Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 65, WarioWare Gold
A greatest hits game on a console capable of replicating all the various versions of WarioWare gameplay in existence is an easy choice to represent the series.
I’m ranking the top 101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.
Greatest hits collections get a bad rap. In music, there is the snob side of things that thinks you’re not a Real Fan of an artist unless you have fully immersed yourself in their decades-spanning catalog. You know what, maybe I only enjoy Bob Dylan enough to listen to a small, curated sampling of his career, so the greatest hits is a nifty shortcut, and I don’t want to listen to all of his 700 albums or whatever to figure out which one I prefer, ya nerd. In games, the idea of greatest hits takes on a different meaning, and it’s not a negative one. Usually, it’s kind of a “best of a console” discount re-release of best-selling titles — different companies call them different things, from Greatest Hits to Players Choice to Platinum Hits — but there is a rarely seen video game version of the music industry’s idea of greatest hits collections, too. They tend to have their own industry-specific spin on the idea as well.
WarioWare Gold is one such greatest hits outing, meant to bring what was, at the time, 15 years of WarioWare games together in one collection. It’s not one of those collections that has every iteration of a series on one disc or cartridge, but instead, was its own curated collection of WarioWare’s past, brought together in one package in the present, with updated graphics, audio capabilities, and a slew of extras. It shows off much of the best of WarioWare, in terms of the microgames available throughout the series’ history as well as the different play styles that the franchise has deployed throughout, and, in this, as a celebration of WarioWare, it’s a massive success.
Reviews and review scores can sometimes struggle when it comes to contextualizing something like a WarioWare Gold, though: review score aggregator and thorn in my side Metacritic has Gold at 78, the result of its weighted averaging from 49 different reviews. If you look at the individual reviews, you see plenty that believe Gold is one of the better outings on the Nintendo 3DS, a system with a library that is not lacking for quality. And a whole bunch of the critics who think it’s at least in the B territory on a grading scale. Because of Metacritic’s weighting system, though, Gold suffered in its final score, as major outlets like IGN and Destructoid had it more in the C- and D range, and their analysis counts for more in Metacritic’s equation than some rando at my level.
IGN’s excuse for their 7/10 was that there was a lack of new content in this greatest hits collection for long-time fans of the series, and that’s the point I want to focus on. Not so much to pick on IGN or their reviewer’s opinion about what merits a good score here, but to clarify that what they feel is a weakness is a strength for me, and the reason to seek out WarioWare Gold.
“We’ve seen this before, why not something new?” for a franchise that has nine entries across what is now 17 years is a funny way of looking at things. The first WarioWare title, WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$ released on the Game Boy Advance in 2003. You need a GBA, a Game Boy Advance player for your GameCube, or a pre-DSi Nintendo DS that still plays GBA games in order to play a cartridge of it, or a Wii U — a system that, I will remind you for the hundredth time, comparatively no one purchased — for a digital version, unless you own a 3DS and were lucky enough to get one when Nintendo was giving away a set of 10 GBA games, a list that included Mega Microgame$ on it, for free to early adopters.
The cheapest working, undamaged copy of the GameCube sequel is on ebay for $49 at the time of this writing. The handheld followup to Microgame$, Twisted, can only be played on a GBA or a DS, because the cartridge had a gyro sensor in it that made your GBA into the controller by moving it about as directed by the game. Twisted rules, but even if you have a handheld to play it on — you’re not going to pop that into your GameCube’s Game Boy Advance player and then start twisting the cube around — a used copy will run you about $50 on the secondary market. See where I’m going with this? Throw in that two other WarioWare games were download only, and one of them is on an eshop that you can no longer purchase games from, and a whole lot of Wario’s microgames past is essentially inaccessible to fans, if they even know that said past exists.
What’s wrong with a game that represents and celebrates WarioWare’s past, introducing it to new audiences in the process, or bringing parts of said past to old audiences who either missed playing it the first time or just plain missed playing it? When your options are shelling out $50 — if you’re lucky — for a used copy of an old GBA game, or spending $40 for a new game with more microgames (300!) than any other WarioWare before it, that plays on a system that can handle not just the kind of WarioWare gameplay you got in Twisted, but also your more standard button presses, touch screen games, and even occasionally blowing on the system’s microphone. It has full voice acting, which definitely helps with the comedy aspect of things, enjoyable cutscenes, its own story mode… “we’ve seen this before” as analysis kind of misses the point of what Gold is accomplishing.
Maybe you disagree, and think that Gold was underwhelming because you have been around since the beginning for WarioWare, or you haven’t traded in or sold your old copies of WarioWare titles. And hey, that’s fine: consider this entry a series ranking instead of just Gold’s personal one. For my time and money, though, Gold is the top WarioWare experience out there.
Now, do I wish we weren’t in a situation where Gold could be lauded for celebrating a series’ history instead of Nintendo just making said history much more accessible, easier to find, cheaper to purchase? That’s a conversation for another day: don’t think I’m giving Nintendo too much credit here on the preserving history front, because for all of their years with the Virtual Console, they still flat-out suck at preserving their own history too often. My main point is that Gold had a specific goal in mind, and it crushed that goal to create the most singularly enjoyable WarioWare game going within the context of the gaming world we do live in. And that has merit.
Anyway! If you’re familiar with WarioWare, you know what you’re in for here, and if not, you can be brought up to speed in a hurry. Microgames isn’t just the name of the first game: it’s what WarioWare is all about. Games are a few seconds long each. You’re meant to process what you’re seeing, figure out what needs to be done to succeed at the game, and then do it, in just a few beats’ of time. Then it’s on to the next game, and the game after that, and so on, until whichever WarioWare character you’re “facing off” against or playing the games of has had enough, or you’ve helped them achieve their goal, or whatever is going on in that particular subset of microgames. Jump to 3:10 or so in this embedded video below to get a sense of what the button press games of Wario look like:
If you’ve ever wanted to play a game where the goal was to quickly and accurately pick a floating nose with a giant finger, then WarioWare is for you. It’s all got some level of absurdity to it, and you’ll catch yourself laughing at the idea of WarioWare, not just the game itself. That’s half the fun, but the rest of the fun is in actually mastering quickly and accurately picking a floating nose with a giant finger, and then preparing to play an equally off-beat microgame right after. Rinse, repeat, again and again, until you’re a microgames master.
If you weren’t already aware, you might be shocked to find out that Intelligent Systems is one of the key developers for WarioWare, and has been since the beginning: yes, the people who created and continue to make Fire Emblem. Intelligent Systems is much more than epic fantasy and horny mages, though, as evidenced by the sheer volume of bangers they’ve released in various series over the years, WarioWare being one of them. They didn’t develop WarioWare Gold alone, as Nintendo EPD was also involved, and between the two of them, they came up with a way to revisit the history of the franchise while also creating something new, even if the microgames themselves were not new.
The game is broken up into the aforementioned sections by character, but also by play type. So, you play all button press games in a row, or all tilt games, or all touch screen games, but after you’ve been there done that with it all, there’s a mode where you bounce between the different types, with the only warning you’re getting for the next game being a flash of the control type you’ll employ during it. This is what’s really new to Gold, because the previous WarioWare games were focused very much on one control type: as Gold is bringing all those types together in one place, it only made sense to throw them all at you at once, in randomized orders, as the true challenge and evolution of the WarioWare concept.
One of WarioWare’s strengths is that it manages to feel like a throwback even though the games are throwbacks to a time that never actually existed in mainstream gaming. Microgames were a concept popularized by WarioWare itself, but the relative simplicity, lack of complexity, whatever you want to refer to its ethos as, is what made it feel like a throwback at a time where complexity, scale, and graphical fidelity all ramped up across the industry. Actual old games were often hard, obtuse, and required a time investment and maybe even reading the instruction manual to figure out. WarioWare similarly demands immediate understanding and action or else you’ll never get anywhere, but does so in a way where it’s easy to play and only difficult to master. Highly enjoyable, fun to revisit, and with Gold specifically, you get the largest and most diverse selection of microgames going. It’s hard to argue with that, even if some people made sure to.
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