WarioWare: Touched!

"If I don't convince you then you're missing out"

If you don't like really simple games with really fun concepts then there's something wrong and this game is certainly not for you. However, for a normal person, this is a dream. The story is really easy to complete and will take one day of tapping, spinning, blowing and much, much, more.

If you don't know WarioWare then here we go. You get tiny mini games thrown at you in quick succession. By tiny, we're talking 5 seconds. A long one would be, say, 15 seconds. But that's the beauty of it. The games are thrown at you so quickly. By the end, you won't know what's up and what's down. But once again, that's the beauty of it.

The mini games or from now on, microgames, are so simple. An example would be poking camouflaged bugs on a tree. Simple, but with the franticness, fun.

If you have been a long term fan of Nintendo, then 9 volt and 18 volt will provide you with your dream microgames. The classics. Their microgames include Zelda, Metroid and Mario and they are very famous games taking you back all the way to the NES. But if you are a long term fan of Nintendo, you must have played a WarioWare game anyway.

What really adds to the franticness of the game is the fact that you are thrown one word commands or phrases such as Pop! or Throw! or Put out Fire!. Genius. That is my desciption of the game. What really adds to the longitivity of the game after the story is the task of trying to beat your high scores...again and again. And then, you realise that you have rosettes to collect on the gallery mode. What this mode is is a mode that lets you play each game individually...again and again, trying to beat your high scores all the times. Rosettes are scores that the game sets that you have got to try and beat. I don't think anything happens when you get all the rosettes but I wouldn't know...I'm still trying. I expect you get a toy for the playroom but more on that feature later.

With all of these fabulous microgames and all that replay material you have enough to be going on for months. And so I have. A feature that I thought of and tried which is quite entertaining is using 2 styli and 2 players and trying to complete the microgames together. You might think that this makes it easier but you're always fighting to try and do it yourself and you end up messing it up. I bet no one else has noticed you can do that.

As it is human nature that makes '2 player WarioWare' more difficult it is also human nature that makes the actual game fun. The next part I want to talk about is the interactiveness of the game. At practically any point of the game, there is something you can do. The title screen, is very good, although most people will never see it as it requires you to wait at the title screen. Eventually lots of nose shaped things will come and rainbow balls and rubbers will come. This is actually more fun than it sounds, unbelievably. Also, after microgames, you can sometimes interact with them, once again, more fun than it sounds. You can also play with the credits, less fun than it sounds.

There is a mode, like a toyroom, where you've got a room of souvenirs, which you unlock, to play with. Unfortunatly, most of them are very boring and basic (wobbling a jelly?). Some are good. These are the ones where you are going for a high score. You unlock these by getting 30 on the people's microgames. However, my favourite isn't a high score one, but the parrot one. You speak to it, and it repeats you and remembers what you said for a bit. I sang We are the Champions line by line to it and it remembered all of the lines and repeated them to me in an incredibly annoying voice. Very annoying. A really stupid one is where you blow a Granny's tea and she gives you some 'words of wisdom'. Yes, they are a complete load of rubbish if you were interested. How about a timer. You're not interested? Why am I not surprised. But how about a really exciting film which you get to run forward and rewind as much as you like. That is so fun in a parallel universe. The table tennis one is kind of fun with a friend, but it is a shame that you can't play it against the computer and move the racquet yourself. Still, I'm sad enough to play it against myself.

Back to the microgames then and if you really want fun then I'd have to reccommend the spinning Professor. His microgames involve you spinning things on the touch screen using the stylus. It's really easy for the first 25 or so, but then it gets slightly more difficult, not allowing you to make a big mistake. Then after you get to the 50 mark, it says that you must do this perfectly or else you'll never get it (it doesn't actually say that).

One really good aspect of the people game is that after each however many microgames, you get a boss game. If you win the boss game, you get a life back. This starts to get you thinking tactically about how many games you can afford to lose before the boss. In gallery mode, you get the same tactical thinking, knowing that the order is easy, medium, hard is very handy in the tactical game as you know how many hard ones you have to win to get the score you want to get. But with you doing all this mental maths, playing, thinking about the mental maths and wondering what game is coming next, it can get your head into a mess. A mess which is the reason why WarioWare is so successful. Whether, you enjoy getting into a mess or not, you should buy this game for your DS as it utilizes the features of the machine incredibly well. Buy this!
Rating
10/10

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 02/13/06