...brain-meltingly bonkers puzzles and mazes

Mercury Meltdown Revolution was made for Wii. Or, if you want to be picky, was made for the nifty little white bit of kit under your telly “previously code-named Nintendo Revolution.”

Before we go on to outline why this is one of 2007’s first real ‘must-get’ Wii titles (and Lordy knows Nintendo needs more of those) let’s have a bit of a mercury-blob-rolling potted history. The game originally globbed into view on Sony’s PSP as a launch title. Back then it was clunkily entitled Archer Maclean’s Mercury although we steadfastly refused to call it that whenever we referred to it out loud and we were glad when Archer’s name was dropped from the much more forgiving and far superior sequel, Mercury Meltdown and its PS2 spin-off Mercury Meltdown Remix. Indeed, Mercury Meltdown to this day remains (alongside Mizuguchi’s glorious Lumines II) one of our most-played PSP games.

Yet there has always been something slightly not right about the Mercury games on PSP and PS2. Something niggly about them. Simply put, the fiddly little analogue stick control system on PSP and the PS2’s sturdy old dual-shock controller did not offer a very intuitive or easy control over your gloopy blob of mercury as you struggled to direct it around the brain-meltingly bonkers puzzles and mazes.

(There was talk of designing a PSP motion sensor for the original version of the game, by the way.)

The Wii Remote Control rectifies this problem by, very soon after you start to play the game, making you wonder how you ever played it with any other control method.

So if you really are a puzzle game ninja and have managed to finish Mercury Meltdown Remix then there are an extra thirty levels in this version to keep your brain and right hand more than well occupied. I haven’t had this much fun with my right hand since I discovered… well, you know what.

So, if you own a Wii and have yet to play any Mercury game, then you are in for a proper summer gaming tilt-controlled treat when the game finally releases in the UK on June 8th courtesy of the good people of Atari and the development ninjas at Ignition. In addition to the motion-control, the game looks noticeably better on the Wii than the PS2 version, with much-improved textures and some beautifully bright colour, not to mention the fact that it will support both 480p and the Wii's widescreen function.