The whole WarioWare thing has for some reason, much like Monkey Ball, passed me by. Its only now, looking forward to the new generation, I noticed WarioWare for the Wii which looks spectacular. I decided to pick up the DS version for cheap from play.com after playing around with the GBA version for a couple of hours.

Blast it over the hurdle for my review
If you’ve never played WarioWare before then you are truly missing out. The premise of the game is rather similar every time. In Touched, Wario is up to his usual bad deeds and has stolen two Game Boy Advances but trips into a manhole (bear with me). A sort of ghost carries him out of the manhole and gives him the choice of a Nintendo DS or the GBA’s, he decides to take both but is baffled by the DS until he discovers the stylus. The story is hardly engrossing to be honest but what is, is the unique and excellent gameplay.

The game is set out with different characters who have become somewhat recurring to the series. Each characters story is played out with a 2 to 5 minute cut scene and then you must play a round of microgames. Each microgame lasts approximately 5 to 10 seconds to complete, you are given a short phrase before the game begins to help you figure out exactly what it is you are to do in the game. After you finish the 13 microgames you see another cut scene which rounds off the story (usually in an extremely wacky way). Sadly there are only 8 characters in the game, each with their own different microgames which are based around a certain action, for example one of the characters games are based around rubbing the screen whereas another is focused on blowing into the built in microphone.

Due to only having 8 stages (as well as 5 “remix stages”) the game can be fairly short and can get repetitive after awhile. However this is evened out by the toys system which gives an incentive to carry on playing to unlock all of the microgames (every character has around 25 each). The toys themselves are actually quite interesting as they all do something clever involving either the touch screen or the microphone and are great little toys to have a little play around with if your bored.

As there are around 200 microgames included, I suppose I can’t be too harsh on this game due to the fact that it must take literally ages to come up with the games for each new iteration of the game. As short as they are, some are truly genius ideas which sadly, you would not be able to expand into a normal game. I highly recommend you play a WarioWare game, if not this one.