First off, sorry for not being a good 'wrecker these days. Coming back in and slurping up the backlog of everything I've missed has been on my Todo list for a few months now.

So, my nomination for most glorious trainwreck of 2006: Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz - this game gets so much right, and so much absolutely terrifyingly wrong. You really get the feeling of "wow, what can we do with this cool controller???" more so than in any other game -- and some of the minigames are just brilliant (especially two that have the player holding the wiimote upright - one as a super brilliant 3D lunar lander, the other as a flightstick.... I wish to god that other games would take the flightstick idea, it's so much more comfortable and cool than the "hold it like a paper airplane" control Wii Sports Resort uses) and other ones are just unplayable, unworkably awful.

And so much of the UI is a mess! The most egregious example is the idiosyncratic "twist" controller on the main menu, where you kind of roll the wiimote like a log in a log rolling contest to move the selector left and right, like an old tv tuner. And then this was the first place I noticed Nintendo was doing itself a huge disservice by ditching the traditional "start=pause" for "+" (which is sometimes a pause) "home" (which can act like a very disruptive pause but never has the menu you're looking for) and "-".

Also in its favor, this game figured out that for party games, people want to - play the games. Mario Party does itself a disservice each generation that adds more and more crap to the "board game" when really it should be just enough framework to get everyone engaged.

Super Monkey Ball 2 was pretty grand as well (not for the main game, which never had a difficulty curve I was willing to deal with) -- cranking that Monkey Target hang-glider game to simultaneous play was genius, monkey fight is supremely satisfying, the dogfight is fairly unique, the race was a good substitute for proper Mario Kart...

Anyway- Banana Blitz. So much energy and enthusiasm, such a low ratio of brilliance to idiocy...