Bringing together two of gaming's most iconic mascots in the same game is a rarity in itself, a meeting of greats perhaps unrivalled since De Niro and Pacino shared coffee together in the middle of the movie Heat. Yet Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games is also an all-too-rare attempt to revisit the genre started by Track & Field way back at the start of the 1980s: the joystick waggler.

Only it's not a joystick waggler, of course. This is a Nintendo Wii game, and that means the Wiimote replaces the joystick, with a little help from the nunchuk controller. It uses the Beijing Olympics as a starting point to go for the Wii Sports audience, serving up a pot pourri of individual minigames with differing results.

Let's do the good first, though, for when Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games steps into gear, it really works. Basically, the game invites you and your friends to assume the guise of one of the many in-game characters, and to put them to the test in one of the 24 events included within. Not all of these events are accessible from the start, which is a mild frustration, but it's not too tricky to unlock them.

And some of them are really very good. For example, we particularly enjoyed the good old-fashioned 100 metres, which left us just as knackered as the old Konami athletics games used to. Meanwhile, the dream racing is terrific fun, transforming a simple race into a power-up bonanza that - if you're like us - you'll return to time and time again. Think Mario Kart on, er, an athletics track, to give you an idea of one variant.

Trampolining, too, successfully captures a simple event and marries it to the control system pretty much perfectly. The same can be said for the surprisingly deep fencing mechanic, which enables some fascinating contests.

On the downside, many of the events don't really work very well at all. We didn't have a lot of time for the table tennis segment, while the archery wasn't much fun either. You'll genuinely be exhausted quite quickly if you tackle the running and swimming-based events, and it's a right royal pain in multiplayer mode to have to unlock everything before your party can truly begin.

It's also frustrating that nowhere within the game does it allow you to practice the many events on offer, meaning you're learning them as you're playing them for real. This is tough, perhaps a little unfair, and is a real oversight on Sega's part.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games is a real mixed bag. Clearly it hits its stride very much in multiplayer mode, and there are plenty of little games within it that are well worth your time. But it's also a frustrating beast, where one event that you enjoy can easily precede one that you don't take to at all. It's uneven, and even on the better events, the fun can at most be measured in the medium term.

But, in line with the rapidly expanding collection of party games that are pumping full the Wii release schedules, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games does have its place, and can be relied on to entertain a room of people for a while. Just don't be counting on it six months down the line.

Another quite good party game for the Wii, but yet another that manages to frustrate almost as much as it entertains. It's good, but not without problems, and really only hits its stride when more than one player is involved.