The Wii may be all the rage these days as titles like Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy keep gamers happy while more casual players are enticed with the unit's bountiful shovelware, but many have forgotten about the game that led Nintendo's initiative to expand the market by bringing casual and non-gamers into the mix: Wii Sports. Serving as an introduction to the system and the Wii Remote, it was a fun minigame collection that earned accolades from a plethora of mainstream media outlets and fueled the hype machine that helped propel the Wii to the top of the sales charts.

Most of us moved on to other games soon after purchasing the system, but publisher Hudson Soft apparently hasn't been so quick to forget the game that spearheaded Nintendo's assault on your grandmother's living room. Deca Sports, one of their upcoming titles, is an obvious foray into the new market that Nintendo has forged.

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This isn’t a straight Wii Sports clone, however, as you’ll find that the game has more than just your basic sports. While there are events such as basketball, soccer, and beach volleyball, Deca Sports tries to differentiate itself by including less traditional sports such as curling, archery, and figure skating. There are also snowboarding, badminton, supercross, and kart racing events.

Supercross is as straightforward as you'd expect it to be; you hold the remote sideways, pressing the 2 button to gas and the 1 button to brake as you make turning motions to steer. Wide motions during turns cause you to lose control, which means that this event is aggravating unless you severely limit your motions, hampering the overall experience.

The badminton event plays very much like Wii Tennis, but the difference is in how the birdie reacts to your hits. The ball in Wii Tennis wasn’t very reactive to location, while here your swings really do determine the angle and trajectory of the hit. It’s a definite improvement, and the shortness of the rounds makes it good for bursts of play.

The beach volleyball event, where you and a friend (or an AI partner if you’re by your lonesome) can play against another team in a standard game of volleyball, is especially fun. The controls feel really fresh and immersive. It feels great to flail madly and work with your partner to keep the ball alive and then smash it over the net into the sand

What really stands out for its uniqueness is the figure skating event. You utilize the Nunchuk to guide your skater across a path of yellow dots while you use the remote to perform tricks as you skate across large, colored icons that occasionally appear on the path. However, the poor controls make it difficult to keep your skater on track, and it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out how and when to execute tricks. On the whole, though, Deca Sports warrants checking out if Hudson Soft successfully blends the game's fun elements with its more unique events.