Party Game Sundays: Monkey Mischief! Party Time

A few weeks ago we played a Coldstone Creamery themed game, which was developed by Zoo games. This week we played another hot Zoo release, but this time it was about Monkeys instead of ice cream. It was also quite a bit of fun and had much better control explanations than the Coldstone game.

I'll be real honest; I thought this game was going to be terrible. Normally when we play these weird themed mini-games they're not super great. Since it was developed by Zoo my expectations were even lower, because they flooded the market with all kinds of bullshit games for the Wii. Instead my expectations were exceeded when it turned out to be a halfway decent game.

Everyone loves math!

You start off by picking one of four monkeys and then you head straight to the mini-games. Some of them were locked, because we needed to play single player to unlock them. Obviously this is Party Game Sundays, so no one was going to spend the time to unlock the rest of the games. We had around 15 games to play still. They were not really related to monkeys at all.

For some reason almost every single game you had to use the Wii-mote like a crank. A lot of them had us aiming at the screen as well. The first game we played had us shooting fruit at a monkey in a tire. It was a weak start, but it got much better from there. The games were surprisingly varied in their objectives. We did tons of stuff ranging from throwing hippos to playing dodgeball.

Monkeys aren't the best at painting. That's why it's funny!

It also had the classics that are apparently in every single mini-game collection like Simon Says. It wanted us to shake the Wii-mote like the monkey in the middle of the screen. I felt like I was doing the actions exactly, but I missed around half the time. It's entirely possible that I was distracted by the crazy sounds that our characters were making. One of them seemed to be barking like a dog, and everyone else sounded like they were trying to talk while heavily sedated.

Normally this wouldn't be a compliment, but it was good that the game actually explained what the hell we were doing. The previous game we played developed by Zoo didn't have that. In fact a lot of the games we've been playing recently haven't really had instructions. I feel like people complain a lot about tutorials in games, but they're a necessary part of the experience. Games like this don't need a full blown tutorial, but they at least should have a picture of what buttons we need to press and what they do.

Simon says shake the Wii-mote like an idiot!

This game like many others we've played doesn't have a proper versus mode. Instead it just has a menu where you can play the mini-games individually. Someone wins each game, but it takes away a lot of the competitive fun when someone doesn't win overall. It also gives us a lot of downtime, because the game had to load before and after every game. This isn't quite as bad when there's something going on in the loading screen, but in this case it's a poorly drawn monkey swinging on a tire swing with no sound. Not exactly the most uplifting thing ever.

Monkey Mischief wasn't a great game, but we had a lot of fun playing it. I always feel weird for saying this, because in the context of good video games this one isn't very good at all. In fact you could easily say it's a bad game. However, it's a lot better than the shit we've seen when playing games for Party Game Sundays.

     -Manny