I can’t imagine a legitimate use for “Mario Party 9” other than as a tool to lure in unsuspecting children, and even in that case I’d probably just use candy, since candy isn’t going to make a kid hate you. (I guess the idea is that, unlike candy, “Mario Party 9” might eventually pay for itself.)

I can try to look at it as entertainment, but it’s hard to believe that’s what it was designed as. If you don’t know what a Mario Party is (congratulations, I guess), then here you go: It’s set up like a board game. Players roll dice and move spaces and if they land on certain spaces minigames start. They win coins or stars or whatever and then after so many turns somebody wins. Splash a little Walt-Nintendo-World fetishism on top of that and there you go.

Somewhere between “Mario Party 3” and “Mario Party 9” (I had better things to do, all right?), some boardroom somewhere reached the incredible conclusion that these games are way too complicated. So this time we have more boards for players to move around, except now the boards are straight lines, and all the players stay together on the same space. Up to four players take turns hitting a giant whirling die, making no decisions and watching the whole team lurch forward to various might-as-well-be-random events.