Ubisoft announces that it's bringing the "Anno [insert year here]" series to the Wii, but minus the Latin word in the name that might scare off Wii owners worried about, say, having to read subtitles or care about boring history. The Wii version of Anno 1404, the next game in the series, will be called Dawn of Discovery, which is a name everyone can get on board with. Who wouldn't want to discover something bright and early in the morning?

Although these games have tended towards cutesy graphics, they've been serious city-builders all along, requiring no small amount of micromanagement and fiscal responsibility. And based on having played SimCity Creator, the Wii is ideally suited to city builders like this. Kick back on the couch, muck around with the Wiimote from time to time, and watch the city thrive. If SimCity Creator had a better interface, it would be one of my favorite Wii games.

Unlike SimCity with its finicky PC roots, Dawn of Discovery's gameplay is a good fit for the Wii. You build cities from fairly large manageable buildings and roads. It's all about dropping blocks on the map and letting an economy grow and prosper. Hopefully, there won't be too much micromanagement with moving goods around from island to island, which has been a sticking point in the last few Anno games. New for the Wii will be a co-operative mode that lets a second player control a cursor to clean and paint houses or blow on the sails of ships to make them go faster. In other words, give this to some nearby little kid to keep him entertained while you actually play to game.

Dawn of Discovery will ship this summer for the Wii and Nintendo DS.