It is stale. That is why I am a Rabbid follower now.

Yeah this is definitely not a game for people who don't like Party games, but it IS a great drinking game. Honestly, I think reviewers just lock themselves in a dark room with no friends to review this game lol. I had a blast playing at my friend's. We had 4 people completely trashed playing and it's one of the best times I have ever had playing a game system. I'm almost positive I'm going to buy this. I never gave-a-crap what reviewers said about most of my games anyway.

I have MP7 for the cube and I must say that the game is tedious. My daughter likes to play but it just gets annoying. It moves entirely too slow and the minigames, for the most part, are not even amusing at best. I guess if I was on recreational pharmaceuticals and/or had a BAC of .1 or better I might enjoy it, but as it stands, I'm THANKFUL when the game is over and that is when we play it on the minimum number of turns. From reading the reviews, it sounds like it is just more of the same with some minigames including use of the wiimote. What they *should* have done is create an entirely new game and take the MP series in a new direction. It could certainly still have been a board game with minigames but change it up enough so that it wasn't a rehash of MP7,6,5..... If I ever do get a Wii, I'll pass on this title unless it makes the bargain bin.

Mario Party games have constantly been getting lower and lower reviews even though the general quality and enjoyment from the games has not dropped off. The main reason for this (I suspect) is that a lot of reviewers have played every game in the series quite heavily (in order to give a reasonable review) and they're playing the game in a way which was not intended.

Mario Party is primarly a local multiplayer game, the true enjoyment of the game comes when you have 4 people (or 8 people on teams of two) playing the game together locally; the nature of the game makes this (fairly) easy to accomplish being that people of varied skill level can play the game together and enjoy it. Playing these games single player (as you're likely to in a review) is never all that much fun.

The biggest thing I see people bitch about (and what causes the low score) with Mario Party is that the single player mode sucks. But they all love it as a multiplayer game. Nintendo should really just drop the Single player mode all together.