''Family Pirate Party'' (''Okiraku Sugoroku Wii'' in Japan) is a

pirate Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and valuable goods, or taking hostages. Those who conduct acts of piracy are call ...

-themed

party A party is a gathering of people who have been invited by a Hospitality, host for the purposes of socializing, conversation, recreation, or as part of a festival or other commemoration or celebration of a special occasion. A party will oft ...

video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

developed by

Arc System Works , commonly referred to as ArcSys, is a Japanese video game developer and video game publisher, publisher located in Yokohama. Founded by Minoru Kidooka in 1988, the company is known for arcade 2D fighting game franchises, including ''Guilty Gear ...

for

WiiWare WiiWare was a digital media entertainment service operated by Nintendo that allowed the download of games and applications developed for the Wii video game console. These games and applications could only be purchased and downloaded from the W ...

. It was released in Japan on January 17, 2009, and later, released in

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

on May 11, 2009, and the

PAL region Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a color encoding system for analog television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25& ...

on July 30, 2010.

Gameplay

Players control a member of a family, which includes a mother, father, son (Billy), and daughter (Sarah), as they traverse around a group of islands, competing against each other to collect the most gold pieces. In addition to picking up random Help Cards that allows them to gain more gold or steal pieces from other players, players may also encounter brief minigames that require them to use the

Wii Remote The Wii Remote, colloquially known as the Wiimote, is the primary game controller for Nintendo's Wii home video game console. An essential capability of the Wii Remote is its motion sensing capability, which allows the user to interact with an ...

to fight off an angry octopus or shoot down cannonballs or asteroids heading towards them. The game features additional

downloadable content content (DLC) is additional content created for an already released video game, distributed through the Internet by the game's publisher. It can be added for no extra cost or as a form of video game monetization, enabling the publisher to gain ad ...

in the form of new maps and a swimsuit costume for each character.

Reception

''Family Pirate Party'' received negative reviews from critics upon release. On

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

, the game holds a score of 46/100 based on 4 reviews, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". On

GameRankings GameRankings was a video gaming review aggregator that was founded in 1999 and owned by CBS Interactive. It indexed over 315,000 articles relating to more than 14,500 video games. GameRankings was discontinued in December 2019, with its staff bei ...

, the game holds a score of 36.83% based on 6 reviews.

IGN ''IGN'' is an American video gaming and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco's SoMa district and is headed by its former e ...

criticized the game's lack of interaction, noting that the gameplay largely equates to "nothing more than the random, repetitive rolling of dice" by the computer. ''Nintendo Life'' called it "a poor man's ''

Mario Party is a series of party video games created by Hudson Soft and owned by Nintendo. It features List of Mario franchise characters, characters from the Mario (franchise), ''Mario'' franchise in which up to four local players or Artificial inte ...

''". Both reviews criticized ''Family Pirate Partys few mini-games, which they felt should have been the focus of the game as in the Mario title.

References

External links

Official Website
(Japanese) 2009 video games Arc System Works games Multiplayer and single-player video games Party video games Video games about pirates Video games developed in Japan Wii games Wii-only games WiiWare games {{party-videogame-stub