At the time the original NiGHTS game was released over here in Europe at the tail end of 1996 on Sega’s ill-starred Saturn console, PlayStation fever was sweeping through the continent and all the cool kids of my age-group had one of Sony’s grey wonderboxes sat under their television with a copy of Ridge Racer or WipeOut (or both if their parents were rich). Admitting to owning a Saturn was about as fashionable as wearing a brown v-neck tweed sweater over a ridiculous cream-coloured school shirt, and so games like NiGHTS kind of slipped by without me really noticing.

Several years later I chanced upon it whilst rifling through some old unwanted games at a friend’s house, and after an exchange of £5 and a loan of his Sega Saturn I sat down and managed to get initially very, very confused and then subsequently very, very addicted. Thus, the announcement last year that a sequel was in the works for the Wii peaked my interest along with a whole load of gaming chaps and chapettes, and it’s now floated over the horizon and gracefully nose-dived into our office Wii.

The premise of NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams isn’t particularly easy to bend your noodle around initially. The basic idea is that you control a purple-clad seemingly genderless jester as it flies a pre-determined path around a dream world, with the player directing it up, down and around the screen to collect blue orbs, fight enemies and collect keys. Each flight chapter is set across three ‘laps’ of the particular stage, with each lap taking a different route to the last. NiGHTS must catch a flying bird on each lap and defeat it to grab a key, before continuing on his way to the end of the lap and depositing said key into a kind of gate to allow progress onto the next lap, and once you’ve completed all the laps you are whisked off for a boss battle.

If it sounds gloriously oddball, that’s because it is. Sonic Team’s dreamy otherworld is packed full of the kind of bizarre enemies and sweeping landscapes that could have been conjured up by Walt Disney during a particularly violent migraine, which to give the developer’s their dues is actually the whole point. The games sees you playing the part of one of a selection of two young children who, crippled by nightmares, travel to the world of Nightopia where they are instantly bothered by a rather annoying owl who informs them that NiGHTS is the solution to all their problems.

Hence, it’s over to you to help them cure their personal demons over a number of chapters. Each chapter has a number of different levels that vary between the standard flying mode mentioned above, a selection of mini-games involving NiGHTS such as pushing smaller bubbles into a central bubble in order to make it as big as possible and a couple of third-person platforming sections as the two children.

It’s safe to say that the most fun you’ll get out of NiGHTS will be in the former two modes, as it’s the relaxing sense of floating along mid-air that really sucks you in. Gliding around the levels becomes rather hypnotic, and the system of looping-the-loop to create a void into which gems and enemies are sucked whilst dashing at items to smash or defeat them is simple enough to get to grips with.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the main intended control system the game offers you. The idea is that, by pointing the Wii-mote at the screen and holding A, NiGHTS will float toward whichever direction your little cursor is in. It sounds reasonably simple and in a way it is, but it’s completely hamstrung by the system not recognising changes in direction well enough. The cursor turns red when it’s too far away from NiGHTS to warn you that you need to bring it a little closer to the centre of the screen, but curiously the circle in which your aiming point is most effective is rather small, making smooth control rather difficult.

Luckily, Sonic Team chose to offer the player other methods of control, and it’s to these that most will run screaming. With options for turning the Wii-mote side-on to0 replicate a classic controller, to use the nunchuck, the classic controller itself or even the GameCube controller offered, you can hardly say that the game almost makes up for the main scheme being a little broken. Still, it’s a shame as with some proper gesture-based controls the game would have been all the better.

For all the fun you have floating about, though, there are other aspects of Journey of Dreams that miss the mark. The platforming sections that see you controlling the two children are dull and feel rather out-of-place, whilst the boss battles that end each standard chapter are often confusing and, in keeping with the original game, offer very little in the way of hints as to how to even begin to conquer them. Equally annoyingly, when you die you are kicked back to the menu and pretty much given the option of starting a particular section all over again or… er, playing something else.

Technically it is a curious mixture to, with both the graphical and audio sides having their own dreams and nightmares. The cutscenes in the game are fantastic, but the actual in-game graphics themselves look horridly dated, with jagged edges and basic textures scattered everywhere. This is backed by a decent musical score that captures the nature of NiGHTS perfectly, but at the same time is savagely smashed in the goolies by some of the most awful voice-acting and script ever to issue forth from SEGA (given some of the dialogue in the Sonic Adventure games, that’s saying something) waffling on over the top of it. Listening to the rather forced tea-and-scones British accents is so annoying it’ll make you grind your teeth down to the gums.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag, then. There’s a couple of incentives to keep playing in the form of unlockable levels if you perform well enough on the standard ones and a customisable garden in which you can store enemies you’ve beaten and have your Wii chums visit, although to be quite frank it’s hard to imagine most people being all that fussed even if it does use the Wii Weather Channel to decide on daily conditions. There’s also a multiplayer option where you zoom around throwing objects at the other person, but it feels slightly tacked-on and won’t last you long.

The main game won’t last you all that long, either; you’ll probably be able to clock the whole thing in less than ten hours. For all its failings, though, you can’t help but be (I hate using this word, trust me) charmed by Journey of Dreams. In its purest form, with NiGHTS circling around the standard chapter levels, it’s really rather good fun and decidedly addictive, which will no doubt see many people through to the end even if there are the odd annoying hurdles to leap over. A system-seller or Triple A title it may not be, but as a passing curiosity or something to rent out for a weekend it will fill the void quite nicely.