Wii Party? No We Don’t.

So yesterday, at a family trip to the beach, SS and I were overcome with a strong case of nostalgia. Specifically, the Mario Party series, and other Gamecube and Nintendo64 moments. We talked about the characters! The minigames! The boards! And all the little inside jokes we had in between. Although we only had Mario Party 1, 2, 3, and 7, we loved them all, and played them for countless hours until some point in 2008.

So, today, SS and I were researching the series, and if there were any plans to make new ones, and so on. We were nervous, seeing as they made new ones annually, and the last one was made three years ago, so the franchise seemed dead. We came upon a bittersweet discovery: A new game is being made… but not for the Mario Party series. For the Wii series.

I don’t mean the actual console, but all the Wii themed games, where you get to play with your own Miis and it’s just boring. Other games in the ‘series’ include Wii Sports, Play, Fit, Music, Sports Resort, Chess, and Fit Plus.

Honestly, if people don’t hate the Wii enough already, this will give them a reason to run into every GameStop in their area and vandalize the Wii section. I mean, I already thought 95% of the Wii games were party games, so why make a specific one that basically says ‘This is the official party game for the Wii, and others are inferior knockoffs’? Besides, it’s ridiculous that people are going to have to pay around $50.00 dollars, not including frivolous peripherals, to play bland, dry, repetitive minigames they could already find in Wii Play. I mean, at least the Mario Party series lets you play with loveable Nintendo characters, and the whole game is themed, so you could play ridiculous minigames without thinking ‘Why can virtual people fall into fire repeated times but come out without a scratch?’. And there are things like Bowser and the whole Star concept that can’t(And shouldn’t) be rewritten into the Mii series. Basically, yeah, Nintendo is the Mario series’ parent, but they shouldn’t be allowed to, say, turn Mario Party’s old bedroom into the Wii series’… gym, or study after Mario Party moved out, or went to college, or something.(If we’re still going with the parent analogy). And if people would be paying around 30 or 40 dollars for a Mario Party game(Ah, the good old days, where video games didn’t cost someone an arm, a leg, or their first born), at least they’d be promised that the game had Mario, and that Nintendo went creative with the game. For the Wii games, they don’t give you a theme, they don’t bother thinking of characters, they probably won’t give you voices, there won’t be a storyline, and there’s going to be about 40 sequels before the next Nintendo console. And each will probably introduce 20 new useless crappy peripherals that you need to play. I miss it when the worst thing about video game storage was just getting controllers tangled.

And the crappy part about this is, that my Wii’s playback thing is being.. stupid. I can’t play any of my old games from the Gamecube, and I’ve done exactly what Nintendo wanted me to do for it. And they haven’t put any of the Mario Party games available on the Virtual console, so it looks like Nintendo is trying to write out my childhood memories the Mario Party series out of existence.