Party Game Sundays: Start the Party!

This past Sunday I was out of town, so we did not play anything new. I have however, neglected to talk about the game we played two weeks ago on Sunday, so I'll do that now!

As you may have surmised from the title of this post we played Start the Party. You may remember from the Sportsfriends edition of Party Game Sundays when I said I never wanted to play a PlayStation Move game other than Johann Sebastian Joust. That dream was shattered by Start the Party.

I kind of just want to type Start the Party over and over, because it's such a stupid name, but I guess I'll actually try to be informative and tell you what it's all about. I realize I sound super disdainful already, but the game was actually fine. It's a mini-game collection that uses Move controllers. 

Yeah, this is the box art...

You start the game by taking a picture of your face with the PlayStation camera, and then say your name. When it's your turn to play the game will pop up your face and replay your name. They change your voice a little bit, so everyone ends up sounding a lot like the announcer from the N64 classic Diddy Kong Racing. 

Once you set up the players you choose how many rounds you want to play and the game is off. You'll play through various rounds that all have slight variation on what you're trying to do. You might want to last the longest, get the most points, or try and steal points from other players. This is all done by actually playing the mini-games.

What's crazy to me about the PlayStation Move controllers is how well they work when paired with the PlayStation Camera. They make the motion control of the Wii look like complete garbage, which it pretty much is. Since the camera is tracking the movement of the Move controller you can see yourself on screen, This helps, because you need to move closer or farther away from the TV depending on certain scenarios. 

This girl does not look like she's having fun.

One of the games has you using a magnifying glass to find bugs. The closer you get to the screen the bigger the search area is, just like a real magnifying glass. The onscreen image of the move controller is replaced by a three-dimensional magnifying glass so you can see what you're doing. What's really cool is that if you turn your wrist the object in the game will rotate as well, so how you're holding the controller in relation to the camera matters.

In theory this game is really cool as a tech demo for the way PlayStation Move controllers work. The problem is that once again it's a mini-game collection. It has you doing all kinds of things from brushing an alligator's teeth to catching toppings on a pizza. It's all things that we've seen before, but with the added bonus of using a legitimately cool piece of technology. While I did have fun playing the game it just made me sad about the wasted potential of the Move Controllers. I understand that companies make games like this because they're easy to produce and sell, but it's just not fun if you play it more than a few times. 

The most upsetting thing about it to me was that I had the most fun re-recording my opponents name to "dickface" between rounds so that I could hear that whenever it was Noukeo's turn. The gameplay should be more compelling than me being able to yell obscenities about my friends.