphics bright and not exactly pretty, and GameTrailers gave 7.9.

Game Informer’s Phil Kollar was blunt: the minigames share the uneven quality of Mario Party, and the game types are each less exciting than the last. Wikipedia counts 9.35 million copies sold, and Japan took 230,000 copies in its first week.

Can you still play it?

Play it on a Wii, or on a Wii U in Wii Mode, which wants a Sensor Bar for most software. In both cases the House Party games call for extra Wii Remotes, which are the real obstacle today since a full party needs four. Check the disc region against the console.

As a disc release it was not part of the Wii Shop Channel, which closed on 30 January 2019.