Nintendo Wii Fanboy

A port of casual PC title Home Sweet Home (succumb to your IKEA nesting instinct) and The Incredible Maze (succumb to possibly the worst game on WiiWare) would struggle to get noticed in most weeks, but on the day Tetris Party finally lands in Europe and Australia? Poor things don't stand a chance, cos' there ain't no party like a Tetris Party!

• Tetris Party -- WiiWare -- 1200 Nintendo Points
• Home Sweet Home -- WiiWare -- 1000 Nintendo Points
• The Incredible Maze -- WiiWare -- 500 Nintendo Points

The Incredible Maze is based on a simple, solid game concept: the wooden "labyrinth" toy. You know the one: you turn dials to tilt a wooden maze so that a ball rolls to the destination point without falling into strategically-placed holes. This concept is the basis for Super Monkey Ball, Kororinpa, and even (sort of) Mercury Meltdown Revolution. The Wii Remote, which can be physically tilted to control gameplay, seems like a natural for this sort of thing.

It's harder than it looks to implement good tilt control on the Wii, however. And The Incredible Maze's tilt controls take what would otherwise be a pretty benign game and ruin it.

Despite both of this week's North American VC releases being quality games in their own right, we found the selection disappointing. We only got two games, one of which is only a minor upgrade over an existing release. Why did Nintendo skimp on the releases? And why have they been skimping for the last three or four weeks?

The situation is actually not that much better in Japan. This week only one new game is available: Devil World, the weirdo Famicom maze game designed by Miyamoto. With the game's dancing Devil making an appearance in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it's not terribly surprising that the original Famicom game is showing up on the VC.

Is it going to join imports like Super Mario Bros. 2 and Sin and Punishment on Western consoles? It's got a lot of religious imagery -- more than Devil's Crush, which was censored -- so we're going to say no and hope we're proven wrong.

• Devil World (Famicom, 1-2 players, 500 Wii Points)

Infendo has taken a snarky poke at the bevy of Marble Madness-y labyrinthine games gearing up for appearances on the Wii, and frankly, we too are surprised at the sheer number of such titles. Super Monkey Ball (obviously) already featured ball-rolling as one of the better parts of an uneven offering, and now three more upcoming games are centered around labyrinth puzzles.

You know, we love rolling balls as much as the next guy, and certainly the gametype suits the console on many levels; the controller and the games-for-everyone theme are both well-supported here. But four games in the first year seems a little excessive. The Wiimote is also really well-suited to pointing and shooting, but we don't need four simple shooting gallery games, either. Sure, each game has different features. In Dewy's Adventure, the "marble" can go vaporous or crystallize into ice. Awesome. Except at the end of the day, it's still all about rolling around from here to there. This is really a pretty simple theme, and there are only so many variations on it. How many labyrinth games are we really going to buy? Does anyone expect to own all of these?