The ‘Long story short’ of it is that, this game is a long story cut short. So much potential and love has gone into this game its truly remarkable, I fear that many people will miss the hidden depth due to its only potential down point, its fairly short single player outing. But once you unlock the Multi player mode, the true game begins.

WarioWare is a series of games which in my opinion are hugely underrated. Their premise is, for the most part, indescribable. There are a set of characters in each game and each character has a ’story’ which plays out as a ridiculously well animated cartoon and usually includes an amount of subtle humor which works off of the conventions and themes portrayed through the previous outings of the series. After the story pieces your set on a task to perform around 15 ‘microgames’ which take between 2 and 10 seconds to complete. There are around 200 of these microgames in each entry in the series and every time they are usually very different. The latest games released have been very different indeed due to their revolutionary control interfaces, and with the latest entry on the Wii - it allows for some great ideas to be played around with.

The games themselves are based around the many functions of the Wii remote such as motion sensing, pointing at the screen, the speakers etc. They actually come up with some pretty inspiring ideas for how to use the remote to the best of its technical abilities. A lot of the games are based on using the controllers motion sensing to simulate things on screen. There are many different ’styles’ of holding the remote which are taught throughout the game and introduced slowly as you edge towards the last couple of levels, culminating all of the control schemes into one challenging finale. Many of the control schemes for the microgames are sort of broken though as you can pretty much perform all of them holding the controller as you normally would – but wheres the fun in that huh? There are loads of schemes which are used for different games for example, ‘The Mohawk’ where you hold the controller above your head, ‘The Waiter’ where you hold the remote in the middle of your palm and the largely humorous ‘Elephant’ where you hold the controller on the tip of your nose like an elephants trunk. All of these games bode well with the control schemes as reported before from our pre-release play test, you can balance brooms, answer phones, insert teeth into the elderly and pump iron just as you would in real life. It perhaps begs the question, why not actually do this stuff for real instead of via a game? A similar question to what new players ask about Wii Sports. Perhaps one of the arguments to this statement would be the Multi player modes.

As each game is rather short and extremely well thought out, it really doesn’t take long to finish and work through everything that this game has to offer. For example this game came out today and already me and Heather have both completed it in one evening (How geeky eh?) Although I have a feeling that a lot of replay-ability lies in the Multi-player mode which is unlocked after completion of this game. WarioWare Smooth Moves actually supports up to 12 players locally with the use of one Wii remote, a perfect way of bringing a large amount of people together for a super exciting game fest. If 12 people is a tad too many though, there are other games which work with up to 5 people and are a nice treat to play. Most of them revolve around the ‘last one in’ strategy whereby you must win every micro game to be able to keep in the game and outlast your opponents. I think the Multi player works terribly well due to the short nature of the games themselves and the competitiveness of the many modes available to you.

Perhaps the greatest part of WarioWare though is the excitement of the control scheme. I just can’t help but think about the wonderful things that game creators will be able to do in a few years. It’s amazing that they have been able to do so much with such a new technology. The way that it feels like you are playing something incredibly new and modern at the same time as being friendly and down to earth is just great. This is exactly the sort of game that Nintendo needs for the Wii, a simple and easy to pick up and play game which emphasizes social fun, but also including single play for those dull moments of your day. My only wish is that more people could play this, sadly the full price tag for this game is a sign that perhaps not as many people as Nintendo would like will be able to. Hopefully the majority will be able to see through this though and this game will become the classic title that it deserves to be on the Wii.

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