User Rating: 9.5 | Wario Ware, Inc: Minigame Mania GBA
In an era where enormous development costs and equally large financial risks result in far too many stale, cookie-cutter games finding their way to store shelves, WarioWare Inc.: Mega MicroGame$ is quite an accomplishment. Forget the gaggles of Super Nintendo ports—the Game Boy Advance exists for unique, outside-the-box experimenting like this. Defying classification, WarioWare Inc. is the most original and daring anomaly of a game I’ve seen in a long time. But beyond all that, and most importantly, it’s just damn good fun. At one time equally bizarre, charming, hilarious, simple, and manic, WarioWare is brilliant in the way that it takes a straightforward concept and delivers it in such a unique method to make the whole package unlike anything you’ve played before. The simplest way to explain WarioWare is to say that it’s a collection of really mini games (hence microgames), almost all of them lasting for only 5 seconds. Each game is immensely simple, to the point that you only use the D-pad and the A button in each of them to do no more than one small action. But that’s an incomplete explanation, because the real beauty of WarioWare lies in the presentation; in the style of the microgames and the way that they are presented to you. There are over 200 of them, and they’re thrown at you in rapid succession. The next microgame will begin after 5 seconds, whether or not you complete the required action; not unlike time and tide, WarioWare waits for no man. Fail to complete 4 microgames and it’s game over. Oh, but it gets even more frenzied. The microgames, as short as they already are, actually speed up even more as you play, adding to the intensity. But the most far out aspect is that the game never tells you what’s coming next nor what exactly you have to do. Just before each microgame begins, one clue word will be shown (such as “Chomp!” or “Dodge!”), and in those short 5 seconds you must figure out what action you must do, and then do it. What truly makes the game such a heady experience, though, is how stark raving mad many of the microgames are. They’re split into different genres, and they’ll have you doing such a wide variety of actions that even trying to come up with a small cross-section is difficult. For instance, in the Sports Genre alone, you’ll be jumping rope, avoiding obstacles on a skateboard, performing a long jump on skis, bowling, curling (yes, curling), bouncing on a trampoline, and much, much more—and this is definitely the least bizarre of the different genres. Some of the strangest and most hilarious microgames include: taking a picture of a flying squirrel; cutting a piece of meat; dodging a hotdog on wheels (that actually tries to psyche you out sometimes); shaking a dog’s paw (which cries if your attempt fails); and dropping a fatter than usual Wario onto a floating banana. A floating banana! Playing WarioWare, especially for the first time, makes you feel like you are losing your mind, but in a good way. And as a testament to just how varied the microgames are, some of them actually come from classic Nintendo games, such as fighting Mother Brain in the original Metroid, jumping on a Goomba in Super Mario Bros., or simply entering a cave in The Legend of Zelda. Admittedly, the whole thing just sounds silly on paper. But once you actually play the game, you’ll slowly become so absorbed by the its crazy style and intense gameplay that you’ll suddenly find yourself deeply addicted. And although the excitement of playing the game for the first time does wear off decidedly once you’ve played all the microgames, the shear fun of them remains fully intact for quite some time. In the way that the game has no decided ending, other than failing four times, once you start playing one of the genres (after you beat it the first time, at least) and how it speeds up gradually as you play, WarioWare has an almost puzzle game-like method to its madness—it has the same pick-up-and-play qualities of a Tetris or a Pokemon Puzzle League (making it a perfect game to take on the road, since you can literally fit a session into any size of spare time), and the same replay value as a great puzzle game as well. Moreover, all the bonus games that you can unlock, such as a complete version of Dr. Mario (dubbed Dr. Wario) and a bevy of two-player challenges that can be played on one GBA, further insures that you’ll be playing WarioWare for a long time. Considering the immense variety and insane aesthetics present in WarioWare, it’s difficult to peg the game’s graphics and sound. You could literally go from playing a perfect conversion of F-Zero in all its Mode 7 glory in one moment to playing a conversion of an old Nintendo Game & Watch in the next; from helping an anime-styled woman snort up a booger to inserting a simple line drawing of a finger into a simple line drawing of a nose. The game does often look great, but it also looks “bad” and just about everything in between—but when it looks “bad,” you really can’t fault it, because if it does then it does so intentionally. In the end, trying to stack up WarioWare’s graphical offerings is fruitless, because “good graphics” in the conventional sense just isn’t the point here. It’s all about crazy and hilarious style, and in that respect, WarioWare succeeds gloriously. The same could be said about the sound, too. It varies immensely, but considering that the music that plays during the Nature Genre is one of the best game songs ever (not to mention the almost equally as good music in the Sci-Fi Genre), some degree of aural props must be given. It must be noted that there will surely be some people out there that just won’t understand WarioWare. It’s truly as weird as games get, and if you don’t have a compatible sense of humor (that is, if you don’t find foolish stuff like taking a picture of a flying squirrel funny), then you’ll probably be too put off by all the insanity to enjoy the experience. But if that’s the case, you should be pitied, because you really don’t know what you’ll be missing. And considering that many people won’t be hip to WarioWare’s groove, much credit must be given to Nintendo for even making this audacious game to begin with. So if you’re daring and up for a change of pace, just give WarioWare a shot—you might just find yourself hip to its whole scene and subsequently privy to one of the most unique games of all time. 
