I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time playing around with Wing Island at the NYC show. I hopped onto the game just to check out what flight felt like with the new controller and ended up getting into a conversation with Bill Trinnen about how he's secretly taking over Nintendo. (He denies this, adamantly).

About five minutes into our conversation, Bill asked me what the heck I was playing. He said he'd never seen or heard of it before. We both searched around the kiosk, but couldn't find any developer's name. (I found out later it was Hudson.)

The game seemed sorta like a technology demo for a flight sim, though it did have a lot of gameplay elements.

You control the game's various planes by holding the remote in your hand and twisting, turning and moving it around. The plane does exactly what you do. One of the remote's buttons lets you lay on the turbo and the other was used in various ways, depending on the mode you were playing. The controls were incredibly intuitive. It felt like I was holding the plane in my hand and swooping it around the island on the screen. This is probably the most responsive game I've checked out yet for the Wii.

I only played two modes, despite my time on the game. One had me flying around an island in search of cows. When I found the cow, I had to fly in very close and snap a photo by locking on and pressing a button.

The other mode had me controlling a half-dozen or so planes flying in formation in a race. I had to race through a series of aerial rings in a set time limit.

The game was fun, though it did feel a little light on the content. Brian Crecente