The wonderful thing about well-made typical Wii games is that their simplicity is earned by the finesse the Wiimote introduces. If you can make hitting a baseball have some fraction of the intrinsic and tactile joy of doing so in real life, you don't need to stack piles of systems around that action to make it meaningful, because it already is. This is where the shovelware knockoffs that came to define the Wii usually went wrong: they'd make something just as easy to understand and simple as Wii Sports or the better minigames in Wii Play, but never earned the right to do so. That is, they weren't interested in refining gamefeel down to the point where a game can be that simple and still remain engaging for more than a few minutes.

While developers looking to make a quick buck with games that existed simply to occupy space on a shelf were mostly to blame for this phenomenon, enough fell into this trap while still appearing to actually try that I don't think Nintendo was blameless. The standard Wii remote's IR pointer is excellent, but the accelerometers are pretty lackluster for more than the simplest of actions, with seemingly no one outside of Nintendo able to make it feel like the precision device it originally seemed to be. Play even the best-implemented games with this in mind and it becomes pretty easy to see the limitations of the controller and where those games cleverly paper over its flaws. That's not to say the Wiimote was bad, it's just that the effect working required slight of hand on the parts of developers that rarely came together, so we got the dreaded waggle.

Wii MotionPlus and the Wii Remote Plus were later released to add a gyroscope in an attempt to make the Wii remote what it promised to be. It sort of worked, but at the expense of elegance. You could have nuanced sword movements in an action game, but only if you subjected yourself to constant fiddly recalibrating. How does it work for a follow-up to Wii Play, a collection of high score-chasing minigames meant to show off the original Wii remote? It does alright! While the aiming-based games control horribly compared to past equivalents that use IR, the rest are mostly pretty neat! My personal favorite is the rock skipping minigame despite the fact that every throw I make is exactly the same for some reason. The zen of tossing rocks onto the water as the sun sets and everything is so quiet is so compelling on its own that I don't even care how little it seems to actually care about my movements. Oh, and I love that the background Miis are much more active in the minigames than was usual in earlier Wii series games, making your friends and the fictional characters you downloaded from the Check Mii Out channel the supporting cast of your high score chasing sessions rather than just extras.

But despite all that added nuance to controls, I'm not sure any of these minigames really carry the intrinsically satisfying control that elevates something like Wii bowling or the rallying in Wii Play. What's here works based on warm, cutesy vibes or from making you say "oh, that's a neat use of the technology!" That's great, but given that in 2011 Nintendo was about to dig themselves into a generation-long hole of games that make you say exactly that and little else, it's funny to see.

I wish I had this in its day or even knew it existed, it's got a lot of character and I would have been even more receptive to it back then, I think.