WarioWare (2003)

I honestly didn’t really play a lot of GameBoy Advance games, I felt it was basically a smaller Super Nintendo and this was back in 2001 when I was already well into High School. I didn’t even really get into the system in a big way until the GameBoy Advance SP was out. With it’s clamshell design and backlight, it made playing games so much easier. Also with emulators, it made it easier to play the very few games that I actually wanted. I really enjoyed several games like Super Dodge Ball and Bomberman Tournament, but what really grabbed my interest was a little game called WarioWare.

With a subtitle like “Micro-mini games” I didn’t really understand what that meant. Remember this was back when Minigames were still relatively new to games. And Micro-Mini Games didn’t exist.

Tied together with a small story of Wario wanting to create his own video game to earn lots of money, the game itself is just a random assortment of very small games that are completed within about five seconds. Within those five seconds. You have to understand the game that is placed in front of you and also make sure you complete the objective. Most of the games are extremely simple, but as the game progresses, they become faster paced and more complicated. You are allocated four hearts or tries at the start of the level, every failed attempt makes you lose a heart.

Each “level” is formed around a certain character that shows up and has some sort of theme loosely tying them all together. For example, a crazy scientist named Dr. Crygor shows up and most of the games revolve around robots, machines or science. Each level then ends in a Boss Stage, that becomes much longer than several seconds that the levels normally take. It’s nothing too much more difficult, but offers a good challenge. It can become much more frantic when you only have a heart or two left when entering the Boss Stage and if you mess up, even a single hit may result in you starting the Boss Stage completely over again. Even though it’s only been maybe a minute, you really feel the sense of loss and having to restart the stage over again.

The game doesn’t take much more than about an hour or so to complete, once you complete the game you can go into an endless mode, that allows you to just continue playing games until you fail completely.