Hudson sent over a demo disc for Marble Saga: Kororinpa, the marble rolling game that ships this spring for Wii. It's the sequel to Kororinpa: Marble Mania, which came out a couple years ago. It was an extremely limited demo, showing only five stages, but a few things could be gleaned.

After some time with the provided demo, the basic game appears mostly unchanged. Each level requires you to roll your marble (or cat, hedgehog, etc.) to the goal, but only after having picked up all of the diamonds in the level. This is done by tilting the Wii Remote. Having never played the original, the controls were particularly shocking for a couple of reasons. I was expecting them to be extremely sensitive, similarly to the Wii's other ball rolling game, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. In fact, most Wii games come off as sensitive. The marbles in Marble Saga take a lot to roll. So much so that it seems a little unnatural. For example, it may take what appears to be a 30 degree incline to get the ball to move at all, but if you picture an actual marble on a similar incline, it would roll down with great haste.

At first these extreme requirements make playing the game feel a bit out of control. I quickly became accustomed to it and realized that, in many ways, it makes the game much more forgiving. You can tip the stage to near 80 degrees, let the ball roll furiously, quickly yank the Remote to the opposite 80 degrees, and immediately slam on the brakes. The result looks jerky and frightening on the screen, but it works, and it can look mighty impressive to any onlookers. When my fiancee gave it a try, who absolutely hates frustrating, twitch games, she greatly appreciated the forgiving controls.

The other shocking part is the fact that the stage completely and totally mimics the controller's position. If you quickly flip the Remote over, the stage flips, causing the ball to just drop straight down. One of the featured levels of the demo made use of this feature. To start, you roll your marble up to a wall situated exactly perpendicular to the floor your marble is currently on. This was pretty confusing the first time it happened, but I simply continued tipping the Remote until it was almost upside down, and the marble continued along the new floor which was previously a wall.

It was hard to get much more than that out of the short demo. It did allow for multiplayer, which was very similar to the mode featured in the last game. The screen splits and each player races to the goal. Opponents' marbles appear as ghosts on your screen, and thus can be rolled right through. This was fun, but wasn't really that much different than playing the single player game.

The packaging for the disc advertised a Wii Balance Board mode. I was pretty disappointed to learn that this was not demonstrated on the disc. If you check out our preview on the game, you'll see that only ten levels will use this control scheme. While that seems like a pretty small number, when you think about levels like the making-the-wall-the-floor example mentioned earlier, you can start to understand why using the Balance Board would require a different type of level design. It will be interesting to see how those levels turn out.

Overall, Marble Saga looks like it will be a solid game, just like its predecessor. If you are a Marble Madness or Super Monkey Ball fan, you should be looking forward to this game. Check out the teaser for the game below.