For a game that had playable code at last year’s E3, very little has been heard since from Wii Sports: Airplane. A sufficient number of months have now passed for people to start noticing its absence, and they want to know when they’re going to see this title on their game store shelves dammit!

The game (from the video above) seems to be little more than a pick-up-and-play flying minigame, but you can’t deny how much fun it looks. And anything that carries the Wii Sports brand, in my opinion, is on to a winner before it even gets started. Controls, as you’d expect, are simple tilt and turn gestures and it looks pretty responsive even in this (very) early build.

Rumours are flying (get it?) around the web just now; will Nintendo release this as a standalone product? EBGames.com is currently selling it as such. Is it part of a larger — Wii Motorsports or Pilotwings anyone? — minigames package? That’s what IGN are hinting anyway. Maybe it was never intended to be anything more than an E3 Wii tech demo? Truth is, no one can say for sure right now. We can only wait.

I really hope that the latter tech demo possibility doesn’t turn out to be the case. I’m sold already after just a few minutes of video, and if I’m sold there must be someone else out there sold too. C’mon Nintendo, that’s two sales already! Surely that makes the months of development, the thousands of dollars, the blood/sweat/tears all worth it? Perhaps not. Maybe it could be downloadable content on the VC? We should expect some original content to surface on that sometime this year I’d guess.

Whatever happens, the game can’t come soon enough for me. I want to pilot my fish-laden aircraft (an assumption based on all the seagulls swarming over your plane not dissimilar to Hitchcock’s birds of ‘63 — see video) through hoops soon please. Via The Wii Experience. [JC]

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 10:42 am by WiiWii
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