The gamer

YOU may or may not be aware that Nights: Journey of Dreams, (£39.99, ***) on the Wii is inspired by a game that came out on the Sega Saturn 10 years ago called Nights.

The original was like Sonic… only with you as the main character Nights, who looks a bit like a purple jester, flying round the levels, through rings, collecting blue orbs and circling bad guys. In this new version on the Wii, you have to, wait for it, fly through levels, through rings, collect blue orbs and circle the bad guys. You do, however, get to do a bit of running about as a boy/girl as you explore their dream world and get to rid it of evil Nightmaren.

The controls are very simple. What Sega want you to do is point the Wii remote at the screen and use a cursor to point in the direction that you want Nights to fly. What you actually find yourself doing is throwing the remote away and using the nunchuck controller to control him directly. The Wii remote on this game is absolutely useless. It's a bit like trying to write with your left hand if you're right handed. Use a normal controller and you can control Nights a lot better and have some fun.

It may look 3D, but the flying sections play like pandemonium with the 3D levels rotating round as you fly from left to right in them. The problem is that using just one analogue stick to control Nights' flying is just a bit too simple and quite frankly it bored me. If you do find yourself having to restart a level, you have to go all the way back to the beginning and are forced to watch the unskippable cut scenes – torture.

The cut scenes are lovely but when they are in the main game it does look a bit like a Dreamcast game. The Wii can create better graphics than this and it's also capable of a more responsive reaction from the remote.

So I am disappointed with this game. It looked good when I saw the footage but it's just not that much fun to play. It feels like a 2D platformer wrapped up in a 3D engine. This game may have been around for 10 years but it has not progressed into the slick sort of title you might expect from a release where the makers have had a long time to get it right. There's a difference between being mature and being an OAP.