"Celebrity Sports Showdown"
Photo: EA

The wait to discover who can paddle a canoe faster - Fergie or Nelly Furtado - is almost over.

The eternal debate about whether Boston Celtic Paul Pierce can spike a volleyball better than country music sensation LeAnn Rimes will soon be settled.

Video game publisher Electronic Arts has revealed to MTV News that a new holiday-season Nintendo Wii game, "Celebrity Sports Showdown," will settle these arguments - or at least present a virtual forum with which to do so.

Modeled after the hit "Wii Sports" and developed by the creators of another mini-game compilation, "EA Playground," the new EA title will allow up to four players to control a set of celebrities in activities that range from the bizarre (inner-tubing) to the more bizarre (fighter-jet racing). The game's dozen activities will also include slalom skiing, dodgeball, "smash badminton" and curling, each featuring the aforementioned celebrities, plus soccer star Mia Hamm, country singer Keith Urban, boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, ice-skater Kristi Yamaguchi and more.

The game is meant to be played by a group of people using a single Wii. It's a party game, starring the A-to-C-list.

How Fergie-like is video game Fergie? Each celebrity appears in big-headed cartoonish form. They look like themselves - Fergie's got the right outfit, down to the tiara - but athletics-wise they're all the same. Fergie is as strong as football player Reggie Bush. Rimes is just as fast as Furtado.

At a recent demonstration of the game for MTV News, an EA representative explained that none of the celebrities would have special abilities. The reason Yamaguchi obliterated Fergie, Pierce and one other celebrity in a race of speedboat-drawn inner tubes? One player knew how to make Yamaguchi avoid mines and hit the proper items for extra points and boosts of speed. It's all in the deft handling of a Wii remote.

Like "Wii Sports" and many other popular games of the type, each game in "Celebrity Sports Showdown" is controlled a little differently. Controlling the inner tubes involves holding the Wii remote at its short end and tilting it to steer. Hoisting then slamming down the remote allows a player to bounce one celebrity's inner tube out of the water and onto another's. The fighter-pilot game, based on the well-received paper-airplane flying game of "Wii Playground," according to one of the games' developers, involves holding the Wii remote vertically like a joystick.

Previous Wii party games, like "Wii Sports" and "Carnival Games," let users control avatars that looked like themselves or anyone else whose likeness they could replicate. Being able to control an officially licensed celebrity instead is new, at least at this scale. One-off celebrity cameos have been common in games at least since the '90s when Bill Clinton was a hidden unlockable baller in "NBA Jam." On Wednesday, EA announced Kim Kardashian as a playable fighter in the company's upcoming "Facebreaker" boxing game.

EA's "Celebrity Sports Showdown" is a Wii exclusive. It's set to ship this holiday season.