Part old school bleep bleep bloop bloop scrolling 2D shooter, part anything-goes virtual hobby shop with a trunk full of pixilated wonder, Blast Works is a surprisingly deep and engaging game of, well, game design. It allows you to create all aspects of a generic shooting game: your craft, your enemies, levels, events, background, the works. You can make a sci-fi shooter, a cartoon shooter, and emulated classic shooter, a lewd, crude, toilet bowl shooter... if you can think it, you can probably make a game of it.

The user-created game is not a new concept -- console titles have occasionally included "level editors" since way back when -- but as 90 per cent of the point of it all, Blast Works is much less restrained and more sophisticated than your average tacked-on component -- despite the seeming simplicity of 2 dimensional design. (It should also be noted that the public availability of source code of certain PC games long ago spawned a cottage industry of "modders" whose custom modifications have been known to net complete, self contained games that rival the blockbuster titles from whence their code came... the famed Counter Strike, for example. But Blast Works is not source code; it's a graphic user interface for game design).

Blast Works also takes advantage of the Wii's online capabilities by allowing you to upload your creations in whole or in part as well as download those of others. Already there's a surpassingly huge community of home hobbyists amassing and sharing some great designs and ideas (and quite a few not-so-great).

The other 10 percent of the game is the actual playing of games designed, which is only fun because of the innate potential for absolute lunacy. Otherwise, it's just a straight up, boring old shooter... albeit one with maybe a gazillion variations on a theme, which is pretty cool.