SAN FRANCISCO – High-quality Wii games from third parties may be few and far between, but Guilty Party could buck that trend.
Guilty Party, unveiled Wednesday at a Nintendo media briefing, is best thought of as a more complex version of the murder-mystery board game Clue. It's the first collaboration between Stubbs the Zombie creator Wideload Games and its new corporate overlords at Disney. From all appearances, it's a match made in heaven: Wideload's penchant for comedy and family-friendly party games blends well with Disney's aesthetic and target market.
I laughed out loud quite a bit while taking Guilty Party for a spin. The cast of detective characters shows up at the beginning and end of each mystery in the story mode, in story sequences that are genuinely funny, with great dialogue and comedy timing. While the game can create an unlimited amount of random cases for you to solve, in much the same manner as Clue's card-shuffling, it seems as if you'll want to play the story mode first for all the well-paced humor and the plot that runs through all the cases.
The story mode features drop-in, drop-out cooperative gameplay, so parents can pick up a controller and help kids with the cases if they're struggling, for example. Players take turns moving about the different locations (a mansion and a cruise ship, just to name two) and investigating question mark icons – these might indicate a person to interrogate or a clue that's been left on the ground.
Every such investigation brings up a Mario Party-style minigame – you might need to bribe a witness by placing money into their hands, or stare them in the eyes by moving the pointer around.
Occasionally, you'll have to play cooperative mini-games – in the one we tried, I had to pick up boards and hold them against a hole in a wall while the other player nailed them in. It all seems like pretty solid stuff.
Every time you successfully complete a challenge, you'll get another clue. In your notebook, you can build a profile of the suspect, as shown above, based on the clues you've collected. In the early stages, the clues will be pretty direct – a witness might just say flat-out that the culprit was tall, for example. But later in the game, they'll get a bit more convoluted: You might have to infer that a suspect was tall based on him bumping his head on the ceiling in another room, for example.
Once you've got everything in place, you can accuse a suspect, but you'll have to illustrate that you had all of the clues necessary and didn't just guess.
Guilty Party will be available in the second half of 2010.
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