lone gamer that i am i haven’t really spent much time with the mario party series, but a friend of mine lent me the somewhat awkwardly named mario party-e. mario party-e is a novelty hybrid that combines a physical board/card game with mini games played by scanning cards into the e-reader. this was my first experience with the e-reader, and that in itself was novel and entertaining (if not a particularly efficient way to get your gaming fix).
i didn’t actually play through an entire game, but just from a mock playthrough the game seems to be fairly decently balanced. as seems to be the case with mario party games (and nintendo multiplayer in general, cf. the mario kart series) chance plays a fairly big role and it looks like it wouldn’t be uncommon for the person in the lead to end up moving to last place in just one turn. but the mini games are entertaining if not particularly unique; they’re helped in part by the novelty of seeing daisy and waluigi in their own mini-game starring roles.
this was another quick diversion. not worth a huge monetary investment, but as it doesn’t seem to be particularly rare it’s a more-or-less worthwhile addition to the meager library of the little-used e-reader peripheral.
mario party-e links in the cards:
– PDF of the manual at nintendo.com
– review at IGN
– entry at mariowiki.com with screenshots of all the mini-games
– section at wikipedia
video games rock 