Gamespot is right... Skyward Swords controls are bad.

[Soma]

The problem I had with the bird race is that I didn't read the instructions correctly, I was just pointing up to ascend but it turns out I needed to shake the wiimote to do that. So the first time I spent most of the time down in the clouds :p

About the menus, you don't use the cursor for that, tilting the remote is how you do it. I think that was a mistake, even if it works I think the cursor in the menus works better and is more intuitive. There's been a lot of confusion about that, and even if I read it before I also got confused when playing it.