Elebits [Wii]

When the power goes out, don't curse the darkness. Instead, grab an elebit. These shy little creatures supply power, but you'll have to root them out of their hiding places first. Think of them as a cross between mice and batteries. In the game, Elebits, you'll ransack the house and rearrange the furniture to find them, at which point you can suck them up into a capture gun. Then use their essence to power your appliances. It's a clever excuse for some fancy Wii waggling, but it makes for an often tedious game.

A comparison to Namco's Katamari Damacy is inevitable. Both games are about picking up bigger and bigger things. Both games have stylized and somewhat primitive graphics. Both games revel in a sort of gleeful havoc, but with a childlike sense of innocence instead of a destructive malice. Both games even keep a list of everything you've touched for no other reason than the sheer love of lists.

But Elebits stands apart for its unique control scheme. The developers deserve props for clever support of the Wii. The interface works like a first-person shooter, with the analog stick on the Nunchuk controlling your movement and the Wiimote controlling an onscreen pointer.

But the gameplay is all about using the Wiimote to manipulate objects. Point at an object and press a button to pick it up. Once you've picked something up, you can turn it, shake it, smash it, or throw it. You do this to discover the hidden elebits, and then you zap them much as you would a Nazi or a demon in a first person shooter. But the heart of the game is the physics system. Although you'll eventually range much farther than your house, the basics of manipulating objects are always the same.

All the levels are timed. You have to gather a certain amount of power before the time runs out. To do this, you'll need to capture two types of elebits. The first type increases your score and sheds a little light on the environment. You'll need these guys to clear a level. The second type improves the lifting power of your gun. You'll need these guys to get to the first kind of elebits, who are invariably hiding inside heavier objects.

The lift gun elebits, however, tend to be hiding inside appliances that you can't turn on until you've accumulated enough scoring elebits. This is how the game manages its level design. It gives everything the feeling of a constrained puzzle, without any of Katamari's free-roaming sensibility. You'll usually have to replay a level a few times to figure out the progression and make the most of your limited time. You can find pink elebits that unlock new ways to play a level, including an untimed mode that lets you explore at your leisure.