Game Party review

Dec 11, 2007

Wii is quickly becoming a third-party crap magnet and Game Party is the latest game you shouldn’t buy unless you’re either really easy to please or one of the 10 people who rented Gigli just to see how bad it was. Game Party is no Gigli, but each of the 7 events collected here has its fair share of mechanical issues (except maybe Hoop Shot and Trivia) that nearly take the fun out of partying.

Here, in all their half-baked glory, are the games: Darts, Table Hockey (air hockey), Skill Ball (skee ball), Hoop Shot, Ping Cup (Beer Pong, sans beer), Shuffle Board and Trivia. Some of these are tremendously difficult to get the hang of, especially Darts and Table Hockey. With Darts, you have to aim your Wii-mote where you’d like your dart to land, press A and then emulate throwing a dart with enough force and control to give the game the input it’s looking for. Translation: we played a ton of matches where nary anyone scored because the darts never landed. And no, we weren’t drunk. In fact, nothing says buzz-kill like a game that makes you feel like you don’t know how to play darts.

Hoop shot is fun, but it’s really easy. You have one minute to sink as many shots as possible and once you find your arc, you’ll be a virtual Steve Nash in no time. Trivia is also fun - you use the remote to spin a wheel and play through sports and music related trivia. By the end of the night we found ourselves playing Trivia the most, which seems weird when we could be playing Ping Cup or Table Hockey (which incidentally has a disorienting horizontal, top-down view).