Until recently, to say videogames helped improve motor skills and hand/eye coordination was mostly just a marketing ploy to endear parents to their kids' pastime. That is, there's very little motor and coordination involved between seeing a video image and reacting to it by twitching one's thumb -- the action itself might depict something elaborately coordinated; its really just reflexive twitch that invokes it, a neuron stimulator.

Now, of course, you have your Nintendo Wii and its celebrated, motion-sensitive controller that does, in fact, require responsive, modestly coordinated gestures to engage those visual images. Even so, it's hardly the pinnacle of fine- and gross motor-skills apparatus; it's too forgiving for that. Often a single, spastic twitch of the wrist will affect the same result as the athletic precision of, say, the swing of tennis racket. Such is the nature of "accessibility."

So it follows that EA's Ninja Reflex does the best with what it has in a Wii-mote intensive reflex training game -- and does it rather well.

First, Ninja Reflex is not an action game of stealth martial artists assassinating the unsuspecting, nor is it particularly immersive, intense or long playing. No, Ninja Reflex has more in common with those "brain training" games; a collection of dexterity exercises that interactively illustrates the finer points of Ninjutsu (or what seems primarily Ninjutsu-ish), the requisite, concentrated calm, the loose, elegant movements (as opposed to the stiff, aggressive strength of most martial arts), and, most obviously, the need to react precisely, quickly and correctly to given circumstances.

There's only a scant six reflex exercises offered, mind you, but played at progressive difficulty, so engaging and reliably challenging in snippets. It's the kind of game you play for "15 minutes a day," grabbing fish from a pond with your bare hand, snatching flies from the air with chopsticks, moving-target practice, whacking pitched watermelon with your swishing nunchaku (not to be confused with the Wii-mote's Nunchuk attachment, which isn't actually used), that sort of thing.

Oddly, perhaps erringly, there's but one exercise that has you using the Wii-mote like a Katana (sword), first to block an attack then to follow with a killing swipe, which single-handedly (ha ha) makes Ninja Reflex a game perhaps a bit to intense for young kids, the ones who could really benefit from such base motor-skill drills, though it's otherwise greatly suited to them, or their parents, or grandparents, and anyone else interested in a wee challenge that actually uses the Wii-mote like the all-ages hand/eye coordinator it's innately designed to be. Oh well.