With the success of the Wii, a Mario Party installment on the system was pretty much an inevitability. And although I haven't played it in a long time, I remember it being another fun entry for the series. The board variety kept up strongly too ---- racing to buy up hotels in Koopa's Tycoon Town & hurrying to the end of Goomba's Booty Boardwalk stand out in my mind for sure.
They made a Mario Party on the Wii, so of course they had to heavily feature motion controls. I personally never found the controls frustrating, but I certainly know plenty of people who did. Definitely past the point at which MP had exhausted itself, the boards are mostly retreads of ideas from the previous game, although it undoes some of the bad ideas from the late GC era. Doesn't achieve the heights of the N64 games, but is probably the MP I've played the most since its on a newer console.
Mario Party 8 is a weird one. It has the shiny new graphics of the Wii and some decently cool visuals undercut by this weird semi-realistic artstyle and the game being forced into 4:3 as a result of being rushed onto the Wii last-minute (even though Mario Strikers ran at 16:9 on GameCube). The orb system is replaced with candies that are basically worse versions of the items from 2 through 4 but the transformations are charming. There are some really good minigames with the most obnoxious forced motion controls a Wii game released in 2007 can have. Koopa's Tycoon Town is a top 5 board in the series and the rest of the boards are either straight lines or bad.
I kinda like it. It certainly has its charm, but it clearly had a lot of troubles in development and is a major step down from 6 and 7.
I kinda like it. It certainly has its charm, but it clearly had a lot of troubles in development and is a major step down from 6 and 7.