Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip

But if you don't have a Balance Board, or you can't be bothered to keep moving the sofa about, the Wii remote offers equally acceptable controls. Tilting the remote steers, a flick in the air will get you jumping, and A and B still tuck and carve. Tricks are less successful: jab randomly at various buttons while yanking the controller in any direction and you'll pull off something rather special, but it probably won't be the same something special you got the last time you did exactly the same thing.

Taken on traditional videogame levels, it's slightly broken, yet the generosity of the whole process - coupled with excellent animations and a surprisingly large set of moves - means that it's weirdly enjoyable nonetheless. In the end, the trick system in Road Trip has the same kind of unexpected payoffs that endlessly pressing the "randomise avatar" button does in LittleBigPlanet - but without the zebra heads and General Alcazar moustaches. It's not perfect, but it could be worse.

While each control method is enjoyable, there's a sense that the game never entirely finds its sweet spot in terms of difficulty. Pulling off tricks on the Balance Board can be extremely tough, as can lining yourself up for jumps and landings, whereas the remote makes it a touch too easy to blast through the game, maracas-style. Road Trip certainly coaxes more reliability out of the Wii's inputs than most other titles, but it can't entirely avoid that familiar fuzziness the console tends to bring with it.

In terms of structure, alongside the five locations, Road Trip has three basic challenge types - collecting, trick runs, and races - even if it uses a handful of different event names to make it seem like there are more. All three have their pleasures, aided by some busy, if linear slope layouts filled with jumps, grind-rails and sudden turns, and every event has a basic "Dare" objective alongside a more challenging "Respect" one. The option to choose from a range of camera operators, each of whom provides a specific special move such as a trick-points boost or bursts of speed, introduces a pleasantly undemanding layer of strategy, as well.

Despite this, special mention goes, and for all the wrong reasons, to the half-pipe sections, where the need for the fast turns that neither control method can handle combines with imprecise tricks to fuel intense frustration. It's not that they're hard to complete: it's that they're hard to complete without exposing the limitations of the controls. Your best strategy is always to vigorously shake everything from start to finish, and it makes you and the game feel slightly fraudulent. An unnecessary and, thanks to the unlock structure, often compulsory aggravation in the middle of an otherwise accommodating game.

While the single-player's undoubtedly short, it's vivid and full of easy charm, and the multiplayer provides some of the most fun you'll have had with your Wii since the joys of Wii Baseball ended suddenly with that ruptured tendon and a year spent being pushed along the seafront at Margate in a bath chair. The entire solo campaign is playable in split-screen co-op with up to four players, and there's a separate range of challenges and cup runs alongside that.

Only one Balance Board is supported at any time, but if you can't bring yourself to buy three copies of Wii Play for the other remotes, there's a hot-seat pass-around mode which is surprisingly entertaining, and, despite a very strange design decision - characters or locations unlocked in single-player will not carry over, so you'll have to unlock them again by playing the co-op campaign - the joys of local multiplayer are so suited to this chummy kind of game, so you probably won't notice the lack of online options.