Pac-Man Party is a party game dedicated to Pac-Man, that famous icon of gaming. I wondered if that would be enough, however, to make a game you actually wanted to look at for more than an hour. It was a nice surprise to find that the game does a good job of keeping things interesting. Cheerful Pac-Man manages to be expressive and cute, and that's pretty good for a character that really is just a round yellow ball. His ghost friends have also gotten little touches like cartoony "hair." They really have managed to put a lot of personality into these characters, which is amazing considering their primitive arcade game roots.

Pac-Man Party is a bright, cheery game, with blue skies, green grass, and generally friendly cartoon graphics. The sounds follow the same suit, with music reminiscent of cartoony side-scrollers, and other family friendly gaming staples. It's very friendly, very fun, but not really anything you'll be humming the next day. Likewise, Pac-Man and his friends make a few squeaks and squawks, but no one actually speaks any lines.

Pac-Man Party centers around a board game where Pac-Man and other characters from his game try to collect the most "cookies." It's what Pac-Man has been doing since the original game where the yellow guy goes around the screen eating what people have dubbed as everything from dots to pellets. But here, they're cookies, and collecting them is what wins the game.

Story Mode can be played with a single player, but it isn't much of a story. You go around the map playing the game, landing on spaces, playing mini-games, and battling your opponent. When you beat a board, you'll get a short story sequence, pretty much entailing the ghosts stealing or otherwise withholding a cookie recipe from Pac-Man. Pac-Man does meet some new characters along the way, however, including a fox (or cat?) named Patra from a land that looks a lot like ancient Egypt.

The board game itself is a mixture of a lot of different board game concepts. You need to collect castles, which pay you more, the more you own. You can also steal away another player's hard earned work of building a huge castle in an instant by choosing to battle them with a mini-game. There are also some special items like hover boots that help out the person in last place, so the game doesn't get to be an impossible race of catch-up for players that aren't good with the dice. Of course, a big advantage that a video game board game has is that special spaces can be animated, adding a bit more interest to moving around the board.

There's a nice variety of mini-games. You'll do everything from stacking ice cream cones to racing, to painting a canvas. I didn't get any repeats in my playthrough of the whole game, which is pretty impressive. It's just one of the ways this game shows it's not simply a piece of shovelware, there really is a lot that went into it. In addition to the mini-games, three classic arcade games are included: Dig Dug, Galaga, and of course, Pac-Man.

Pac-Man Party shows from the start that it's going to be an accessible game. Tutorials abound, ensuring that you'll know exactly what you need to do. Since this is a party game, much of the game centers around luck, though you can have a good eye for things like throwing the dart at the number selection wheel.

Not much skill is required to win most of the games, which simply ask the player to shake the Wii-mote or twist it repeatedly, or something similar. Some games are more like platformers or side-scrollers, and require a little more skill to win. If you find yourself in one of these games and you're sure you won't be able to make it, you can use a power pellet to give yourself a boost of power, speed, or whatever the mini-game calls for in order to help yourself win.

Pac-Man Party does have one of the classic aggravating features that seems to plague most of these types of games. It just takes way too long to tally the ending score to every mini-game, to wait for the movement screen to come up after you press a button, etc. When you have to do things over and over in a turn-based party game like this, the little seconds of arbitrary waiting between everything just seem to go on forever.

Other than the excessive wait times, Pac-Man Party delivers a pretty cute and cuddly party game for fans of the genre. The mini-game controls always seem to function just fine, but of course, a lot of this is due to the fact that there's a lot of button-mashing and Wii-mote waggling required instead of precise movements.