The 11 Best Wii Exclusives of All Time

The culmination of everything that has gone into Wii design, the action-adventure game The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the ultimate Wii game, the game that fulfills my faith in the potential of the Wii console and the viability of gesture gaming as a true alternative to traditional game controllers. After this, playing an action-adventure game with nothing but buttons and triggers will just feel wrong.

It is rare for any publisher except Nintendo to put out a big-budget Wii exclusive, but that's what happened with Disney Epic Mickey an action-adventure game designed by the brilliant Warren Spector. Portraying Mickey Mouse's adventures in a decaying alternate cartoon universe, the game is notable for an engaging story and a unique game mechanism that allows players to use paint and thinner to repair and destroy the world. While the game has a few flaws, notably in camera positioning, this is still an involving, immersive experience.

A game that correlates oppression and revolution with grays and colors, De Blob creates a vivid world where the dark forces of black and white are pitted against revolutionaries who are colorful in the most literal sense of the word; they devote themselves to repainting their cities after the bad guys drain them of color. A funny and stylish platformer with an intuitive control scheme that uses motion control smoothly and intelligently, De Blob is an almost perfect Wii game, and my favorite Wii exclusive.

This impressive old-school 2D platformer is so imaginative and varied and well designed that I can more-or-less forgive it for being brutally difficult. While some games like to come up with something different, DKCR aims to gives Donkey Kong fans everything they expect, perfectly done.

This is the game that finally made Sonic the Hedgehog a successful 3D star. With years of great 2D arcade platformers featuring the speedy critter followed by years of 3D Sonic games that varied from dreary to near-misses, Sonic Colors, finally, perfectly recaptures the magic of the original 2D games in a 3D world.

I often complain about the flood of mini-game collections that have virtually drowned the Wii, but a mini-game collection done right can be tremendous fun. Resort is, very simply, the ultimate mini-game collection. Created to introduce the MotionPlus, the game finds a lot of different ways to take advantage of the increased motion sensitivity, giving players an experience that is even more impossible on any other console than the typical Wii game.

Action games are generally about fighting things you wouldn’t want to meet in person: alien monsters, Nazi soldiers, zombies, ninjas, and, in the case of Deadly Creatures, spiders and scorpions. One of the most original and exciting action video games ever made for the Wii, Creatures takes place in the dust of the desert, with fierce battles between creatures that could easily crawl into your boot and poison you when you put it on. Although in Creatures, these little critters prove they can do much worse than that.

The Wii has revived the rail shooter, simply because the Wii remote so perfectly emulates the light gun technology used on other consoles. While other rail shooters are content to basically serve up the same old formula, the ambitious Extraction aims to create something new, adding a jittery camera and an intriguing story to the standard shooting gallery mechanics. The result is quite possibly the best rail shooter ever made.

Kororinpa is one of the best examples of a game that wouldn’t make a lot of sense on any platform except the Wii. Sure, you could rotate the game’s elaborate three-dimensional mazes with analog sticks, but that would be like walking on the beach in heavy boots; yes, you still are on the beach, you’re still leaving footprints, but you don’t feel the sand between your toes or the water lapping at your ankles. Koririnpa makes the relationship between player, maze and rolling marble beautifully symbiotic, and is the best puzzle game on the Wii.

Using the remote/nunchuk combo to punch and the balance board to dodge, Punch-Out!! is a full-body game, making it both a lot of fun and an utterly exhausting workout game. I’m hoping for a MotionPlus sequel that can get rid of the couple of movements in the game that require the player to still push buttons instead of just moving, but until that day comes, Punch-Out!! is the most fun you can have swinging at the air.

While the story is pretty dreadful in this entry in the POP series (which shares a name with versions on other platforms but is in fact a game written and designed especially for the Wii), the gameplay is as good as any of its cousins, offering the same wondrous mix of acrobatic puzzle solving and combat that, while not great, is notably improved over the earlier games. While the lack of a decent story makes the overall experience less magical than the original Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, there is still plenty of magic in the gameplay.