In the six months since the Wii appeared on store shelves and proceeded to turn conventional gaming upside down, publishers who came late to the party have scrambled to stink up Nintendo's innovative box with overpriced ports of last-gen games. One of the latest offenders is Heatseeker, an air combat game from Codemasters that was also released for PS2 and PSP -- and looks it.


The basic controls are relatively standard and don't carry much of a learning curve with them. Pointing the nunchuk or Wii remote up or down adjusts the pitch of your aircraft. In the novice-friendly Arcade mode control style, pointing either controller right or left turns the aircraft in that direction, while in the Professional Mode control style, you twist the controllers clockwise or counter clockwise to control the roll and yaw of the plane. Three difficulty levels (Rookie, Pilot and Ace) allow you to further customize the game for your experience level, but even novice air warriors shouldn't have much of a problem on anything except the Ace setting. The nunchuk's analog stick is the throttle and airbrake. The Wii remote's B trigger fires your primary weapon, while the nunchuk's Z trigger fires your cannon. As with most Wii games, there's a bit of a learning curve associated with mastering an entirely new control scheme for a familiar genre, but they're surprisingly good for a third-party game. When you're skimming a hundred feet or less above the ground, you might find them to be a little twitchier than you'd like, but overall, they're pretty solid.


We Have Liftoff... Barely

If this all sounds pretty by-the-numbers, well, that's because it is. At its best, Heatseeker does all of the things that any decent arcade-style air combat game should do. It does a passable job of making you feel as if you're at the controls of a fast and furious flying machine, and it feeds you ridiculous numbers of enemies for your exploding pleasure. But when compared to any of the many quality air combat games that have come before it on other consoles, it comes up short.