Mercury Meltdown Revolution (Nintendo Wii)

By playing the single player levels you'll unlock party levels and extra labs, all told the game has a whopping 150+ levels of mercury malarkey to keep you going for quite a while. Each of the 8 labs in the game is broken into 16 levels a-piece and it allows you to revisit old levels and attempt to beat your previous score, save more mercury or replay a favourite level.

The game even has a replay option where you can view your trip through a level; this helps you to see where you might have gone wrong or relive a cool moment or two. There's also a Ghost Player mode that functions similar to the Ghost Car in racing games.

The fun doesn't stop there, MMR has a few party games for you to unlock and play.

Rodeo puts your blob of mercury on a small tray with a moving fan; the fan becomes stronger and stronger as time passes. You can collect pickups to slow the fan down and give you more time to hang on.

Paint lets you play against an opponent, paint as much of the area as you can before your timer runs out. There are various power ups such as paint bombs, these blow up and shower paint over the area in the colour of the player that touched them.

Shove reminds me of the sport of curling, you push your blob into the centre of a target to get max points. Avoid hazards and grab score increasing multipliers.

Race will let you play against a timer or another player, a little like Wipeout but with blobs of mercury.

Metrix is perhaps the most complicated of the party games. You must place your mercury into a special hopper. Make a set, which is a collection of 3 blobs that are placed adjacent to each other (not diagonally) - once you've done this you can then move them into a tray where you try to explode sets of 3 or more blobs. You get some mercury for your gauge, extra time and points.

There are power ups, bonus stars and a freezer that stops your opponent for a while.

So with these little bonus games, the main game and fiendish level design MMR is one of the best puzzle games you can get for the Wii. I personally think it's one of the best puzzle games that I've played in a long time and regardless of the fact it doesn't have mind-blowing graphics (I'd rather have solid gameplay than amazing graphics any day) or a fantastic musical score, it is still a great title and deserves a place on your shelf.

I'd like to see a return to the era of these games since they were excellent party games and I've a Birthday coming up fairly soon, so you can guess they'll be much MMR since I've traded in my Monkey Balls for a blob of mercury madness.