The MotionPlus is still incredibly rare — the unit we played with was one of only two in the entire SEGA organisation. Scuffed, and covered in arcane registration stickers, it looked like someone had nicked it from Tony Stark’s lab.

The MotionPlus itself is small — very small. It's a tiny thing. You can barely feel its weight in your hand, and once it innocuously clips in to the bottom of the Wii Remote, you're hardly aware that it's there.

Yet the MotionPlus makes a difference. The MotionPlus makes the Wii Remote whole. For the Wii controller, as originally implemented, was incomplete. Like a black-and-white TV signal, it needed a little something extra to bring it to life — to enter the world of colour.

That something extra is there. It's hard to describe, but it is real. You know it's real, because it immediately demands that you start playing Virtua Tennis 2009 differently to any other Wii game.

Every round that begins with a ritual: you have to calibrate the controller by pointing it at your player on the screen. Persons, teams, and nations have their pre-game hakas and so forth, but the benefit here is not psychosomatic. The MotionPlus must know precisely where it is before it can work its magic.

The most immediate effect is that it makes for a more challenging game of tennis. Yes, you can now subtly twist your hand during a stroke to put spin on the ball, and make it drop down right after it crosses the net. But you must also know what you’re doing — MotionPlus makes for a steeper learning curve. You have to follow through flawlessly to get those slices and lobs just right. The payoff is a level of court dominance that just wasn’t possible when the Wii Remote could only broadly detect movement.

On the accessories front, Nintendo engineers have thought of everything. There's a new, elongated rubber Wii Remote sleeve to go with the newer, longer controller, once assembled. This, presumably, will launch Day One with the add-on, to prevent any overlap where once again people find themselves flinging the things straight through their plasmas. There has been some paranoid speculation on the internet that this new rubber sleeve must be permanently held in place with glue. These reports are false; it works just the same as the old sleeve. No need to panic!

There's also a chunky locking mechanism on the under-side of the device, cunningly hidden by all the glossy publicity photos. Unlocked, a squeeze on the two buttons on the unit's sides will allow its insertion or removal. Locked, this becomes impossible. So the MotionPlus itself, properly used, won't become a deadly projectile with the potential of concussing the cat.

And, presumably, future versions of the Wii Remote will have MotionPlus built-in. Nintendo has a proud history of taking successful experiments in novelty and raising them atop their three pillars (though failures, like the Virtual Boy, are swept under the rug…).