Wii Party

Wii Party is a late-console title that consciously builds on what Wii did best: getting four people in front of one television and having them compete in tasks whose rules fit into a single sentence. The game uses the Mii characters stored on the console, so the faces of the guests present race right there on screen, and it's divided into several large blocks. The board modes recall a classic party board game with squares and bonuses, the competitive modes push toward direct clashes between two sides, and the so-called household games move the action into the actual room.

That last group is the most interesting. In it, the controller is used as a physical prop: it gets hidden around the room and others search for it by sound, gets set on a table while players guess who was holding it, or gets silently passed around in a circle. This way the game steps out of the screen and becomes a social activity in which the console is merely the referee. The classic minigames cover the usual range from aiming and balancing to reaction duels, and are designed so that chance keeps the odds even even among players with very different levels of experience. There's also a two-player mode that works as a quick ten-minute rematch.

The visuals are deliberately restrained and clean so the Mii characters stand out, and technically it's an undemanding game that never loses its smoothness. The music is light, upbeat, and unobtrusive, exactly in the spirit of home entertainment. At the time, the game was received as a solid, if no longer surprising, offering; reviewers praised the ideas involving the controller off-screen and pointed out that part of the roster had already been seen several times before. Today Wii Party is one of the surest choices when a group gathers that doesn't normally play video games and just wants a laugh. At the same time, it's a nice illustration of how far Nintendo took the idea that a console doesn't have to be just a source of picture, but also a tool for a game played around the table.