Family Party: 30 Great Games!
Score: 30% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: D3 Developer: Tamsoft Media: CD/1 Players: 1 - 4 Genre: Family/ Party/ Sports
Graphics & Sound: The Wii catches a lot of flack lately for having too much of what you may see referred to as "shovelware." What does it mean? We aren't really sure, but we suspect that since working with a shovel doesn't require much precision and the list of things you typically shovel isn't always that pleasant, being accused of peddling shovelware is bad. We wouldn't be so crass as to accuse Family Party: 30 Great Games! of being shovelware, but the low quality and rushed feeling this game exudes certainly isn't helping to improve the Wii's reputation as a platform for high caliber gaming. Visually, there are immediate tipoffs that this is going to be a sub-par experience. The first is that even in single-player, referred to as Challenge Mode, you'll be competing against three contestants that are strictly on A.I. control. The A.I. itself isn't poorly implemented, but having to watch your player up in one quadrant of the screen isn't very satisfying. The likely reason for not having single player show your character alone against others is that there isn't enough polish on the graphics, and the game is totally built around four separate views rather than simultaneous competition. Music and sound effects are probably the highlights of 30 Great Games!, as you get to hear excited crowd noises and lots of incidental effects keyed to events during the competition. Between the poor controls and the poorly balanced design, it can be hard to appreciate the little touches put into 30 Great Games!, but there are a few. It's nice that the character models come built to fit different player styles, such as an old man, a young boy and girl, and a mom or dad. There's even a semi-hot older sister in the mix, complete with short-shorts and a funky style. Sure, you can earn upgrades along the way that open new features, but most people won't hang around long enough to see this additional content. With Wii Sports as a pack-in and various other fun mini-game collections for the Wii available, Family Party: 30 Great Games! just doesn't cut the mustard.
Gameplay: The games contained in Family Party: 30 Great Games! are rarely great. There are some moments where you'll find something you can sink your teeth into, but the vast majority of activities here are either too bland or too crazy or too confusing to be any fun. Not all 30 are available from the beginning, so you'll have to work through the Challenge Mode to unlock them by scoring in first place through an entire competition. You can build your own competition in Challenge through whatever games are available at the time, in a specific area. Each area offers games that fit into a specific theme, with a distinct design style. Think of Challenge like a championship, where you'll be scored during each competition and then scored for your aggregate. Once the final score comes through, you'll either pass and open up additional content, or fail and have to retry. The benefit of unlocking games and new areas is that they become playable in the Battle Mode. This is where you can get your game on with four players, either by building a slate of challenges you like or selecting random to have challenges selected automatically. Success in this mode also can unlock additional content. The mini-games that form the meat of Family Party: 30 Great Games! are incredibly weak. It's as if there was confusion over what actually constituted a mini-game... Some events are classic mini-game fare, such as the Monkey Ball derivative that has you running across a short moving platform, trying to avoid pitching off or falling through holes. Others involve (what feel like endless) minutes of elaborate movements or button presses on the Wii-mote, such as "Red Flag, White Flag" or the vaulting/jumping games. Requiring more than two timed button-press sequences starts to make a game feel more maxi than mini, especially when the controls are so poorly implemented. 30 Great Games! is so imbalanced that it will likely just be a big frustration for kids, no matter their level of ability as gamers. The items or rewards that can be unlocked aren't worth the suffering, and there just isn't enough quality here to justify any kind of Family Party. Sure, Wii Sports may be spending more time on your shelf or in your drawer, but you'd be better off clearing off the dust and playing Wii Sports or some other release that supports multiplayer.
Difficulty: There are moments of redemption throughout Family Party: 30 Great Games. You may be lured into thinking that because you can press the (A) or (B) button in sequence and run across a plank dodging bombs thrown by other players, you can do anything. There are too many seductions contained here, all of them ultimately hollow. The goal of Challenge is to place well at the end. It seems like there is always some weird game thrown in that puts you in third or fourth place and ruins your chances of placing in the top slot and opening up new content. There was never a time in the game requiring you to balance on a pile of pillows during an earthquake that I didn't pitch off in the first three seconds. Watching the CPU-controller players finish the round is hardly fun, but you'll be doing a lot of that. At other moments in Challenge, you'll reach the finish line early and be watching the other players try to catch up. Nothing in the middle really exists, nothing to affirm that there is anything but blind luck at work in most of these games that determines where you'll place. At a few junctures, you'll find games that are well constructed and require skill and have balance, but they are a tiny fraction of the whole. For the most part, 30 Great Games! is a jumbled mess that will frustrate every member of your family...
Game Mechanics: Rarely have we seen motion controls so broken. The responsive quality that usually comes from swinging the Wii-mote is gone, replaced by a muddiness that seems present in every game. The requirement to control using only the (A) and (B) button creates a lot of confusing sequences, where you'll get a few minutes to read instructions before having to swing the Wii-mote to run, hit the (A) button to jump, then hit the (B) button to do something else, then hit the (A) and (B) button together. This type of sequence is not uncommon, and is every bit as confusing to execute as it looks on paper. If the objective was just to teach us to fail, similar to those crazy carnival games where you throw rings over bottles, then Family Party: 30 Great Games! has hit its mark nicely. There's no reason that any of the games need to have so many moving parts, and there's also no reason that pressing the (A) or (B) button and using some motion won't prompt immediate results. There are a handful of games in 30 Great Games! that appear to have solid controls, with the "rolling path" game mentioned above being one of the smoothest. You get a set of instructions ahead of playing each game, written out and showing a few examples. The reading requirement rules out 30 Great Games! for young players, unless someone is willing to read them the instructions and revisit periodically for reminders. Memorizing the controls for 30 games is nothing to sneeze at, so luckily there are some games with similar controls. The rationale behind making a poor collection of mini-games escapes us, but the real mystery is why a consumer would want to play this when other similar-but-better options exist. The truth may be that some families will appreciate the bloodless and antiseptic approach taken by Family Party: 30 Great Games!. It won't offend anyone and it even has a character pre-made for grandpa... There is something to be said for family-friendly gaming, but we get the sense that some developers assume kids won't be discerning or care about those "nice-to-haves" like good graphics, balanced difficulty, and interesting, exciting, original content. With all that missing, the only thing on offer in 30 Great Games! is 30 games, none of them great...
-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock
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