Sadness

Polish developer Nibris is keeping Sadness under such tight wraps that the game's publisher - if it has one yet - still hasn't been revealed at the time of writing. What we do know about this most mysterious of Wii titles is that it incorporates a wide range of motion controls that are intended to be completely transparent to the person playing.

For example, reaching into the environment to pick up an object is simply a matter of gesturing in the appropriate direction. With the object in your virtual hands, manipulating it is supposed to be completely intuitive.

Say you have a wall to climb, and a rope nearby. You'd have to gesture towards the rope to grab it, then swing it around your head and fling it over the wall. It sounds interesting, and the monochrome art style is certainly striking.

Frustrating experiences with into-the-screen gestures in games such as Wii Play's annoying fishing thing makes us somewhat skeptical about how smoothly this HUD - and cursor-free experience will work, but there's ages left for Nibris to perfect the system. The game might not even appear until next year.

Dog Island

Super chibi dogs running around on their very own island. Rediscovering our filthy, flea-riddled mutts after nine months of Nintendogs neglect (we lost the cart down the back of the sofa) brought to mind this forthcoming doggy adventure for Wii.

The visual style is based on the big-headed photos featured in Japan's The Dog product line, which is like a low-key Hello Kitty that involves close-up photos of real dogs taken with a wide-angle lens, making their faces appear ginormous.

Sadly it isn't a dog-care simulator, as you actually play as one dog in a whole canine community - they live in houses and have families and jobs. And they can talk to each other, too. They are, to all intents and purposes, human - barring the fact that they look like dogs with heads three times the size of their bodies, and poo on the floor.

In this marvelously surreal world, you embark on a quest to save a sick relative by locating a special flower. You know, typical dog stuff.