Party Game Sundays: Medieval Games

This past Sunday we only played one game, because I got caught up in trying to name every single Pokemon by looking at them. I missed around 60, which I think is pretty good considering there are over 700 of the critters now. As much as I know you enjoy hearing about my amazing performance that is not why we're here. It's been a few weeks, but we finally played an actual party game on Party Game Sunday. That game was Medieval Games for the Wii.

As the title suggests it takes place in Medieval times. In fact, it's basically a Medieval Mario Party. It's about as Medieval as you can get with language like "shaketh" and wildly varying voice acting talent. Just as in all party games you roll a die to move around what is essentially a game board. You land on spaces that have random events, or trigger mini games. When you start you pick one of three stories. All three stories have their own objectives, but in a surprise to me they are also actually stories.

In the first story some pigs have gone missing due to some mysterious force. The kingdom is searching for the pigs, but they are also competing in various games. By winning the games you gain coins, or a large treasure, which nets you even more coins. The person with the most coins at the end gets to judge a beauty contest that will decide who the prince is going to marry. In case you were wondering the prince's name is Beemish and that's awesome.

Shaketh the ye-olde Wii-mote!

Upon the completion of the first story we unlocked a second, which was based around a multi-kingdom tournament. Instead of getting coins you needed to be first place in the most tournaments by the end of the story. Each story is only a certain amount of turns or "days" and then it automatically ends. There was also a third, but we're going to be saving that for another time.

The thing that I liked most about the game was that it actually gave context for all of the mini-games. In front of each game there is a picture along with some scrolling text that tells you exactly why you're going to be playing that specific game. I think that's pretty awesome, because in any other game you get zero context and everything seems to be super random and dumb.

Play such Medieval classics as jousting!

The games themselves were actually pretty fun too. I came into this expecting everything to be garbage, because that's pretty much what most Wii games like this are. They're even worse when you add in motion control, but this is surprisingly good. As you'd expect there are all kinds of Medieval themed games. If you want to joust you can totally do that. Archery and laying siege on a castle are available as well. They're pretty much everything you'd expect, except for the one where you need to make sure you don't get attacked by a demonic squirrel. What the hell does that have to do with anything?

Overall it's actually a pretty well put together game. The main issue it has is that every time anything happens on the map the game stutters as it tries to pull things off of the disc. I'm pretty sure that problem was fixed midway through the PlayStation 1 era, but clearly not everyone figured out how to make seamless gameplay. It's an issue that mars what is otherwise a good game. According to the box art it won some type of parenting award. It would probably be a good game for kids, but as someone in their mid twenties I found it to be pretty good too. I actually hope we play this one again sometime.

     -Manny