Delightful tossing around of stuff and real sense of accomplishment as you power up your capture gun.

User Rating: 8.4 | Elebits WII
I haven't played Katamari Damacy, though I know I'd love it. I believe this game fits in a similar niche. It's more of a toy than a game. The fun is in figuring out whatever puzzle lets you power up your gun enough to just tear through the place, leveling everything in sight, or flinging it into the stratosphere. Doing this isn't always easy, with time constraints to begin with, and real opposition later on from miniature tanks, cannons, and certain angry elebits. I enjoy the music and composite drawn cut-scenes, and I'm almost over the voice acting. I've stopped cursing at the actors and moved on to imagining them as chairs and shelf units before my mighty beam.

I've owned the game for a little more than 24 hours, and played it for 13 of those. I'm not tired of it yet. In fact, I'm only beginning to scratch the surface of the map editing, a feature sorely missed in my other purchase: Far Cry Vengeance (edit: I returned Vengeance and bought Lost Planet).

So, beyond justifying the game's existence, how does it play? The capture gun gives you amazing control over your environment, and moving and looking is the best I've seen yet on the Wii (granted, you don't need to move very fast). Once you grab an item, you can drag and lift it, of course, but you can also rotate it, push it, pull it, or just shake it around. All of this is done as if you actually had the item on a pole extending from the Wiimote. A pole made of latex. The beam is very elastic, so that items near the limit of your gun's power will move quite sluggishly and bend your beam quite a lot. Relatively light items (an apple or a car, depending on your guns current power) snap back and forth very responsively.

The elebits, as you may already know, power the modern world and come in many varieties. The most necessary kind are counted as watts, and come in several forms, each with a different wattage. Another sort powers your gun, also by different degrees depending on its color. Still others are simply jerks, helping you in no way and flinging themselves at your face if you accidentally hit one with your beam, causing damage. Collecting the power elebits, in an effort to move bigger things and thus access blocked areas, is the most satisfying part of the whole mess. However, you must balance your attention between the elebits that count towards your wattage and the ones that power your gun. You need the power to access most of the elebits in the stage, but you also need to be thorough with what you can access already or the clock will cut you short. As Obi-Wan say, "Be mindful of the future, but not at the expense of the present".

So far, this game is absolutely the nearest to the Wii ideal of any I've played. Zelda's great, Rayman's hilarious, Monkey Ball's bewitching. Each of them deserves to be on the console, but this game really defines the console. It could not be done with any other hardware. You'll have the Rabbids on PS2, but Elebits will stay put by its nature.