Hudson have a long and happy relationship with the 'mature' games-player, and have been entertaining fans with delights such as Adventure Island and Bonk's Adventures for years; not to mention bringing us a little someone known as Bomberman. Despite not being as prolific as they once were, Hudson still manage to turn it on with the charm and character in their games, so it's especially nice to see them turning their hand to full-blown Wii development, and not just the Virtual Console.

At its most basic, Kororinpa is a ball rolling game. Age will dictate whether that's seen by people as a Monkey Ball clone or a Marble Madness one, but it certainly owes more to the former than the latter. A series of levels mysteriously floating in space represent your path ahead - except in this instance space is more like a garishly bright, sickly sweet, moving backdrop and your path ahead is crazy paving from the Devil's own garden. Control is, predictably for a Wii game, via the Wii remote's magical tilt sensors, and in a similar vein to the aforementioned simian rolling game, the player is in control of the floor and not the chosen marble. As the player tilts the remote the level follows suit, and much like Newton's apple, gravity does the rest. The main difference between Kororinpa and Monkey Ball though is that the range of motion is not restricted by an analogue stick. This means that if the player were to turn the remote onto its side, the level on-screen follows suit and tilts to 90 degrees - in fact it recognises and matches a full 360 degrees of freedom. This has allowed the level designers to go a little crazy and ignore the restraints which may have stifled creativity somewhat on the part of Amusement Vision's own developers.

The game's most basic aim is to guide the chosen marble safely to the end of the level, collecting all of the red crystals along the way. On each level there's also a green crystal, which requires a little more lateral thinking to reach, but rewards the player with unlockables. These unlockables include secret levels, different marbles to choose from and new music. Each level is also timed, which seems of little importance on the first run through the game, but for anyone wishing to get a little deeper into the game it shouldn't be ignored. The levels consist of flat surfaces, stairs, various 'coatings' (ice is very slippery, whereas honey is very sticky), magnetic bars, cannons, jelly, tarmac - the list goes on. For the first few levels and the obligatory hand-holding portion of the game only very simple tilts of the controller are needed, but things soon move on and that remote will end up in all sorts of positions as players wrestle with their hand-eye coordination. The surfaces behave as one would expect, and provide appropriate feedback and friction - dropping from a height onto solid wood gives a bigger bounce than onto a sponge cake for example. It should be mentioned that the control implementation is done very well. The 'dead zone' is big enough to be able to hold the marble still in the event that one might need to, and the controls are very responsive. This is great news as the player knows any drops into nothingness are as a result of their lack of control, not through a fault in the game or any 'lag' in the response.

The game's visuals are at first appearance very basic, and very bright; there's not a huge amount of graphical wizardry going on here. Far from being a negative though, this actually adds to Kororinpa's charm. The themed levels are well illustrated with a bold, almost 'cartooney' approach. The marbles themselves deserve a big mention too, after all, it's these self-same balls whose fate rests in the player's palm. The character design, despite being limited to something spherical, is brilliant. Ranging from cute animals to sports balls, and even some oddities too (Saturn anyone?). Each has their own attributes too, affecting their weight, response, bounce and speed. Which one is chosen isn't a major issue when first progressing through, but when coming back to get those gold cups by beating the levels' preset time goals it can make all the difference. The audio deserves a lot of praise too. Everything's very sugar-coated and almost twee, but it fits the bill perfectly. As progress is made and extra tunes unlocked, older gamesplayers will recognise some classic Hudson tunes remixed.

Kororinpa isn't a massively deep game - we're talking more like swimming pool than Marianas Trench - and as such it certainly won't take most people very long to plough through to the credits, but when compared games of this ilk there's still plenty to come back for. Firstly there's the large chunk of locked treats, which mean approaching the levels differently in order to reach the tricky green crystals. Then there's the added challenge of time-trialling, both in order to help unlock more levels, and in a strictly high-score/bragging rights manner. There are secret levels too, as well as a full mirror mode to unlock and get through. The multiplayer is definitely worth a mention, and although it mostly comes down to racing through the levels against one another, it's actually really good fun and can get quite heated. Being able to use a Nunchuk as the second controller is also a plus if two remotes aren't to hand. The game does have its downfalls though, not least of which is the terrible 16:9 support. If widescreen mode is chosen it effectively borders out the top and bottom of the 4:3 picture, so the player would need to use some kind of zoom mode on the TV - so 4:3 is the way to go for this one. The camera too is a little odd at first, and at times it's not unusual to see people leaning around trying to change their viewpoint, as it sits at a constant position and cannot be moved. For fans of Monkey Ball style trials of patience (although it should be noted that on the whole Kororinpa is easier - no "Launchers" here), this is nearly the game you've been waiting for so far. For fans of the genre and those without masses of time, this is ideal. For anyone looking for a deeper puzzle/action game with hundreds of levels however, this will leave them wanting.