Right away you can see what Nintendo is trying to do. Endless Ocean is supposed to be an approachable, easy-to-control, non-combative Game For Everyone. They've had great success with Sports Games For Everyone and Brain Games For Everyone, so this is an attempt to introduce game-game mechanics to that audience. It's built for a single, nunchukless Wii Remote. HUD elements are there but largely inconsequential. You gradually expose a barebones map overworld. Your onscreen character exists in a 3D virtual environment that you explore in a realistically slow manner. You collect items and go on missions with no compelling purpose or reward. It's almost as if Nintendo is readying the Endless Ocean player for basic video game concepts.

It's actually a very good idea, but one that needs Brain Age style marketing to make that push. I've seen Brain Age commercials during cable drama shows and they're brilliant. They don't look like video game ads; they look like vitamin commercials. Endless Ocean could use something like to reach the proper audience. Although the $30 price tag certainly does help.

But, demographics aside, what do you get in Endless Ocean? Not much. Most of Endless Ocean is the same ocean floor texture surrounded by the same rock outcroppings covered in the same clamshells and anemones and coral. You're going to have to OK with that to ever proceed further, and I have to tell you, it's a damn near thing.

Sure, there's the scattered setpiece structures - a whale skeleton, underwater caves, etc - but they're surrounded by acres of identical sand and rock. It is a huge disappointment, especially when placed against the unrealistically diverse and vibrant selection of sea life (come on... five types of penguins?) The animals all look great and believable - except on occasion when they clip through each other - but they have to live in this bland, underwater clip art backdrop.

It's a good thing that the fish all look so great, because they are one of the collectibles, so it's a nice thing to concentrate on. You have a huge blank encyclopedia and as you "become familiar" with different species, they fill up your book. The familiarity process involves lots of shaking the Remote. It's exceedingly odd. You click on a fish - which I'm fine with, the clicking - but then you have to wave the Remote as if you are petting the animal. Could be a tiny sea slug or a manatee, doesn't matter. You stroke it. After some indeterminate length of time, the game decides you've fapped enough and credits your encyclopedia with the discovery.

The game takes about two hours to hand out all of the gameplay upgrades. You get a whistle for calling your dolphin buddy (don't get too excited; teaching him tricks amounts to merely clicking on him, and although the game makes a big deal about riding him, doing so just loops an animation of your diver clinging onto the animal), there's this crazy pen that lets you draw in the water (I guess mainly for multiplayer communication?), and the expected and anticipated underwater camera.

Which, although you can snap and save pictures during the game, you cannot save them out to the Wii console. I swear, Nintendo has completely fucked the integration between their own games and their own system. They're not even trying. Mario Galaxy let you save your star screen to the Wii Message Board, and even that was the most insanely stupid use of the technology ever. (Like, geniuses, how about just Friend-based LEADERBOARDS? Why the fuck are we filling up each other's Photo Channel with obsolescing pictures of each other's star lists?!) But at least that was an attempt. Endless Ocean has a moderately interesting photography feature and you're forbidden to share it with anyone. You know what's not going to get people talking about this game? Not being able to zap pictures of sea turtles to Friends.

Much hay is made over Endless Ocean being the second Wii game to let you play your own MP3s (the first being launch day marginal title Excite Truck). Great idea, but EO borks it. First of all, you can only play one track. The game will loop one song forever. I'm not expecting iTunes here, but picking one song is useless enough to be insulting. Even if the game doesn't want to bother with a simple playlisting feature, it could at least run through every song in a given folder.

But, in what I guess is a concession to realism?, in order to play an MP3 off of your SD card, you have to walk over to a radio on the exterior deck of your boat and select the song from there. Not from some kind of meta-level Options screen, is my point. This means that you can't change songs when you're in the water. Because your radio is back on the boat. Your radio that you can hear across a mile of water. Is on the boat. Not with your SCUBA gear. So you can't change songs. Until you're done swimming.

It boggles the mind. It's like sitting down to watch The Simpsons and finding it's one of those damn ugly Season One episodes where they had to have the family learn an important lesson about love at the end, just to keep the PTA off their backs.

Look, I'll happily cop to enjoying the slow exploration portions, stumbling onto an unmentioned cave and finding a glowing anglerfish within. But I'm not going to sit here and overwrite paragraphs of whimsy about how Endless Ocean is so magical and inspiring and relaxing. It fumbles around on bits that should have been cake, and it doesn't deserve to be raised so high just because it's different and it's Nintendo.

And yet, it also deserves more than an easy, crude backhand, the kind written in the slacker-friendly eye-rolling that went limp during the Gamecube years. Endless Ocean is not for the "gamer" audience and should not be dangled in front of the hungry hardcore as anti-Nintendo flamebait.

Endless Ocean occupies a strange, lo-fi middle ground. It's for the most adventurous non-gamer, perhaps ready for an experience distinct from Wii Sports or Brain Age... and it's for the most compulsive OCD-gamer, the kind most interested in collecting items and exploring every corner of the map.