Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games

If it's novelty value you're after then the bobsleigh mini-game is your best bet. It's played by holding the remote vertically up to your chest and tilting your body left and right to steer down the run. For best results, try getting players to sit front-to-back in a row of chairs or on a chaise longue. It all looks and feels very silly, just like a good multiplayer Wii mini-game should.

For a more relaxed experience, try curling. It's bowls on ice, essentially, with a bit of waggling thrown in to simulate doing the stupid thing with the broom. The game is turn-based and there are several stages to each turn - you have to get the power of your throw right, then adjust the angle, then watch the gauge on the right-hand side of the screen as you try to sweep your stone into the centre of the target. The fun really begins when players start knocking each other's stones out of position, which soon becomes more about annoying each other than actually scoring points. Excellent.

The mini-game most similar to ye olde video-gaymes of ye early nineties is ice hockey. It's a reminiscent of the NHL titles in the days when they were built with bits of Ceefax, except your top-down view of the rink is horizontal. Holding the remote sideways-on you press 2 to pass and use the d-pad to aim. Shooting is done by jerking the controller upwards. The character you're controlling switches constantly, depending on who's got the puck and the position of the players on-screen.

It sounds simple, and if you've played this sort of game before it is. However, casual types might struggle to get the hang of things. The action moves quickly, the camera flits around and it can be tricky to follow all the character-switching and the movement of the puck. Probably not one for grandma then, and certainly not if she's forgotten her glasses, but a treat for those who remember when games were good even though they looked rubbish.

As with any mini-game collection there are a few duds. In this case they're the speed skating events, which are played simply by swishing your arm around with the correct timing. It's surprisingly hard to get this right at first; there seems to be a lot of lag between your movements and the action on screen, and occasionally your character goes mental and starts whizzing their arms about madly even though you're not doing anything. With practice you realise it's more effective to swish the remote like a conductor's baton than try to mimic a speed skater's movements, and things get easier. But not much more entertaining.

All of the above events are unlocked when you first boot up the game. This is of course a Good Thing, as it means you can get stuck straight into a bit of curling come Christmas morning without having to spend hours unlocking stuff. A definite improvement over the first game, then.

There is a Story mode mind you, or as it's titled here, Festival. It's a bit like the World Tour in Virtua Tennis. You take part in a 30-day tournament and are assigned up to three training sessions and competitive events per day. There are also a few boss battles - Bullet Bill might challenge you to a bobsleigh race, for example. (He's tough to beat, what with being inherently aerodynamically suitable for this sort of thing.)

Festival mode is well-structured, rewarding and enjoyable, especially if you take the option to play through it co-operatively with a friend. It also offers an excellent way to try out all the events and get used to the various control systems. But best of all, playing through Festival mode wins you extra stuff.

That includes in-game currency which you can use to buy things in the all-new Olympic Village shops. There's a music store which sells tracks from MSOWG as well as classic hits from old Mario and Sonic titles. The Sports Shop offers decals and paint-jobs for your equipment. The Library is full of tedious books about things like "the vocabulary of the Olympic Winter Games", which might not be so tedious if you hadn't been to a press event where you were made to sit through an hour-long explanation of why they chose the colours blue and green for the logo.