For a machine built with one eye very much on social gaming and the gathering together of lots of people to make fools of themselves, the Nintendo Wii should surely be the most comfortable home ever for the Mario Party franchise.

And in some ways it is: Mario Party is, after all, a big, multi-player board game laced with lots of silly little mini-games that can be enjoyed by up to four players. It's very simple: you hit the dice, move the number of squares, try to gather stars and coins (in that order of priority) and have a big mini-game mash at the end of every turn.

And yet, even taking into account the fact that the Mario Party franchise has consistently delivered enjoyable, but hardly classic, multi-player gaming entertainment, version eight asks a lot of tolerance of its audience.

For starters, it really does drag on. Extended scenes of characters talking rubbish at you really don't help, but even if you choose the shortest ten-turn take on the main board game, you're easily committing an hour or two of your life to it. That in itself wouldn't be a problem, but the board game element really does start to become a chore, the extended padding before you can get to the mini-games that are the real meat of the game.

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The mini-games themselves have a few issues too. Firstly, while there are many different games included within Mario Party 8, many of them are ports from previous iterations of the franchise. Some have, to be fair, been convincingly moved over to the Wii control system, and all the new additions to the mini-game pot utilise it quite well. And this is when the game hits its peaks; waving the Wiimote around like a mad person is surely what the crowd expects from a Wii-based Mario Party game, and sporadically it delivers just that.

Sadly, some of these mini-games are more clumsy in their control system, requiring you to turn the controller on its side to use the thumbpad and standard fire buttons instead. These are far less comfortable and far less fun.

Much has been done to spice things up, with a variety of different boards to play along (we particularly enjoyed the train), and Mario Party still entertains a room of people in need of some multi-player gaming.

But that doesn't hide the - whisper it - laziness at work here. Nintendo knows full well that Mario Party will sell no matter how little work it does between versions, and while we're hardly talking a FIFA-esque pseudo-photocopy update, there nonetheless has to come a point where Mario Party gets a ground-up reworking.

This isn't it, though. Instead, it's a tame Wii update of a fun party game. So while it isn't without merits, it is worth approaching with a hint of caution.

Not the Wii-tastic version of the franchise you were hoping for. Mario Party 8 delivers fun, but it asks for a lot of patience from its players in return.