"WarioWare: Smooth Moves" is full of silly minigames. "The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy" is more fun when playing with a 7-year-old. "Sonic and the Secret Rings" should look familiar to fans of Sonic the Hedgehog. The "Elebits" creatures "meow" when shot.

Video games made for kids behave a lot like cartoons do. Animated characters stick their fingers up their noses and shoot guns at bad guys. It's surprising no game has been named, "Bang-Bang, Where's Your Booger, Bugs?" It'd be a runaway hit.

In fact, in January, the new Nintendo Wii became the month's best-selling system partly by using cartoons, nostrils and weapons to appeal to kids and (there's no polite way to say this) female gamers who used to hate video games. The Wii pushed 435,000 systems at $250 apiece. Amazing.

It's hard not to keep the nose/gun/cartoon equation in mind when you play Wii games for kids. Many titles rely on it. A few thumb their noses at it.

"WarioWare: Smooth Moves" gets to the snout-picking quickly. "Smooth Moves" runs you through a series of short tests. In one, you pick a man's nose by moving his hand to a foreign object sticking out of a nostril, then you yank it out. All "Smooth Moves'" minigames are silly like that.

And like many other Wii games, the minigames of "Smooth Moves" are most fun when you play against another gamer, as you both sit there, shaking your Wii hand controller, which reads your wrist motions.

In "The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy," cartoonish Billy shoves a bone up his beak, too, and he's got access to weapons. The point of "Billy & Mandy" is to stand in boxing ring-style environs to punch and shoot Death in the head with a gun, a book and stuff.

I can't stand "Grim," but I should point out it was more fun when I played it with my 7-year-old nephew Kyle. It's one of Kyle's favorites, partly, I imagine, because of dialogue, like, "If kicking butt is wrong, I don't want to be right."

A better game, the new "Sonic and the Secret Rings," doesn't dwell on nose-pondering or guns, because it has a big-name cartoon character to fall back on: Sonic the Hedgehog.

The heft of "Secret Rings" looks familiar to "Sonic" fans. You run fast to acquire gold rings floating in the air. Villains are trying to kill you, and you avoid them by sprinting, jumping, punching and grinding rails like a skateboarder. The Wii makes this more interactive with that crazy remote control.

The story: A baddie named Erazor Djinn is erasing Arabian Nights tales from existence. Sonic must stop him. This may sound grand, but "Secret Rings" begins slowly. The pace picks up, though, and becomes a workaday (if sometimes cumbersome) adventure.

Then there's "Elebits," which eschews noses but calls on you to shoot cute little Gremlin-styled creatures, which meow oh-so-sweetly when you blast them. Now that's a grim adventure.

The story is, you're a kid, you're jealous of attention-robbing Elebits, so you grab your dad's "capture gun" and shoot as many as 150 of them in any six-minute period. The Elebits don't die. They get captured. But those "meow, meows" break my heart.

And this is where another kid-game element comes into play. You're destroying Elebits in your parent's house. You have to root them out of their warm spots. That means you must destroy TVs, computers, lamps, and your own toys to get to the Elebits.

None of those toys you zap in "Elebits" is a Wii. What? You didn't expect Nintendo to command you to destroy itself, did you?

("Elebits" for Wii -- Plays fun but repetitive. Looks good. Easy to moderately difficult. Rated "E" for cartoon violence. Two and one-half stars out of four.)

("The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy" for Wii -- Plays mildly fun in multiplayer mode only. Looks poor. Easy to moderately difficult. Rated "E 10+" for cartoon violence and crude humor. One star.)

("Sonic and the Secret Rings" for Wii -- Plays fun if you like "Sonic" games. Looks good. Easy to moderately difficult. Rated "E" for cartoon violence. Three stars.)

("WarioWare: Smooth Moves" for Wii -- Plays very fun in multiplayer mode and fun alone. Looks good. Easy. Rated "E 10+" for crude humor and mild cartoon violence. Three and one-half stars.)