[1001] Wario Ware

It’s a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to describe the WarioWare series — every game is very sim­ple at heart, and yet so bril­liantly put together. You could call them a bunch of ‘minigames’, and have done with it — but that doesn’t come close to show­ing how much fun and often down­right hilar­i­ous these games can be. The UCHG had fun a few years back with the Wii edi­tion of the series, ‘Smooth Moves’ — check out that vid here.

The 1001 includes a cou­ple from the series:

1001 No.53: ‘WarioWare, Inc.: Mega MicroGames! (2003)
& No. 54: ‘WarioWare: Twisted!’ (2005)

Mega MicroGames was the first in the series, with Twisted! com­ing out later — both on the Gameboy Advance. All WarioWare titles fea­ture the char­ac­ter Wario, straight out of the Mario series of Nintendo games — but the story and use of char­ac­ters is never impor­tant. What is impor­tant are the minigames — and there are tons of them.

Reaction times are a huge fac­tor in each game. You have mere sec­onds to assess what the hell is going on on-screen, and then react accord­ingly. The sheer ran­dom­ness and bizarre nature of some of the minigames is what gives the WarioWare series its charm: some chal­lenges range from try­ing to shave someone’s beard off, to catch­ing weird bits of food to make a giant sand­wich. And some of them are really odd — but the con­trols remain ever so sim­ple it becomes instinc­tive in no time.

Each sec­tion of each game has a set of dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, together with their own kind of theme, my favourite being ‘9 Volt and 18 Volt’. Like the UCHG these guys love retro games, and every minigame is full of ref­er­ences to bits of gam­ing his­tory. Part of the fun is just recog­nis­ing what each screen has been pulled from.

All these WarioWare games are sim­i­lar at their core. The Wii ver­sion obvi­ously uses the Wiimote, and the ‘Twisted!’ edi­tion actu­ally shipped with a kind of accelerom­e­ter built into the car­tridge to pro­vide the actions — though because of the mer­cury in the car­tridge was never allowed a European release. I really urge you to track down at least one game from this series — it’s hard to explain how much fun it can be, so just give it a go yourself.