The 15 Greatest Games Ever Released for the Wii

This fun kid’s game’s appeal goes far beyond its pricey, bring-toys-to-life gimmick, offering breezy, colorful fun and adventure. It’s also the best co-op game experience I ever had with my non-gamer girlfriend.

PES 2009’s more strategic version of a typical sports game was brilliant. From what I’ve read, succeeding versions of this game were also excellent, but I didn’t get a chance to check any of those out, leaving this as the first soccer game that ever fully sucked me in.

I am generally not a huge found of incredibly difficult, old-school platformers, but DKCR is so beautifully crafted and so unfailingly imaginative that even at its most frustrating I never really got mad at the game. It did what it did as well as it could be done.

Ingeniously combining the Wii remote with the balance board to boost golf simulation to a new level, TWP12:TM is the best Tiger Woods game ever to appear on the Wii. While straight golfing is enough in itself to make this a great game, the mini-golf and disk-golf modes make it a necessity.

This ingenious real-time strategy game, ported from the Gamecube, is typical of the best of Nintendo, colorful, quirky and original. The Wii almost got Pikmin 3, which might have been better still, but since that moved to the Wii U, Pikmin 2 will always be the best Wii Pikmin game.

With an engaging story and a clever paint/thinner game mechanism, DEM is a remarkable game, offering interesting gameplay choices and a beautifully dark and twisted version of Disney World. While some camera and control issues keep this game from perfect, it is still irresistible.

No game series encapsulates the difficulties of the transition from 2D to 3D better than Sonic, which went from brilliant sidescrollers to pedestrian 3D platformers. Sonic Colors was the 3D title that finally recaptured the excitement of the originals. It only took Sonic Team about 14 years to figure it out.

This visually stunning, Zelda-esque action-adventure game was an obvious choice to port from the PS2, since the game involves drawing figures in the air, and the Wii remote seemed ideally suited for mimicking a paint brush. The controls weren’t quite as perfect in practice as in theory, but the game is still a wonder.

Fun, silly and original, this unique take on platforming offers colorful visuals, engaging music, and funny cut scenes. Possibly the happiest game ever made for the Wii.

The best mini-game package ever released for the Wii, WSR’s main purpose was to sell people on Nintendo’s then-new MotionPlus add-on, which gave something close to true one-to-one motion detection, allowing the creation of marvelously real-feeling takes on table tennis, sword play, and archery.