Wii Party U

Wii Party U is the sequel to the hugely successful party collection from the Wii, and its main ambition was to find as many roles for the GamePad as possible that actually make sense in a living room. The lineup includes roughly eighty minigames along with several modes that frame them into longer sessions — from a classic board-game journey to something like a bargaining game to competitions where you play for a leaderboard spot while the players' Miis pull faces at every slip-up.

The best ideas rest on the controller lying flat on the table. In the tabletop modes, the GamePad is placed screen-up and the players around it flick coins, pull on a virtual rope, or play two-finger hockey directly on the glass; elsewhere the screen serves as a card only one player sees, as a radar, a target, or an indicator of a hidden task. On top of this come games for Wii Remotes, so the lineup around the TV can vary in both the number of people and the type of input. Several activities even function as an almost screen-free social game, where the controller just keeps score and hands out secret instructions. The longer modes then frame the minigames within a story of a trip, betting on outcomes, or collecting stamps, so the evening at least has a rough structure and doesn't end in random menu-clicking.

Visually, it's clean, simple graphics with Mii characters, well suited to the audience the game targets — anyone can sit down and know what to do within thirty seconds. The music is unobtrusive and cheerful, and the commentary and sound effects reliably ramp up the tension in the final seconds. Critics rated the game mostly solid: they praised the amount of content and the clever use of the second screen, but faulted the uneven quality of individual pieces and a weaker sense of drive in the longer modes. Today, Wii Party U is one of the few games that can hold even people who otherwise don't play at all, and together with Nintendo Land it forms the pair that best shows the console's original intent. It still holds up at the Christmas table.