Pilotwings has always been the game Nintendo suckers you into buying when there’s hardly anything else to play on your spanking new machine.

When the company launched the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 consoles, the casual flight simulator was one of the few games on shelves. If you wanted to take a break from pouring hours into the new Mario game, you could give your brain some variety by flying around in airplanes, rocket packs or hang gliders.

When the Nintendo 3DS launches in the United States this Sunday, there won’t be a new Mario title to command gamers’ attention. Pilotwings Resort will be the big launch title for gamers that crave action on the new 3-D handheld. (I’m assuming here that throwing a Frisbee to your Nintendog won’t be enough.)

Early adopters will therefore snap up copies of Pilotwings Resort. The good news is they’ll have fun with it; the bad news is the joy ride won’t last long.

I found myself fairly addicted to Pilotwings Resort. The main game is a series of about 40 small challenges that range from one to three minutes in length. Typically, you’ll fly on a course through the game’s tropical island, zipping through rings, collecting point tokens, avoiding obstacles and finally pulling off a good landing.

If I screwed anything up, it was easy to whack the 3DS’ Start button and retry the level from the beginning, so I fell into that compulsion loop of trying and retrying until I could attain — well, not perfection, but a result good enough to move forward in the game.

Achieving that state of mastery is Pilotwings Resort’s greatest reward. The controls are simple; you rarely have to do anything other than adjust your direction with the 3DS’ analog pad and press A and B to accelerate and brake. The difficulty is in learning to read the environment and skillfully tap those buttons in the perfect increments so as to slide through the obstacles and not crash into anything.

Once you get it down, you can start pulling off death-defying aerial stunts. There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as dive-bombing into a mountain tunnel, pulling up just short of crashing into asphalt, swooping through the narrow space and emerging unscathed.

I have mixed feelings about how Resort works with the device’s glasses-free 3-D display. On the one hand, flying around the island in the ambient Free Flight mode effectively showcases the system’s depth effects. On the other, when the challenges get more difficult (and oh, do they), the 3-D proved unhelpful in terms of gauging how far away I was from objects.

I also found it annoying to constantly have to switch my focus from my avatar to the world around me. I actually found myself switching off the 3-D entirely when the flying got tough.

Pilotwings Resort’s main drawback is that there’s not much to the game. It doesn’t take very long to plow through its challenges. Besides trying for increasingly higher scores, there’s little to do once you’ve finished the limited number of scenarios. Online races or even leaderboards would have added some stickiness, but the game doesn’t offer these options. (In particular, adding leaderboards would have required a trivial amount of work.)

If Nintendo is serious about proving that its polished portable releases smoke competitors’ cut-rate downloadable titles, the company should concentrate on producing games that last longer than a few hours.

WIRED Addictive, just-one-more-try flight gameplay. Lots of variation in the levels. Smooth controls.

TIRED Single-player only. No online mode. Few features and a short experience.

Nintendo, $40

Rating: