Well, if that were Fortune Street, you could quickly buy stocks in that area so that way when he inevitably buys a house and a hotel for his monopoly, you benefit as well. Imagine if you're playing Monopoly and you've got one friend with Park Place and Boardwalk. You can buy stock in different districts, meaning you get a cut of every sale in that area as well as an increased stock value if someone invests in it. The major addition for this set of rules is the stock market. Then, I tried it with the regular, more complicated rules, and I was even more infatuated.
All of this is set in an awesome Mario and Dragon Quest wrapper, featuring a variety of characters (Platypunk! Waluigi! Yangus!) and settings (Spaceship Mario! All-Trades Abbey!) with an excellent soundtrack. You buy properties, you invest in those properties, and you try to make money while bankrupting your friends. The basic mode is essentially just Monopoly. Fortune Street is the best version of Monopoly ever made. Like most Wii owners at the time, I wasn't paying too much attention to this seeming Mario Party rip-off.Įventually, I bought it for cheap and tried it out. Our own review was pretty high on the game, calling it "the definitive Wii board game experience" and trumpeting its depth and strategy. It didn't stay on my radar after that.įortune Street ended up launching discretely in late 2011, weeks after Skyward Sword was the "swan song" of Wii. All I really remember about that demo was that the writing for each character's trash-talking smack was dumb and funny. With no one on line for it, I wound up playing it on the last day of E3 that year. Fortune Street, for better or worse, is a game that demos horribly.
I first discovered Fortune Street at E3 2011, when it was revealed that the Wii version of the long-running Japanese series Itadaki Street was coming to America.