Start the Party Review

A! Party! Game! For! The! Move!

So you just bought yourself a Playstation Move. You never owned a Wii, you've never even touched a Wii-mote, because it has Nintendo cooties you're such a diehard Sony fanboy. All those Wii parties your friends were having, you stayed away, you wouldn't dare betray Sony in such a blasphemous way. The Sixaxis was motion control enough! Still, something was missing. Now you've got a Move controller, two even! The glowing orbs on the end have perhaps allowed you to enjoy Sports Champions, perhaps even Heavy Rain's updated control scheme! What's left? Mini-game compilations!

[image1]So goes the reasoning behind Enter: Start the Party. Little time was wasted getting a party game into eager Move-controlling hands, and it shows. Start the Party! heinously rips off all the party games the Wii's library has suffered for the past four years.

Start the Party! presents the player with a series of challenges that include all the silly, pointless entertainment that bargain bin Wii games are known for. Shave a monster's hair! Use a handheld fan to direct baby birds to their nests! Point to specific areas to short-circuit invading robots! Pop a school of puffer fish! All of these mini-games have obnoxious names like Bug Bashin' or Spooky Shootout. The charm lasts about as long as it takes you to push the PS button and return to the XMB.

You can play each mini-game on its own and see how high a score you can obtain, or you can play survival mode which tasks you with earning enough points in each mini-game to stick it through to the next before your survival bar depletes. Each mini-game transforms the Move wand into different tools on the screen. Sometimes the controller will turn into a paintbrush in your hands or a bat to smash a piñata with.

[image2]Children will be delighted that they're on screen interacting with the games by waving their arms around and playing with silly characters on screen. Adults will be utterly disgusted.

Frankly, Start the Party! is the result of someone mixing pixie sticks and Nickelodeon. From the opening screen, the announcer is yelling at you with a voice worse than even the most obnoxious game show hosts. There's no semblance of theme between the minig-ames, and everything splashes with eye-bleeding neon colors. If you have children, they'll be delighted, but if you're over the age of twelve, the party will decidedly end the moment you put this game in the disc drive.