Wii Party
Ellie Gibson is away.
Beyond that, there's a trio of Pair Games, which tend to be excellent, including an enjoyable creepy compatibility checking game and the brilliant Balance Boat, which dumps Miis of varying sizes onto a rickety galleon depending on how you fare at mini-games, and tasks both players with ensuring the ship stays afloat.
There's also a handful of House Party titles, which use the remote in more imaginative ways, offering variants on pass-the-parcel and hide-and-seek, alongside other delights including a quiz about your friends and a game about identifying animal sounds. Was that a frog? No, it was a cow, and you're an idiot.
If Nintendo's latest was a deeply strategic board game simulator, the aimlessness and lack of proper balancing in most of the Party Games would probably be a huge problem. But it's not: Nintendo's latest is really just a Twister alternative for drunk people and very small children, so the muddlesome Globe Trot and the frustrating switchbacks of Board Game Island don't really matter - you just press a random button, hope you'll be given a mini-game to play fairly soon, and have another Ritz cracker. You could even make a case that exchanging strategy for cruel luck means you'll howl all the louder and up the trash-talking as the games get more and more bizarre.
And, besides, the meat of the event is still the 80 mini-games, which, thankfully, all come unlocked from the start and are available to dive into on their own should you wish. Wii Party's no WarioWare, certainly, but there are still plenty of gems to discover this time, including zippy reimaginings of football and snooker and mine-cart mazes, in amongst games about not getting squashed by barrels, games about being chased by zombies, games about swimming around and collecting pearls, games about photographing UFOs, and games about punching your rivals into the sea.
My personal favourite is a blend of Time Crisis and Luigi's Mansion I'll refer to as Luigi's Crisis, because it sounds pleasantly existential. It's an on-rails flashlight shooter set in a haunted house, and I could play it until the (ghostly) cows come home.
Ranging from all-out competitions to two-person co-operation and asymmetric games that see three players picking on the fourth, they're all clearly explained, colourfully implemented, and generally make good use of the remote, whether you're swinging it, pointing it, shaking it, or listening to its speaker. The worst are over before you know it, and there's a decent range of more challenging efforts on offer if you fancy a scamper up the hi-score table.
If I hadn't failed my art GCSE (my art GCSE) with an ill-conceived mixed-media sculpture entitled Things I've Found in Tins, this would probably be the point where I busted out a felt tip and created a flowchart to drive this one home. Party games always come with caveats for the traditional videogame audience, and it's hard to avoid the lapse into formulas like: IF you are genuinely having a party and IF you are quite drunk and DON'T have parties too regularly, and DON'T really care about the niceties of game design, you're going to have a lot of fun with this.
In a perfect word, the meta-games would be as good as the mini-games themselves. But with four people, Lambrini and deely-boppers (just me?), Wii Party's still a reliable, if fairly thin, source of entertainment all the same.