Labyrinth puzzles galore for Wii

And no, none of them star or even cameo David Bowie, and I apologize for misleading you. Three labyrinth-style games are featured in April’s issue of Nintendo Power magazine, and all of them are due for release this year.

The first is a Konami (publisher of Elebits) release with the working title “Dewy’s Adventure,” a game that “stars a small droplet of water tasked with eliminating a terrible scourge that has befallen the forest.”

You’ll tilt and twist the Wii remote to move the diminutive protagonist around his environment, and use gesture-based controls to unleash special elemental power – Dewy can shoot bolts of lightning, create earthquakes, and more to vanquish foes.


That thermometer on the side also indicates when Dewy will turn into vapor or crystallize into ice, both forms being key to solving the various puzzles. It should be on shelves by the second half of 2007.

Second is Hudson Soft’s “Kororinpa: Marble Mania” – also distributed by Konami – which is due by the end of this month (theoretically) and promises to more or less be your next-gen Marble Madness fix.


Looks maddening. Hopefully we’ll see a return of the evil black marble, as he was always my favorite antagonist on the NES. Third and final is “Mercury Meltdown Revolution”, developed and published by Ignition Entertainment, and scheduled for release in April.


I believe the distinction between this game and the one above it boils down to a matter of preference between consumers – Specifically, those who like their marbles wobbly and amorphous, and those who do not.

All of these games behave in similar fashion – tilt the Wii remote around to move the game world, add in some physics, and fun is scientifically produced. It’s hard to say how much direct influence Sega’s first foray into the Wii market has had on software developers, but let’s hope they aim to improve on the formula instead of producing clones; I don’t think my heart could take another Monkey Ball.