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My husband and I are fans of the Olympic games. We watch our favorite sports in both the Summer and Winter games. We have even been known to record events that we particularly want to see if we aren't going to be home. I thought the idea of Olympic games for the Wii sounded good. I did not realize it was going to be tied to these summer games.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games is ostensibly set at the summer Olympic games in Beijing 2008. Initially I thought I would feel better about the game if it was set at a generic summer games at an unspecified date, but I suppose the marketing folks felt Beijing 2008 on the box would help sales. I think the whole 'Mario and Sonic appearing together for the first time' is probably a bigger point of sale for the gamers that care about such things.

The opening sequence was reasonably cute. It's definitely reminiscent of the big production piece of any Olympic games (without any parade of nations stuff). You get to name your save game and pick which flag you want to play under. There are a lot of flag choices too - North and South America offer 18 flags, 15 flags for Asia, 28 flags for Europe, 3 flags for Oceania, and 15 flags for Africa.

Once in the game, I have choices for Single Match, Circuit, Mission, Gallery, Records and Options. As I peeked into each of these menus - I quickly discovered that quite a bit of the game has to be unlocked through play. Anyone that has read my reviews in the past will know that I really hate this - especially with something that's supposed to be a party game. If you want a game to play at parties, it would be nice to pop it into the Wii and start playing with your friends.

If I want to spend hours on my own prepping the game for the party, I would probably have just bought a single player game in the first place. Since I didn't have a party going at the time of night that I actually had free time to play, I didn't try anything in party mode.

Single Match, Circuit and Mission are the main play areas of the game so I'll cover them in somewhat more depth in just a bit.

The Gallery offers five different types of Olympic trivia, which sounds good, except each category has a whopping five pieces of trivia and you have to beat a small mini-game (a mini-mini game, if you will) to unlock that piece of trivia. There exists generic Olympic Trivia (with a voice/sequence matching game), Modern Trivia (with a counting game), Beijing 2008 Trivia (with a 3 card monte kind of card following game), Ancient Trivia (with a whack-a-mole game that was actually kind of fun), and About Athletes trivia (with an annoying ball flipping game). I found the tiny bits of trivia you could unlock were not really worth the effort you had to put into unlocking them. For the most part, it's not that the effort was that much - it's that the reward was that small. Oh, you will also find that there's a default song for the game. Apparently you can unlock 10 additional songs - five each for Mario and Sonic.

The Records area is fairly straight-forward. You can see records for the personal games you play on your Wii, you can see rankings compared to other players if you have the wi-fi option, and you can see collections, which shows any prizes you've won through the course of your game play.

Options didn't even have the standard game control kind of options I expected. It let me change my name, change my flag, or select a different icon to use (if I had unlocked any other icons, that is).

For all of your actual Olympic-type events, you'll have many character options. The one that actually amused me the most is that I could pick one of my Miis and compete as that character. For the franchise fans, you have 16 characters - divided into groups of Power (Knuckles, Bowser, Vector, and Wario), All-Around (Mario, Amy, Luigi, and Blaze), Speed (Sonic, Daisy, Shadow and Yoshi), and Skill (Peach, Tails, Waluigi and Dr. Eggman). I've heard of some of the characters and my daughter adores Princess Peach, so of course I had to pick Peach while she was watching.

I discovered with Mission play that each character has their own set of missions that they need to pass to continue. Each event will show you which Wii controls you're going to need and what conditions you need to meet to consider this mission successful. You get some number of pages of onscreen instructions on how to use the controls. That was nice - but I still found the movements not terribly intuitive. I'm not sure if I was doing them wrong, or that they just weren't registering the way the screen was telling me they should.

Peach should have been easy. She had the 4x100m freestyle swim and the hammer throw. While I muddled through the swimming okay, I never did figure out the hammer throw. I read the instructions many times and it very clearly said that I had three attempts, but I would do something wrong, I would get marked as a foul on my first try, and then Peach would sob that she'd lost. No second or third try. No explanation of what I did wrong. I endured Peach sobbing about 10 times so I could retry the event before I finally gave up.

Single Match let me pick through a tree of options to select one of the unlocked event. Athletics, for example, offered Track and Field. Track shows five options but only 100m and 110m hurdles are unlocked to begin with. Not only are the other three options locked - they're just shown as a question mark. You don't know what might be there to be unlocked, and you have no idea what's needed to unlock it. The Field area offered long jump, triple jump, hammer throw, javelin throw and two locked options. I skipped right by that area and went to Gymnastics. It offers trampoline and one locked option. I actually was pretty decent at trampoline. I got the timing of the bounce, and figured out quickly enough that it's a vertical timing game. You have to bounce right at the bottom, then do a sequence of A button, B button and twisting the remote while your little character does wild moves in the air (if you time it right).

The Circuit mode was a bit different. I could pick if I was a beginner or wanted free style. When I picked beginner, I had a few circuits (each with a different set of events) named for a planet, as well as a few locked (and thus unnamed circuits). The free style option said I could pick four or eight events and either select them or have them randomly assigned.

Mainly my experience with Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games was limited to epee (fencing - and I wasn't all that bad at it), swimming, long jump (never got the timing right to get a score), table tennis (I could never figure out how to serve the dang ball), trampoline (actually fun), hammer throw (hated it), skeet shooting (which I was also terrible at), along with the mini-mini games in the trivia area.

Yes, a more diligent person would have invested many hours and explored every combination of things that could be done with every character. But, I have a very busy life and this didn't compel me to do that.

Here's my take on it - I want to be able to jump into a game on the Wii, experience controls that are easy and intuitive that don't require a lot of reading to grasp, and have some fun. I don't want to invest hours of labor unlocking features in the order in which the developers decide to dole them out - based on how much sweat they think I've put into the game - especially when it's a collection of mini-games. If I buy it, I want to play it. Period. Making the player jump through hoops of fire to unlock the games is, oh, like telling the athletes competing at the Olympics that they have to qualify in every freaking sport (or some random set of sports drawn out of a hat) to 'unlock' their event of choice.

If you are a Mario and/or Sonic fan, or a fan of their friends and enemies, and you want a new assortment of party games for your next gathering, and you don't get your knickers in a twist about having to unlock the ability to play something for which you've already paid your hard-earned ducats, go ahead and give Mario & Sonic a try. I'm afraid I'm going to pass.