New for WiiWare - a trio of new titles for gamers who value pretty visuals, ambient sonics and graceful gameplay above all those horrible shooting and racing car titles. Shudder etc…

The ‘Art Style’ series umbrellas three simplistic-looking but probably rather compelling propositions - two of which having been upgraded from the ‘Bit Generations’ series previously released on GameBoy Advance (remember those?) in Japan.

‘Rotohex’ is the first of the titles to make the generational leap. Play will certainly suit puzzle fans - triangular coloured blocks fall onto a grid and gamers have to rotate them to make coloured hexagons in order to make them disappear. It’s not all that dissimilar to Hexic on the 360, we guess. There’s head-to-head action too.

Next up ’Orbient’, where the challenge is to guide a little star through 50 intergalactic stages, absorbing other stars along the way, fighting or utilising the gravitational pull of others, avoiding black holes and asteroids etc. until yours is the biggest star in the Universe. One for the budding cosmologists, perhaps?

And finally the newboy of the bunch, ‘Cubello‘. As before gameplay is simplistic - players fire colours into the spinning Cubello (a collection of coloured cubes) with the aim of destroying those of a similar hue. Problems arise when your aim is wide of the intended target and you end up adding unwanted blocks to the Cubello rather than diminishing it. This one’s our pick of the bunch.

And that’s all for the time being, although Nintendo talks about Art Style as a series rather than just these three games launching on WiiWare from November 21st (there were seven games in the original Bit Generations lineup). Whether any of them goes “beyond traditional action and puzzle games“, as Nintendo would have us believe, remains to be seen. It’ll only cost you 600 Wii Points apiece to find out, though. Meantime check out artstyle.Nintendo.co.uk to see for yourselves.