Guest Author - Lisa Shea

If you enjoy mini-game multiplayer fun like the Mario Party series, then OnePiece Pirates' Carnival will be right up your alley.

Where Mario Party has a main board with a "path" like Life or CandyLand, in Pirates' Carnival your main board is a grid, more like Othello. You're trying to turn squares to your color and capture as many as you can.

In order to win a given square, you have to play a mini-game. This is quite fun in a situation where other people are around to play with, or you can play against the computer to hone your skills. You can choose to play as a variety of male or female characters.

If you're playing against the computer, you can even set the difficulty level of each of the 3 other players. So you can start with them all on easy, and slowly work your way up with some easy and some harder.

The mini-games are pretty fun, and involve the OnePiece crew. You can slide around in a ring trying to bash each other out, sort of a cross between Sumo rules and sliding samurai sensibilities. Other games involve dodging missiles, racing, and other traditional mini-game tasks.

The graphics are reasonably good here, with rippling water, cel shaded graphics and characters from the series. The sounds match up well with the series, which depending on how fond you are of the US version, could be a good or bad thing.

Because the game is fun multiplayer, and because you can ramp up the difficulty based on your own skills, the game can be played pretty much forever. There's always a new challenge in the game. Unlike the path-based games like Mario Party, the strategic challenges of the main board here are great for building up logic skills.

Now, there's the caveat that if you don't enjoy Mario Party style mini-games, you probably won't enjoy this either. It's not a long, epic story. It doesn't involve complex keystrokes to trounce an enemy. However, if you're up for light arcadey fun, and have friends you can hang out with for a few hours, definitely give Pirates' Carnival a try.

Buy One Piece Pirates' Carnival from Amazon.com