Hasbro Family Game Night (Wii)

Gamecow’s Price	RRP $69.95     Save $24.00 $45.95
Availability
Genre	Party Games
Platform	Nintendo Wii
Release Date	20/11/2008
Rated

Hasbro Family Game Night brings all your favourite board games onto the Wii.  Connect Four, Battlehsip, Yahtzee, Boggle and Sorry! have all been recreated into a video game.  This is the perfect game for your family game night.

Hasbro Family Game Night (Wii) Product Information

Join your host Mr. Potato Head as you play classic Hasbro games as well as exciting new versions created for the Wii. Hasbro Family Game Night features family favourites such as CONNECT FOUR, BATTLESHIP, YAHTZEE, BOGGLE, SORRY! and the all new, SORRY! Sliders.

FEATURES:
• Classic Games!  Play the classic games that you know and love Play like Never Before!
• Exciting new ways to play every game – like CONNECT 4 Power Chips, BOGGLE Portal Cubes, Reverse YAHTZEE and BATTLESHIP Barrage!
• Deck Out Your Very Own Game Room. Choose the game room theme that’s right for you
• Earn new game themed trophies, furniture and decorations to customise your game room
• Host a Game Party
• Quickly build a custom Party Game by choosing your favourite games, number of players, and time you want to play

Hasbro Family Game Night (Wii) Review

You've connected four before. You've boggled your mind to search for words, you've rolled five sixes out of the cup on the first round, and you've certainly sunk your share of battleships. But though you've done it all before, EA's hoping you'll want to do it again, in video game form, with Hasbro Family Game Night.

Each of these six designs can only stay appealing for so long as a single-player experience, so you can go ahead and discount Game Night now if you'll only ever have the opportunity to game alone. Mr. Potato Head (who hosts the overall package) is fine company for a while, but the appeal of each one of these games is built on interactions with other humans competing against you -- not computer A.I., and not the second-string Toy Story star (likable though he may be).

Connect Four is the classic checkers-stacking game, where you attempt to complete a row of four same-coloured chips horizontally, vertically or at a diagonal before your opponent can do the same. It's faithfully re-created here, and as the simplest of the six designs has no issues with control or presentation.

Boggle is the fast-paced word search game made internationally famous by King of the Hill's Peggy. It's a bit more complicated to re-create as a video game, because the normal analog version has you armed with a pen and piece of paper instead of a PlayStation pad or Wii Remote.

Yahtzee has no such control trouble, as its dice rolls are randomly generated whether or not you "shake up" the cup -- the point of the game is to score as high as possible in each of 13 different categories, given three rolls of five dice in each round. If you roll the dice and end up with three fives and two sixes, for example, that's a good score for your Full House category (where you need three of a kind paired with two of a different kind) and so on and so forth.
So Hasbro Family Game Night holds mostly positive points through its representations of its first five games, Boggle being the possible exception.  It's a fun idea, and no doubt enjoyable in its analog edition. The problem comes from the control scheme used here in Hasbro Family Game Night. Sorry! Sliders is the one game among these six that actually has to deal with interpreting your physical force, and its translation there is lacking. With the Wii Remote, you'll try your best to migrate your Wii Sports Bowling skills into this design and send the pawns sliding properly, but it's still often hard to judge how quickly or slowly to swing the controller. And while the PlayStation 2 edition doesn't have to deal with motion control at all, it's not really any easier to do with just analog sticks and face buttons either.

Hasbro Family Game Night has one last trick up its sleeve after its initial offering of six different games -- its Party mode. In this mode (which is not even playable against the computer, so you're forced to find friends) you'll compete in a mixed-up mish-mash of each of the six main games, with Mario Party styled mini-games based on their rules and gameplay.

Closing Comments

And that's what Hasbro Family Game Night boils down to -- a collection of board game classics that succeeds when those classics are represented well, but isn't nearly so fun when too many liberties are taken or too many control issues get in the way of enjoying each design in the way it was originally intended. Most of the games in Game Night are solid, and the excellent presentation that brings them all together into this one cohesive package makes it a compilation that's certainly worth looking into if you've got the family and friends around who'll want to play it with you.

Full review IGN