50 Years of Video Games: WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! (GBA)

The Game Boy Advance is a bit of an unusual system. It sold remarkably well and the console itself is sound, but the major games released for it mostly fit into two camps: continuations of long-running series or remakes and rereleases of older games. Even when a unique high quality franchise began on the Game Boy Advance like Golden Sun, it didn’t continue much longer after the system’s life span. In 2003 though there was a game series that started and has been continuing on steadily for years with new fresh ideas: WarioWare. If not for the decision to include the recognizable character Wario as the headliner, the game would have consisted of an entirely new cast with a new style of gameplay separate from Nintendo’s usual designs.

WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! perhaps sets the player up for some unusual action well with its punctuation-riddled title, but this special twist on a minigame collection is more than just a handful of games to play. WarioWare’s first installment introduces the concept of microgames, these being even smaller than the usually short minigame amusements larger games occasionally offer. A microgame has the player suddenly thrown into a small contained gameplay challenge that can take on many forms, but no matter what you need to do within that unique microgame’s context, you’ll only be using the directional buttons and the A button to participate. This keeps things accessible on a base level as the games can never get too complex, although the intelligence games that do ask you to figure things out a bit more do grant you a bit longer to complete them. For the most part though, you’ll be thrown into a minigame with only seconds to complete the goal, the game thankfully giving a quick hint at what you’re meant to do with a single text command. The words are usually things like “Dodge!”, “Stomp!” or “Flee!” that are simple and easy to apply to whatever visuals are on screen, no matter how strange they might be. There is a curling based microgame that assumes some familiarity with the sport and a game where you need to find a certain key on a keyboard to press uses a font that makes a few letters and numbers look alike, but usually the main part of the challenge is immediately realizing what you need to do in the microgame and executing it before your short timer expires.

The microgames are presented rapid fire, the player’s completion of one leading to another cropping up very shortly after with a small bit of randomness determining the next one you’ll need to beat. The more you play the game the more familiar these microgames will become, so while you might lose one on your first try as you are trying to learn what is even asked of you, as you are made to play them more you can start to clear even the more challenging ones without an issue. To keep the game from losing its luster once you get to know its little over 200 microgames, there are a few factors in play to add some fresh twists to the action. One is the gradual increase in game speed. After playing a few microgames, the pace will quicken, the player not only given less time between microgames to relax but the microgames themselves speeding up. If you are able to keep up a continuous streak of successes you can reach some incredible speeds that really test your ability to respond in an instant, but there is thankfully plenty of content to experience beyond just chasing such an increase in difficulty. One way the game makes each microgame have a bit more life is that they each have three difficulty tiers built in. For these the game concept will change in some small but appreciable way, the windows for success becoming smaller, the size of important objects shrinking, the obstacles in the microgame becoming more abundant, or the actions required of the player expanding beyond one simple activity. Similar to game speed, if you keep clearing successive microgames in the sequence, you’ll hit difficulty increases and face these tougher versions of the microgames that you’d be less familiar with. Both of these are smart little twists to advance the design of deliberately basic gameplay concepts without making it impossible for the player to keep up, and with most modes giving the player a few lives and even the rare chance to earn an extra one, there is a little wiggle room for failure but quick reactive play is still key to victory.

While there are many characters to meet in WarioWario, Inc. Mega Microgame$!, the microgames are the true stars of the show. The concepts embraced by them are broad and often a little ridiculous, the game able to find a balance between on-screen visuals showing you only what you need to understand to complete the game but still slipping in an offbeat personality while doing so. For a microgame where you need to activate an airbag to save a dummy during a crash, shoot a basketball into the hoop, or catch a mouse under a bowl, the single screen action keeps the visuals pretty simple so you can time things right. In games with a little more wiggle room though, you might have to make Wario himself jump over a hot dog on wheels, help a large anime girl sniff up a strand of snot, or use a beetle to shove a golf ball into the hole. Most famously this is the game where you need to time your button press so a finger can successfully pick a nose, but there are plenty of little absurd challenges as well as games that wouldn’t be so absurd unless the game depicted them as such. In a way, the weirdness is another way of helping the player, making a microgame more memorable so you can put your brain in the right mindset and respond to it quickly. However, this is hampered a little by a few microgames having similar art styles. A ninja aesthetic is used for an arrow dodging game, a quiz on how many illusions you saw of that ninja, or having that ninja hop across small gaps. It’s hard to tell if this is a deliberate trap to prevent a player from responding things too automatically or just a cost-effective means of producing more minigames, but usually the game does handle communicative design very well so that you can potentially find a rhythm even in max speed, max difficulty situations once you’ve played the microgames enough time to recognize them at a glance.

The microgames in the first WarioWare game are sorted into different themes, although there is one odd caveat to that statement. While the story will take you through these themes, the small set of Intro Games, these even simpler in concept so you can start to familiarize yourself with the concept of microgames, will keep appearing even when they don’t match the current theme. You might be playing the microgame set where everything is built with a Realistic art direction, and while this theme will have some absurd ideas like using digitized images of people as paddles to keep a watermelon airborne or having a jeep drop from the sky and you need to angle it so it attaches to the wheels waiting below, having the cartoonish Wario catch a glass sliding across the bar is still far from the uniting theme. It does throw a small monkey wrench into any theme so you can’t get too complacent and helps you become better at the small subset of Intro Games through familiarity, but sticking within the theme would probably be the wiser decision since every category except for Intro has 25 unique games. There are some overlaps of concept across microgames admittedly, a few only require you to mash the A button to win and a few others have a power bar that quickly fills and empties so you need to time a button press to hit the right power level, but the Intro games lingering around is an unusual choice to pad numbers that didn’t really seem to need it with other factors for variation otherwise existing.

The theming of the microgames probably drew a bit more creativity out of the designers despite the rare repeated gameplay ideas. One of the categories is based on old Nintendo products, and not just video games. You can find yourself hopping over the barrels briefly in Donkey Kong or shooting down ducks in Duck Hunt, but you can also end up playing versions of the toys they made before they became a game company, controlling a remote controlled vacuum for some brief cleaning or grabbing balls with the Ultra Hand extendable gripper. The IQ games will do things like asking you to identify similar shapes quickly, answer a question under pressure, or quickly slip through a small maze, the game breaking briefly away from purely reactive play to something that can still fit the mold by keeping the challenge mostly about speed over really pondering how to proceed. Some games are just grouped by what they feature like Nature and Sci-Fi games, but they are still broad topics since the game will view something like the premise of a Nature game and believe any idea involving a plant or animal can fall under that category, be it protecting a cat from a downpour with an umbrella or running around as a monstrous bear trying to scare a crowd of people off screen.

The main purpose of the themes besides dividing them into more digestible and contained batches is for them to culminate in unique boss games that do take a fair bit longer than the microgames. No longer needing to stick to a few seconds for each challenge, these boss games stretch their legs a bit and ask for the more involved play typical of a regular minigame. One will have you defending Earth from incoming meteors with a laser for example, the rocks coming in phases where the challenge is long term survival rather than trying to complete the game quickly and accurately. They all still have some form of time pressure, the IQ boss for example having you fight monsters by picking the properly spelled and relevant attacks from a list and getting hurt if you delay too long. To complete the story you need to beat each of these at the end of each themed section as well as playing some Remix levels that throw together microgames from the previous levels, but boss microgames will be added at specific intervals when doing long form endurance challenges as well, most of them usually not too long and serving as a change of pace from the steadily quickening onslaught that trying to achieve a high score can sometimes be.

WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!’s strangeness carries over into its story as well. When the game begins, the gross and greedy treasure hunter Wario happens to catch a news story about a new video game selling like gangbusters, and believing it to be an easy way to make cash quickly, he quickly tries to get into game development himself. Finding it more work than he bargained for, he quickly concocts a scheme to not only make the games incredibly small, but he calls up his friends across Diamond City to help develop most of them for him. Wario and his friends end up essentially hosting each of the themed microgame segments, and while some are a good match for the character, the egotistical Wario plastering his face across the Intro Games and the the game-obsessed 9-Volt hosting the Nintendo Classics portion, some are a bit more surprising like the disco dancing Jimmy T. presenting the Sports games. Each character does have a small bit of story surrounding their microgame challenges too, and again you never quite know what you’ll get. The taxi driving dog and cat pair Dribble and Spitz have a segment about picking up a fare, but the inventor Dr. Crygor’s segment has him drinking an experimental liquid and needing to spend the segment on the toilet while the teenage girl Mona ends up speeding after realizing she might be late for work and your microgame victories help her pets repel the huge police chase trying to catch her. The stakes are always silly and like the microgames even the grosser ideas never get nasty with what they show, and some of these story framings like the cab ride and the ninja adventure Kat undergoes have some beautiful vocal tracks playing quietly behind the microgames for a nice little extra touch.

Outside of the tiny little stories of the characters’ lives though you can unlock quite a few forms of independent play and special microgames. The themed packages can be replayed until you lose after their story relevant boss game is completed, but you can also later unlock modes that let you play the full collection of microgames under special conditions. You can do a relaxed Easy only survival challenge, a boss only endurance test, the Thrilling mode where you only get one life and all the games are immediately at their hardest, or the Hard mode where things are still at their easiest difficulty level but the speed is cranked to max from the get go. Another interesting way to play is in the single game challenges where each microgame can be played independently. After selecting the microgame of choice it will undergo the same speed increases and loop between its easy, medium, and hard difficulties so you can train yourself up in the harder ones, but each microgame also has a special challenge to clear it a certain amount of times if you’re looking for more post-game content. Some microgames get expanded versions though, the game including infinite versions of things like a jump rope challenge and paper airplane flying challenge where the rules gradually shift the longer you play without failing. Wario-themed versions of the classic arcade game Sheriff and the NES title Dr. Mario are present practically in their entirety to play, and some single system multiplayer games exist where one player uses the L button to participate and the other the R button. It is a bit awkward to play holding the system that way, but the quick competitive games are still simple enough that you can manage it and have some decent fun.

THE VERDICT: WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! makes a lot out of a little through clever use of a rapid fire minigame presentation. The short games are fun surges of diverse play that progressively get harder without losing their appealing simplicity, the concepts featured able to rope in memorable strangeness without losing clear readability. A few repeated ideas and the rare stinker don’t ruin the entire concept, especially since so many different modes of play allow you to tackle the microgames in many different ways with little safety nets even for the ones you aren’t as familiar with. The character added to the experience by the cast continues to build this up as a quirky and quick way to find some fun with an experience that works both for easy thrills and long-term difficult play.

And so, I give WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! for Game Boy Advance…

A GREAT rating. While I am a little tempted to recommend the GameCube port WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Game$! in place of the original Game Boy Advance release, that game’s robust and incredibly enjoyable multiplayer modes also comes with the cost of stripping out the story and even featuring fewer of the special microgames like the Sheriff and Dr. Mario reskins. They do share the core microgames across them though, and while those are the main attraction, the unusual presentation and little bonuses of the GBA version do make it hard to make such a clear call. Focusing more on what makes this game great though, the microgame concept is remarkably well realized right from the get go with only a few stumbling points like reusing visual designs across a few microgames and the rare text command that isn’t a very natural instruction. The large batch of small games mostly provides a lot of entertaining variation even with such limited controls, the player moving, fighting, playing sports, recreating old video games, and doing off the wall tasks that require different sorts of reactions or timing to quickly complete so you can move onto the next bite-sized challenge. The speeding up and the three tiers of difficulty each game has definitely proves important to the game’s longevity, the play easy to return to even after unlocking everything because it is such a rapid fire blast of games that can grow familiar but won’t go old thanks to the context of their presentation. It was already bound to be a bit silly, sitting on the edge of your seat as playing seconds-long minigames becomes more and more intense, so having a wide range of weird characters backing things up and allowing for clear divisions into themes gives the game more charm than simply assembling a group of little games to play, a wide array of creativity on display even within a concept that’s deliberately designed to stay somewhat basic.

WarioWare’s out of the ordinary nature would continue to let it take on new shapes and embrace interesting gimmicks on future consoles, and while having the familiar face of Wario on the cover likely made it a safer bet, it did truly bring a new gameplay format to the Game Boy Advance while big names like Mario and Pokémon were content to iterate lightly or touch up old games. It is a bit strange a system with “Advance” in the title didn’t seem to be making big advancements in terms of what games could do, and while it was a step up over the previous handhelds from Nintendo, the games for it rarely pushed the envelope. WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! kicked off a wonderful little series that persists to this day, still providing creative new microgames even though their first big batch was already a rather imaginative set. Looking at the quick and easy fun of a minigame and making it into something new and different helps this game stand out even as the arrival of the DS and Wii on the horizon would provide more and more minigame collections, quality and quantity even with games that barely take a few seconds ensuring WarioWare would never just disappear into the crowd.