Murder mystery dinner parties work because they combine our two favorite things: dead people and pudding. So why hasn’t popular culture caught on? A Touch of Frosted Icing, Inspector Mousse, Miami Vice Cream, Charlie’s Angel Delight – these things write themselves. Guilty Party makes up for lost time with a mix of social crime-thwartery and a pudding-obsessed plot.

How do you beat guilty party?, Disney Guilty Party Questions and answers, Wii.

Were Guilty Party a pudding itself it would be a mess: a blend of crushed up Clue and Guess Who with Mario Party sprinkled on top. You scamper around a crime scene – rendered in a lovely 2D cross-section – collecting info on the perpetrator’s physical appearance. Developers Wideload force you to engage the little grey cells by hiding the truth behind conflicting clues. By all means race to make an accusation, but uncollected evidence may prove to be your undoing.

Suspects are questioned in minigames. They are bribed, stared down and tickled. Come on: tickled? Coppers don’t tickle. Where’s the shattered knuckles and bars of soap wrapped in hockey socks? These games are thematically tame. They’re pretty fun-free and ugly to boot. In a game packed with rich 3D character design, these tasks are blighted with crude 2D befitting a title sitting at the cheap end of the Flash game spectrum.

Multiplayer over-eggs the murder pudding. Players split into rival teams and are festooned with vindictive trap cards to throw the competition off the scent. Rooms are locked, lips zippered and suspects shifted at will. Underhand maneuvers are essential to board games – if Monopoly doesn’t end in tears you’re not playing it right – but this rampant backstabbing derails the case. So much time is wasted falling through trap doors and missing turns that the perp often escapes.

And what’s with opposing teams sharing information? That’s like Battleship without the central partition. As a limp solution, evidence is shared, but only the collectors are privy to its veracity. Er… by asking the other team to look away. The art of comparing facts – so doable with physical cards in a game of Clue – has no elegant equivalent on the TV screen.

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Oct 7, 2010

Whether it is in a movie, televisions show, book, or a game, I’ve always found a good mystery to be enjoyable. Trying to be observant, picking up on subtle clues, compiling information, and ultimately, figuring out who or what is responsible. However, I’m not saying all mysteries should be serious, as the over-the-top movie Clue is easily one of my all-time favorites. This is the side of whodunits that Guilty Party falls into, not taking itself too seriously but still managing to keep the players attention from start to finish with its charm.

The story of Guilty Party revolves around the family owned and operated Dickens Detective Agency. The family of sleuths that make up the agency are an eccentric and varied bunch. On one hand, you’ve got characters like Max, an overweight detective who seems like a somewhat realistic portrayal of a real person, and on the other, you have over-the-top characters such as Kid Riddle, a child always wearing a cape and mask, and Charlotte, a senior citizen who loves to perform martial arts on evildoers. Luckily, since the game doesn’t take itself seriously, all of these characters fit in perfectly and generate some genuinely humorous dialog and antics during their quest to hunt down the agency’s nemesis, Mr. Valentine.

Guilty Party’s story mode is what helps to separate the game from the plethora of other party games that have continued to flood the Wii since its release. This mode consists of six levels, a prologue, and a finale, each bookended with humorous cinematics that keep the story moving forward. The prologue does a good job of introducing the player to the concepts they will need to progress through the game and take down Mr. Valentine. These include moving, questioning suspects, collecting clues, narrowing down your suspects (by discovering the criminal’s height, shape, hair style, and gender), and pudding, which manages to play a large role throughout, even if not in the gameplay.

The game plays out similarly to many board games, having players taking turns moving around what is essentially a board while trying to get to the bottom of each level’s mystery. Each turn has the player receiving three coins and picking a savvy card at random from three possible choices. Coins are used to move your character any number of rooms by choosing your destination and then paying a coin to move there. They are also needed in order to interrogate witnesses and collect clues, at the cost of one coin apiece. Either way, paying your coin will instigate a mini-game in which you must perform one of over forty random tasks in order to uncover what you’re looking for.

Most of the mini-games involve things related to investigation, such as bribing a witness, dusting for prints, and piecing together shredded clues. However, there are also mini-games that appear completely unrelated, such as picking a person’s favorite food, swatting bugs, and patching leaking holes with glue and tape. Even so, the sheer variety of mini-games helps to keep any of them from getting stale. While you may not see the point in one of the mini-games you are tasked with, at least you’re not just repeatedly doing the same ten that make sense.

The mini-games in Guilty Party can be humorous, but from a gameplay perspective, they aren’t always exactly fun or challenging. Almost every mini-game in Guilty Party can be solved by shaking the Wii-Remote erratically, pointing it at the screen, dragging objects, or a combination of the three. This makes completing these tasks almost an afterthought and an inconvenience. However, things get even worse as the game decides that you need to jump up in difficulty.

Disney Guilty Party Cheats

Rather than giving the player the option of making the game harder or easier, your difficulty level is set depending on how you perform in mini-games. If you do too well, the game will inform you things are going to get harder, giving you no choice in the matter. While this isn’t a terrible idea on paper, some of the mini-games are ridiculously unbalanced when played at higher levels. For instance, one mini-game tasks you with shaking the Wii-Remote in order to use a fan to clear the fog away from a witness’s memory. On the easiest difficulty level, there is one memory and it can be cleared in about five seconds. However, on the hardest difficulty, there are three memories which continue to fog back over when not being fanned, making clearing all three in the time allotted insanely difficult. I’m not necessarily opposed to a challenge, but when you can breeze through several mini-games without much effort only to get stuck on one in particular for several turns’ worth of coins, something is wrong.