"Forget all of your expectations."

When you hear the name "Wario Ware", what's the first thing that pops into your head? Hundreds of tiny, off-beat video games that come at you faster and faster, right?

Yeah, well, forget about all that.

Wario Ware: Snapped isn't really a Wario Ware game. Sure, it has Wario, Mona, Jimmy T., and Kat & Ana. Sure, it has the very brief games with the weird objectives and silly graphics. But that's where the similarities end.

The game is played by setting your DSi on a flat surface, like a table, and tilting the screen so that the camera is pointed at your face as you sit or stand some distance away. (I found it easiest to stand, as some of the games require you to move the position of your face around a lot.) You select the course you'd like to play, and then the game guides you through five brief mini-games. Before each game, the screen shows you where to place your face and hands, and when the camera recognizes you, the game begins. The mini-games are the sort of Wario Ware silliness you've come to expect -- swat flies, grab coins, wave goodbye, kiss on-screen characters -- and they're played by moving your face and hands around in the camera's view.

What makes this different from most Wario Ware games is that your game always lasts five rounds, and you can't get a game over. Once you reach the end of the course, you're treated to a cute little slideshow of photos or video clips from the games that you completed successfully. In Wario's course, your successful performances are compiled into a little video that makes it look like you're doing a weird dance. In Mona's course, still shots are overlaid with cartoon images to make you look goofy. In Jimmy's course, cartoons and text are added to still shots to make it look like you're participating in a five-panel comic strip. (I was unable to try Kat & Ana's two-player games.) All together, the game includes 20 minigames, divided into four sets of five each.

So it's not a game so much as a pocket-sized photo booth toy. The point isn't the minigames themselves, because they're not very challenging or interesting except from a technical demonstration point of view, and the game doesn't keep any meaningful kind of score. No, the point is to spend about a minute acting like an idiot, and then to see how silly you look in the summary video afterward. And it's surprisingly worthwhile -- I played Jimmy's course four times and got a different comic story each time. They made me giggle.

This isn't a game that you can whip out and chill with for half an hour or an hour, but it is a cute little piece of novelty software that you can show off to people. The only problem is that the game is notoriously picky about recognizing the player. The camera has to be configured before you can play, and there has to be the right amount of lighting and contrast to get it to respond. Even if you can accept the very limited nature of this game, you may be discouraged by the inconvenience of setting up a carefully-staged playing environment just to get it to work.

I found it fun and worthwhile for only 500 points, but then again, I have a fascination with oddball titles like Master of Illusion and Jam Sessions. There isn't a lot here to keep you coming back -- you'll probably fool around with it for an evening and then forget about it. It's undeniably charming, but roughly a half hour of non-gaming entertainment may or may not be worth five bucks to you.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 05/04/09

Game Release: WarioWare: Snapped! (US, 04/05/09)