Mario Party 8: Playing with strangers, you don’t quite get the smack-talking, elbow throwing experience you do with a group of friends playing Mario Party. But, even though I had to restrain myself from good-naturedly cussing out my seemingly unenthusiastic co-players, Mario Party 8 looks like a fine addition to the series. I’ve long held the theory that every other Mario Party game sucks, and after being unimpressed with 7, I’m pleased to see that 8 supports my hypothesis.

Aside from a metric ton of new minigames, a few new characters join the party crew, most notably Dry Bones, who—along with Boo—makes a surprising number of undead in this entry, which—unsurprisingly—I’m all about.

As for the games, they’re the usual assortment of frenetic and wacky games you’d expect from Mario Party. Some are hits, some are misses, but overall I found myself enjoying even the tamer ones more with the Wii controller. Many of the 3 on 1 games—at least, the ones I saw—seemed to be less in the vein of “gang up on the one guy” then in previous version. I was also surprised that the games seemed to be actively trying to avoid already tired Wiimote tropes—like a thirtieth incarnation of some “shake the controller as fast as you can”-type game.

Playing a full, three-person game on Captain Goomba’s Boardwalk, I also got to try out plenty of items for the game, which this time around take the form of candy. Candy to turn you into a spring, candy to turn you into a giant stone head, candy to turn you into a vampire; there’s some weird abilities in the game, but I actually laughed out loud when Mario turned into a vampire. There was also a cool method of randomly determining characters, say for a minigame battle or other challenge. A wheel with all the characters’ faces appears and starts to spin, a player throws a dart—a-la Wario Ware’s darts minigame—with the face it hits being the character selected. It’s that sort of interaction that really impressed me.

So, despite my scary undead skills, Mario won... ‘cause he cheats. But at least he won using cool vampire powers.

Mario Party 8 releases May 29th.