Wario Ware isn’t that great. I mean. The idea is novel. The way it’s done, though — it’s just too full of bullshit. The same as most Nintendo games these days.

It’s a good game to entertain someone who doesn’t play games, though. And I can see how people who play it for five minutes, like Videogame Journalists and academics, think it’s all the gas. Because it’s, like, SO FUCKED-UP, MAN. And DUDE.

It’s quirky, and it’s nice that the game is original. That’s really all it’s got, though. That doesn’t make it good.

I don’t know. Maybe I just expected too much, from the premise. It’s a good premise. This game bores me. Everything good or new it has, it makes an effort to drive into the ground after about five minutes.

So you’ve got a ton of short, inane game snippets. The whole idea is to play with our understanding of videogames: parody game design as we know it, and simultaneously explore gaming cues. Since the player has to know what to do immediately, there’s a lot of potential here.

The game doesn’t really do anything with this, though. It gives the player a long, long cutscene that he can’t skip, then a little game snippet. Then a several-second-long transition sequence. then another little snippet. Then a transition sequence. Then another snippet. And so on.

The game is broken into chunks; fail four times within a chunk, and you’re forced to replay it from the beginning. Each chunk has a theme.

This is all a problem. First: the character design is… what it is. I mean, it’s kind of interesting in a powerpuff-and-stereotype way. The game has the mistaken impression, however, that we give a damn about the characters. That’s not what we’re here for, yet they take up at least half the gametime. And whenever they’re around, the player is out of control of the game. And, again, you can’t skip most of this, no matter how inane it is.

Actually, the entire game is arranged around the characters. It’s like they came up with the concept, and then said — hey. There aren’t any memorable characters in this! Let’s say the premise is that Wario wants to get rich making videogames! And he brought all his friends to help! (Wario has friends?)

It doesn’t follow. It’s just… there, for no particular reason, and it’s what most of the game focuses on. It’s the set of constraints around which the actual meat of the game is edited. And the game is constantly pulling the player out of the experience — out of the potential “zone” — to shove this junk in his face.

Now. It would be something else if the game basically consisted of the mini-games, one after the other, with no time to breathe. If you mess up too many times, it’s game over. Next time you’ll get a different random set of minigames — with luck, entirely different ones.

Back to the organization. Again, that misses the point. Part of the appeal of the variety here is in how random one game can be to the next. Dividing it into categories, tied to specific characters… well, I mean. That might be a nice alternate mode. As you “collect” (beat) the mini-games, they get organized into categories, as in Katamari Damacy. Then you can play through any category you want. I want a free-run, though. That should be the main mode.

The main problem with the way the game is set up now is that, aside from all of the asinine waiting the game forces on you, it also forces you to keep doing the same fucking minigames over and over. You mess up on the “boss” minigame, even though you got most of the earlier ones with no trouble, and you have to walk through the motions again to make another attempt. You might be forced to do the same patently un-fun things half a dozen times, at which point you begin to mess up even the easiest and most brainless of them because you’re so bored and impatient.

That’s where the game makes its fourth misjudgement. One, it thinks the characters are important. They’re not. Two, it constantly interferes with the mental state which might make something worthwhile out of this material. Three, it misorganizes the material. Four, it thinks the material is inherently engaging. It’s not. It’s fucking not. Of course it’s not. That’s the whole point!

The game wants to be irreverent, but just trips over its own feet because it doesn’t know what’s funny. In effect.

Take how it takes a moment to tell the player what to do before every mini-game. Now, the whole idea of the game is that the player is intended to process the situation immediately and instinctively know what to do. It’s playing with that principle of game design. Putting instructions, vague as they are, before every segment is not unlike telling you what, say, a rupee is EVERY FREAKIN’ TIME YOU PICK ONE UP in the recent Zelda games.

I don’t need that. It breaks the flow, and once again, it kind of presumes I’m an idiot. As Nintendo games are wont to do, these days. Maybe include a tutorial mode, for the people who really need it. In theory, the design should inherently obviate it. If it doesn’t, Intelligent Systems has messed up somewhere.

It’s a waste, because I’m convinced something sort of inspiring could have been made of this. By someone with more of a clue.

I give it two stars, out of four!