Wario Ware, Inc. Review
You can call me the “better late than never” gamer. That meaning that I’m always discovering games about five years after their release date. Long after all my peers have raved over and forgotten them. My latest discovery is Wario Ware, Inc.: Mega MicroGame$ for the Game Boy Advance.
With today’s busy life schedules and short attention spans, casual gaming is on the rise. “Twitch games”–simple games that can be fully played in minutes, even seconds–have grown in popularity. These games have found their place in those few extra minutes you have when you arrive at work early. I can now claim that Wario Ware, Inc. is one of the genre’s masters.
Each of the game’s stages pits you against a series of rapid-paced puzzles or tasks to perform. In the nature of each micro-game, the player must be intuitive, investing the first few fractions of a second to assess the scenario and guess as to what’s expected of them. This accelerates the fun as it keeps the synapses firing!
What also adds to the excitement is the cast of wacky characters and the themes on which their stages are based. Stages range from space bunnies rescuing an alien to an afro-sporting disco master’s cell phone to a mad scientist desperate plea to get into a toilet. My personal favorite being the gamer geek whose micro-games are all references to old Nintendo games, even obscure ones from the Virtual Boy to the Famicom Family Basic keyboard.
Adding to the replay value (as if challenging yourself against the high scores wasn’t enough) you also unlock separate mini-games, which are slightly larger versions of some of the micro-games. Some are these are 2-player, with the use of the L and R buttons as each player’s controls.
Wario Ware, Inc. feels like the type of game that conventionally would never had seen the light of day, had they not added Nintendo’s Wario character. In a generation where the gaming industry relies so much on franchises, most publishers are nervous about releasing anything new and unfamiliar to the market. I’m very pleased to see this risk paid off and I’m looking forward to exploring more of the Wario Ware titles.
