There's a reason you find so many Wii games in Walmart's "2 for $10" bargain bins: Some game publishing hucksters use Nintendo's little white wonder to play hard and fast with the unsuspecting consumers Wii so easily lures. Put some smiley faces and wholesome playthings on the box and poof!, you're a Wii game, decent content within not required. Two weeks later, the jig is up but many units moved, the rest hit the junk heap.

What's worse is that Wii does, in fact, play host to some genuinely wholesome and fantastically fun games; they're just indistinguishable from the not-Shinola for said same box art flair. Hence, check these three good 'uns for Wii.



New Super Mario Bros. Wii ($50)
Say what you will about the flood of third-party duds bogging down the Wii's game library; when Nintendo's internal developers step up to the plate to release their own game for their own system, they knock it out of the park every time. Fans cheers, sales soar. Case in point: Super Mario Bros. In it, there's certainly more than enough neo classic content to satisfy any seasoned Nintendo gamer, but it also includes an option for up to four players to opt-in or out of the game at any time. For the novice player (or regular the gamer apathetic to contrived intricacies), there's a wondrous autopilot-like feature called "Super Guide" that will run characters through trickier segments while the you simply watch, marvel and, hopefully, learn. New Super Mario Bros. Wii also sports a couple of separate "party" flavored modes, dubbed Coin Battle and Free For All, offering great, goofball fun of the collect and stomp all-play variety.

Rated Everyone (6+) for Comic Mischief


a boy and his blob ($40)
A unique, inventive adventure of deceptively childlike wonder and simplicity, a boy and his blob (so punctuated) should not be missed by any gamer of any skill level or any age. Actually a remake of an old 80's title, this side-scrolling puzzle-laden adventure is easy-going yet enjoyably vexing as you control an unexceptional boy controlling his animated glop of goo that can transmogrify into a surplus of shapes, objects or tools (beachball, trampoline, anvil, ride-'em-rocket etc.) when fed the right jelly bean to aid in the quest to, uh, get from one level to the next.

Rated Everyone (6+) for Mild Cartoon Violence


Wii Sports Resort w/Wii MotionPlus ($60)
While the Wii console comes packed with the enduring Wii Sports game collection, it is Wii Sports Resort that puts Wii back into the realm of relevant. It's one of two bundles that includes one or two MotionPlus dongles that snap in to the bottom of stock Wii Remote (Wii-mote) controllers to offer much more accurate motion sensing capabilities so compatible Wii games are not merely about waggle and twitch anymore. The Wii Sports Resort game itself is perfectly illustrative of MotionPlus gaming, with exciting and often hilarious little sojourns into stick fighting, Frisbee, ping pong and familiar bowling made huge with 100 pins in a triple-wide alley. Great, great fun.

Rated Everyone (6+) for Cartoon Violence