The wonderful thing about well-made typical Wii games is that their simplicity is earned by the finesse the Wiimote introduces. If you can make hitting a baseball have some fraction of the intrinsic and tactile joy of doing so in real life, you don't need to stack piles of systems around that action to make it meaningful, because it already is. This is where the shovelware knockoffs that came to define the Wii usually went wrong: they'd make something just as easy to understand and simple as Wii Sports or the better minigames in Wii Play, but never earned the right to do so. That is, they weren't interested in refining gamefeel down to the point where a game can be that simple and still remain engaging for more than a few minutes.

While developers looking to make a quick buck with games that existed simply to occupy space on a shelf were mostly to blame for this phenomenon, enough fell into this trap while still appearing to actually try that I don't think Nintendo was blameless. The standard Wii remote's IR pointer is excellent, but the accelerometers are pretty lackluster for more than the simplest of actions, with seemingly no one outside of Nintendo able to make it feel like the precision device it originally seemed to be. Play even the best-implemented games with this in mind and it becomes pretty easy to see the limitations of the controller and where those games cleverly paper over its flaws. That's not to say the Wiimote was bad, it's just that the effect working required slight of hand on the parts of developers that rarely came together, so we got the dreaded waggle.

Wii MotionPlus and the Wii Remote Plus were later released to add a gyroscope in an attempt to make the Wii remote what it promised to be. It sort of worked, but at the expense of elegance. You could have nuanced sword movements in an action game, but only if you subjected yourself to constant fiddly recalibrating. How does it work for a follow-up to Wii Play, a collection of high score-chasing minigames meant to show off the original Wii remote? It does alright! While the aiming-based games control horribly compared to past equivalents that use IR, the rest are mostly pretty neat! My personal favorite is the rock skipping minigame despite the fact that every throw I make is exactly the same for some reason. The zen of tossing rocks onto the water as the sun sets and everything is so quiet is so compelling on its own that I don't even care how little it seems to actually care about my movements. Oh, and I love that the background Miis are much more active in the minigames than was usual in earlier Wii series games, making your friends and the fictional characters you downloaded from the Check Mii Out channel the supporting cast of your high score chasing sessions rather than just extras.

But despite all that added nuance to controls, I'm not sure any of these minigames really carry the intrinsically satisfying control that elevates something like Wii bowling or the rallying in Wii Play. What's here works based on warm, cutesy vibes or from making you say "oh, that's a neat use of the technology!" That's great, but given that in 2011 Nintendo was about to dig themselves into a generation-long hole of games that make you say exactly that and little else, it's funny to see.

I wish I had this in its day or even knew it existed, it's got a lot of character and I would have been even more receptive to it back then, I think.

This may be controversial, but I actually quite like this game! I haven’t played the other games in the Wii Play series, but the mini games offered here are very unique and have the right amount of depth, most of the time. Some of the spectacle here is really amusing, like seeing yourself tower ice cream up so high that it reaches space, or the fun game of hole-in-the-wall as your mii does wacky positions falling through and endless tube. As a mini game collection, it was never going to fare amazingly, but for what it is, I think it’s pretty great.

I didn't have this when it came out for some reason, I don't know why the hell it took me 12 YEARS to get to it, being a die hard fan of the Wii series games.
The wait was worth it to me, I think this is a great set of minigames, two of these are sequels to games from Wii Play (Pose Mii Plus, Trigger Twist) but all new ideas outside of those. Two of these games are very obviously based on Game & Watch games which I find very cool as im a big Game & Watch fan, Veggie Guardin' (great name, btw) being based on Vermin and Treasure Twirl being based on Octopus. I loved both of these but I liked Veggie Guardin' the most out of those two. The new games are great for the most part, Skip Skimmer might be one of my favorite minigames out of the whole series, alongside Island Flyover from Sports Resort. That games visual aesthstic is god tier, i love how it looks so much, its just skipping stones, but the visuals and little easter eggs really add a lot for me. The big highlight here imo is Spooky Search, i was apalled at how creative they were with the motion plus feature with that one, ive never played a wii game that did something like that.
However, a few of these are kinda meh, I personally did not enjoy Jump Park like, at all, i didnt like literally anything about that minigame, it isnt shit but i cant say i liked it. The big issue, is that the last two games (Flutter Fly and Star Shuttle) control SO horribly to the point where i cant find any fun in them at all.
Overall, i'm not sure if this is objectively better than the first game or not, i think this one REALLY ups the creativity but the first game is a bit more fun depending on what minigame you're playing. This game is great though, would reccomend.
Side note, I think they shouldve just...tacked on the first game to this one, honestly, like that weird version of Wii Sports Resort that has Wii Sports on the same disc, except all copies come with the first game aswell.

One of the few 'Wii series' games I didn't have as a kid, experiencing Wii Play: Motion was both an uncannily familiar and decidedly fresh experience. Motion well expands upon the ideas of its predecessor in a package that not only feels fuller but a lot more modern, certainly the Resort to its Wii Sports.

With a veritable who's-who of hit-or-miss second string Nintendo (or Nintendo-adjacent) teams taking the collaborative helm of the project, the quality of Motion feels like a larger spread than Wii Play. Any mini-games developed by Good-Feel and Vanpool rock. Everything else is of a variable degree of success.

The best activities in Motion are more robust than anything in Wii Play (sometimes iterating on and expanding past Wii Play attractions), but many others feel either too fickle in their MotionPlus control or too gimmicky in their conecpt.