Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games

There seems to be a strange trend of late for games which effectively play by themselves. Like waiting for an install to finish on a PC, it feels like you’re actually doing something constructive whilst elsewhere making tea. Football Manager and Sim City were always the kings of such lazy game-playing, yet Pro Evo seems to be attempting to steal that crown now, with the ‘Become a Legend’ mode, whereby you effectively sit on the bench as your computer compatriots run round like headless chickens. The hard work of actually playing is done by the game while you’re left to concentrate on more pressing matters, such as playing an entirely different game on another console/laptop, cooking a stir-fry or just drinking neat whiskey.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, the follow-up to 2006’s gazillion selling summer edition, is of course, nothing like this. It curtly demands complete concentration, with every flail of the Wii remote accounted for and punished. Not only this, but some excruciatingly poor menu music ensures you’ll never leave it on in the background either.

Still, people don’t purchase such games as Mario & Sonic et al to sit on their own in the dark fiddling with buttons, that’s what XBox 360’s are for. No, as the nauseating adverts demonstrate, such brightly flavoured Wii games - offering a wide array of competitive and co-operative mini-games, are really intended to be played in groups; at parties with friends, family gatherings or Jamie Redknapp’s unknown brother. Of the 20-something “adrenaline-pumping winter events” on display here, mostly involving the Wii remote being twisted, hurled round or flicked — it’s a surprisingly sedentary event that produced the most kicks when ‘tested’ with friends however.

Curling, possibly the dullest of winter sports but the only one in which Britain, well, Scotland, excels at, turned out to be incredible. Players have to work co-operatively; aiming, bowling and sweeping in unison to beat a surprisingly wily computer team. To add a bit of variety to choosing which mini-games to play too, there’s also a neat ‘party’ mode which creates game-show style formats and helps prevent the best players from overly dominating proceedings.

As was the case with its predecessor, some games work well - take the pick-up n’ play simplicity of skiing, skeleton or snowboard half-pipe, whilst others - the tedious figure skating or the cack-handed controls of short circuit speed skating, simply don’t.

It’s almost given in party games that the single player mode is a bit of a let down but despite the fact that most events are genuinely entertaining and challenging, Mario and Sonic et al doesn't help itself with possibly the longest series of tutorials in gaming history in ‘Festival’ mode. Despite the games themselves being so well designed that most pensioners could pick them up in 30 seconds, the developers decided that we need to sit through a separate tutorial and practice event for each one of the 25+ events in the game. Each event is then followed by reams of patronising text by cutesy long-forgotten characters from the Sonic games.

But cut through all the treacle and handholding and you’ll find a series of well produced, deceptively addictive games that banish such admittedly minor gripes. Is it as slick as its main competitor Wii Sports Resort? No. Despite having more games, the mechanics of playing just aren’t as varied or as imaginative, yet that shouldn’t stop families from crowding round Wii’s this Christmas to enjoy what is a very likeable game.