Kororinpa: Marble Mania review

Somewhere in the world, there's an animal psychologist using Kororinpa: Marble Mania to determine scientifically, once and for all, if capuchin monkeys are smarter than Paris and Nicky Hilton (and after that, we're guessing, how much). The concept is dead simple - you have a marble, which you need to guide on a jewel-grabbing roll through a floating, maze-like track by tilting the Wii remote - so both groups can instantly grasp the concept.

Moreover, because the controls are so in-tune, so pinpoint accurate, only two things can be blamed when your little spherical buddy plunges off the rails to the abyss: the player's gross motor skills (which, admittedly, we'll give the monkey an edge on) and the player's strategy.

And this is where the game's MC Escher-esque labyrinths, filled with unguarded edges, moving parts, magnetized rails, cannons, stairs and other crazy obstacles come in: they'll require some actual thought to navigate at times. By the end of the 45 mazes (90 if you count the mirror image versions unlocked near the end), Kororinpa will have definitively separated the gold from the guano, the brains from the boobs, the gorillas from the gals. So to speak.

Or, it could just have created a few more Wii fans. This really is a great example of a Wii game done right - the control is perfect, and wouldn't work even with a SixAxis. In fact, the game's two-player mode proves this: if the second player uses the nunchuk controller instead of a remote, the game is harder. Then again, the two-player mode is just a bland, timed race, so that handicap should rarely be a problem.