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When I saw the trailers for "The Bee Movie," I assumed it was going to be mostly aimed at kids and people in chronic "Seinfeld" withdrawal. As I don't fit either of those categories, I didn't pay a great deal of attention to the marketing blitz, secure in the assumption that it would eventually be added to our daughter's movie collection (and repeated ad infinitum) once it was released on DVD. When I saw the Wii version of the game available for review, I snagged it because, as all parents know, you can never give a child too many reasons to wave their arms and leap around wildly while in close proximity to expensive and easily broken items like televisions.

I assumed that a game licensed from a kid's movie would be a game (surprise) for kids; as it turned out, I was right, but not because of the game's storyline or content. The Bee Movie Game is a kid's game because it requires really, really good hand/eye coordination, not to mention the reflexes and flexible focus of a Jack Russell terrier. The games are not terribly complicated or difficult to understand; it's just that they take full advantage of the Wii-mote's capabilities. If you're not skilled at moving, shooting and watching two to three places on the screen at the same time, some of the games can be brutal. I have a feeling I made it past one tutorial for a Pachinko-like game that involves collecting good honey in a bucket and shooting bad honey only because it was set up so that failure was nigh-impossible.

After trying a few of the other activities the game offers, I came to the conclusion that The Bee Movie Game is in the same class as the Cow Racing game on Wii Play — it's a game that we poor parents are meant to lose in the name of bringing joy to the rug rats. Once I accepted that, the game became a lot more entertaining.

The Bee Movie Game does have a lot going for it. The interior of New Hive City is a lot of fun to explore and provides some very nice eye candy during one minigame that has you working as a taxi driver in the hive. The cut scenes — and there are a lot of them — are entertaining without being so long they throw off your groove. I think so, anyway, because I never had a groove to throw off, but if I had gotten said groove, the cut scenes wouldn't have thrown it off. Also, I'm only referring to the groove for the game, not my overall groove, which I still have and is working just fine, thank you!

Ahem. As I was saying, the graphics are very nice overall. I noticed some minor video hitching, which seemed to be caused by new graphics loading from the game disk, but it wasn't anything impairing. The loading screen is another matter, but I'll get to that later. The number of activities you can choose from is very nice and gives the game a very open feeling, even in storyline mode. One of your goals is to collect drops of honey, which is used as currency in New Hive City, and each job option you have to choose from is roughly as rewarding as any other. This gives you the freedom to do only the activities you enjoy while still being able to progress and earn rewards.

Flying around New York also is very nicely done. The only part I didn't care for was the pollination job. You are required to zap flowers with your pollen gun and either extract pollen from healthy flowers or inject it into dying ones and save them. The big issue here is that the activity is fairly uneventful most of the time. Sometimes you'll have to fight off invasions of dragonflies by shooting the enemy bugs with your pollen gun, but even then, the tension comes from trying to both move & shoot, not from the attack itself.

Some of the games evoked an odd feeling of nostalgic enjoyment, which made no sense to me at first. It wasn't until I was doing a task that requires hitting the directional control in the correct sequence at the right time that I recognized the source of the nostalgia: The task I was doing reminded me of the original Dragon's Lair arcade game. It was just like guiding Dirk the Daring through the dragon's castle without getting him squished or impaled or otherwise rendered nonviable. I went back to look at the other games I had gotten the same feeling from and recognized gameplay from such early '80s classics as Space Invaders, Battle Zone and — I think — Frogger.

I have to give the designers at Smart Bomb a nod for their use of these arcade elements. Those were fun games, and the designers did a very good job of using the elements that made those games memorable while still creating new, original games that fit "The Bee Movie" themes. Sadly, flying my little bee self into a windshield just didn't have the same satisfaction as guiding Dirk into a river of fire or throwing him under a swarm of giant rolling boulders. Ah, well, can't have everything ...

The only major complaint I have is, as I mentioned earlier, the loading screen. The game has to pause and load new data with highly annoying frequency. It's understandable to have to load data when entering a new game zone, but freezing in the middle of a task and going to a loading screen just shouldn't be happening. These interruptions can happen any time, without warning, and sometimes occur several times in rapid succession. It's a significant annoyance, and I think of it as the game's single biggest flaw because after the third or fourth time it happens, I run out of desire to keep playing.

While the loading is a limitation of the hardware - the Wii contains no hard drive and extremely memory - designers need to take this into account. Frustrating for an adult becomes downright defeating for a child.

The Bee Movie Game should be very popular with kids, and adults may find a measure of enjoyment from the nostalgia factor in the minigames. Sadly, that loading screen issue, much like the final episode of "Seinfeld," is both annoying and disappointing — the rest of the product proves that the team responsible could have done much better.