WarioWare Gold (3DS)

Despite being a highly successful console, the last few years of the 3DS’s support from Nintendo gave it an unfortunately ignominious end as it made way for the Switch. As things were winding down for the system though, the question arose of whether or not the WarioWare series would see an entry on it after not skipping a Nintendo system since the franchise’s start. Ultimately WarioWare wouldn’t be skipping the system entirely though thanks to a shift towards a compilation format rather than keeping up the series’s inventive uses of new hardware. WarioWare Gold invents a few new microgames but mostly focuses on bringing back ones from previous installments, this batch of over 300 swiftly-completed minigames able to give the 3DS a game in the franchise even if it is mostly built from what the team considered their greatest hits.

 

WarioWare Gold’s story does aim to acknowledge its nature as a collection of new games and old favorites though. The greedy treasure hunter Wario has recently returned home from adventuring with a strange artifact but nothing really worth a lot of cash, so once more inspired by seeing how profitable video games can be, he decides to make some more microgames while calling up his friends to do the same. Rather than just bundling them all together to sell though, Wario decides to host a tournament people can enter, Wario setting a high entry fee of 10,000 coins and hoping that no one will make it far enough to get the ten million coin prize he promised. The microgames are sorted into different leagues and as you make progress through them you’ll periodically get check-ins on Wario getting frustrated someone’s actually making progress, but you’ll also see scenes involving a mysterious young girl who showed up swearing to get her revenge on Wario. She tends to get sidetracked in humorous ways appropriate for a child, but what makes this story that takes around 3 or so hours to tell more fun is the inclusion of voice acting, the already clean cartoon art style enhanced by some fun performances.

 

Each stage in the three microgame leagues has their own character hosting the event with a story of their own to tell. These don’t really tie to the grander idea of a video game tournament, but they are silly story-telling opportunities with the eccentric cast that Wario contracted to build his quirky microgames. Stay at home mom 5-Volt’s microgames accompany her working out to a paid advertisement so she can lift the literal 1 ton frying pan featured in it, martial arts expert Master Mantis has convinced his apprentice Young Cricket that theme park rides are training so you play microgames while they ride a pastel-colored carousel, and inexplicably gigantic fourth grader 18-Volt is in the midst of a rap battle to get a kid’s 3DS back when you play his microgames. The microgame playing itself has no thematic connection to these tiny plots and these short tales are more there to provide a unique aesthetic in the transitions between games, things like representing a win in Mona’s dress shopping as a nice dress and a loss as an ugly sweater an amusing touch that doesn’t demand too much attention between trying to play minigames that end quickly and start to speed up over the course of the current stage.

Microgames themselves come in a wide variety, but at their heart they are meant to be very short challenges where part of the appeal is trying to quickly handle a bunch of them as they’re somewhat randomly thrown your way. A microgame often opens with a simple instruction like “Catch!” as seen in WarioWare Gold’s newly invented microgame Eating Out, after which you quickly need to figure out what’s going on in the game and try to complete the simply described goal. In Eating Out’s case, you’re a big-headed boy whose mother throws a food item in the distance, your goal being to quickly chase after it and make sure it lands in your open mouth. These games take just seconds to complete and the controls are often very simple, so usually if you’re shown an unfamiliar game part of the challenge is just using the few clues you have to quickly determine what you’re meant to do and execute it. Even if you lose the game, you often have a set of lives in most modes so you can move on as long as you don’t fail too often, but you can at least hopefully understand the game’s concept enough that any return appearances it makes can be completed properly. However, many modes begin to speed up the games so you need to be even faster in how you act and with each game having three different difficulty levels that they’ll progress through the deeper in a stage you are, you need to be ready for shake-ups to the format.

 

WarioWare Gold pulling in games from many different game systems also means it has microgames that control in very different ways. Some will involve pressing buttons, others will only need you to utilize the 3DS touchscreen, and some instead have you tilting the console right and left for some motion control play. A few microgames even involve blowing in the microphone even though they’re fairly plain executions of it but there are some even smaller microgames offered that are more about instantly responding to their surprise appearance. For the most part though, the different control types are segregated into different leagues, meaning almost all of the button-focused ones are in Mash League, Touch League focuses on the touch screen games, and the Twist League involves using the motion controls. A few extra challenges after these main leagues rope in the microphone and super fast games as well as featuring mixed formats, but you are shown the control method for a microgame before it pops up. It’s still a little fiddly to get your stylus ready if you want to use it for touch games in between the other formats, but the mixed mode can still be as entertaining as the other presentation styles while offering its own unique challenge to boot.

 

There are certainly many enjoyable microgames from past games as well as some inventive new ones on offer across every league in WarioWare Gold, and they’re further sorted into themes like Ashley the dispassionate witch hosting a series of fantasy-focused games over in the Twist League or the eccentric scientist Dr. Crygor uniting his games under a sports theme. However, many of these themes are repeated between leagues, the Volt family all having games based on old Nintendo video games and products for example but they are at least diversified in the control method you tackle them with. These segments also have unique boss games to cap them off such as having a robot battle a giant nose that fires small noses, the player needing to defeat these longer games to finish that part of the story but sadly not many of the boss games put up much of a fight. Getting four balls to knock down all the bowling pins in touch screen bowling or driving down a fairly tame but twisty road can be cleared without much issue, the boss games not often feeling like the best of the bunch but rather long ones that can serve as simple caps.

The normal microgames are a better batch though, and their timers are often adjusted to accommodate the type of control being asked for or the level of thought involved. This can mean sometimes it overestimates how long one might take to complete, but the normal microgames take seconds to complete so seeing the victory screen a little longer than expected isn’t really a downside. Instead, you can enjoy microgames with kooky and entertaining concepts. Cover Up has you as an egg that tries to roll under the bird standing over it so it can hatch, Ballroom Basics has you trying to waltz without crashing into other couples, Shave the World has you literally using an electric razor to shave off Earth’s crust, and Hot Flash has you pulling the clothes off an exhausted athlete only to learn he’s dressed for his next sport of choice. A lot of the games have silly concepts but ones that can still be easily understood; you may be using a bicycle pump to inflate a camel’s hump, but the actual activity just involves some quick inputs in a fairly easily spotted point of interest so the absurdity doesn’t distract you from what needs doing. However, there are certainly some games that don’t present themselves the best, a judo focused one having an odd waiting period at the start where your inputs do nothing so it can take a few plays of it to try and figure out what you’re meant to do. You can play any microgame you’ve faced before separately and the game even gives you a goal to beat it concurrently a certain amount of times, cycling through its three difficulties and speeding up to make it a challenge for all but the simplest of button mashing focused games, but some can still feel a bit fiddly like Stylus Hunt where different 3DS systems are shown and you need to find the small stylus on them, essentially requiring you to know the stylus storage spot on all six 3DS revisions.

 

There are many more hits than misses in the collection, as one would hope of a game that somewhat bills itself as a best-of compilation despite having tens of new ones. Some have distinct looks like the eerie presentation of the tooth pulling in Tooth Trouble, others like Tearful Reunion and Rocky Reunion feature some recurring characters that give them cute connections, but perhaps most interestingly though are the reinventions of old games. Snowboard Slalom was a button focused game in WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! but is now controlled by tilting your system, Getcha Groove On from that same game has swapped out its teal and white disco dog for some cats in hip hop clothing, and Penguin Shuffle has transformed into Paddle Parade as the bird of choice has become a duckling trying to swim between ducks rather than a penguin marching in step. The nice touch-ups make seeing familiar games a treat and cleaning up some of the rougher early games helps them better blend in next to the new microgames made just for this title, but there is still a good range of art styles on offer that can be both appealing and a helpful aid in recognizing them when they’re randomly thrown your way at high speeds.

 

Beyond the rather quickly completed story there are a few other modes that can present microgames in different ways or provide rewards for continued play. The already mentioned individual game play is a reasonably smart idea as are modes like All Mixed Up that makes it possible for you to experience any microgame regardless of theme or control method. Some game modes let you choose if you want to face every microgame type or just ones from certain leagues, allowing you to set individual best performance records for each setting. Perhaps most interesting in the alternate play types are things like Split Screen where you complete a microgame on one of the 3DS’s screens only for one to appear immediately on the next so it is constant quick play. Wario Watch has you trying to earn extra time by completing microgames quickly and Sneaky Gamer has you playing as a kid in bed at night who has to hide his game console from his mother when she makes some rather eerie incursions into his room to check on him, but other game types like Cruise Controls where you can tilt your 3DS to speed up or slow down microgames to try and get a taxi tied to your successes to a destination in time feel rather basic and bland by comparison. Battle Time at least offers a no-frills multiplayer component where you and another owner of the game try to outperform each other in the same set of microgames, although some multiplayer variation would definitely be appreciate rather than just the expected competition angle.

 

Performing well in most any mode will earn you coins though, and these can be used to get random rewards from a capsule machine. Some of these “souvenirs” are minigames in themselves like Pyoro where a bird with a stretchy tongue tries to eat incoming seeds before they can destroy the ground he walks on while others extend other microgames like the Game & Watch Manhole game seen only for a few seconds normally is actually included as a full reproduction of the real game here. You’re more likely to get less interesting souvenirs though like character-themed alarm clocks where you need to play a few microgames to turn them off or the option to record your voice over cutscenes, but you can also unlock a small competitive card game or nifty little bits of history like 3D models of Nintendo products or music records featuring songs from previous WarioWare games.  It’s a shame there’s a lot of less interesting ones so spending coins doesn’t feel as special, but it can at least give you some reason to play after you’ve seen what each mode is like, and some like the 10 unknown components that make something when all are found gives you a mystery to work towards solving.

THE VERDICT: WarioWare Gold brings in a lot of good games from the series’s past with a surprisingly beefy amount of new microgames to boot, and while you get a few stinkers usually thanks to unclear goals, most of the games are bursts of fun with appealingly unusual ideas and art styles. The different control types diversify how the game is played as do most of the extra modes, and with some voice acting adding even more character to the strange cast who make these microgames, WarioWare Gold will easily make you smile while also providing some rapid fire entertainment. The boss games are surprisingly gentle and the game does feel like it could have benefited from more content beyond just a high microgame count, but it still generally has a good idea of how to make things frantic but manageable in a way that makes the microgame barrage enjoyable.

 

And so, I give WarioWare Gold for Nintendo 3DS…

A GOOD rating. WarioWare Gold isn’t quite as good as some other entries in the series despite the idea that it is taking some of the microgames from them and repackaging them in a compilation, but that’s more a sign of those game’s successes than this game’s failure. The extra modes and options are a bit lean and straightforward here, some having long term appeal like the simple presentation shifts of Split Screen but other ideas like the alarm clocks are more like a concept you’re being presented as a curiosity rather than something you’re likely to engage with. If you have no nostalgic connection to previous WarioWare games this can still be effective because the fundamental idea of the franchise is still intact, the games rapidly thrown your way and you need to quickly identify the challenge and complete it, and with the game’s personality so strong it makes even the simplest games often amusing enough in some manner. Even a less enjoyable microgame like Judo Pro at least has your martial artist going up against a gorilla for the few seconds it lasts, and while sniffing up a bit of dribbling snot sounds gross on its surface, the beautiful art style of a forlorn woman looking over a lighthouse on a cliff gives it an unexpected charm. If you are familiar with the oddities of the series though it can be neat to see how a microgame you know has changed its face or form, but most important is perhaps the games ability to keep 300+ microgames fresh by having the different control methods shake things up. Microgames work best when they’re kept simple, so having touch, button presses, and twisting in the mix lets you change some aspects of the game without making the controls so demanding that the microgames have to slow down or provide too much instruction to feel different. It’s a bit surprising so many of the boss games ended up weak then since this is a spot where they do have the room to get more complex with reasonable justification, but some can be handled just as easily as a microgame.

 

WarioWare Gold’s isn’t just wrangling old content for an easy installment late in the 3DS’s life, it has a good set of new microgame ideas and some charm to its presentation. It does feel like the game should have put more effort into the extras so that more parts of it feel unique and new, but getting a lot of classic microgames that still work well on top of some new ideas wasn’t likely to be a formula for failure anyway so it’s more about wanting something beyond just a massive batch of minigames presented in the familiar although still remarkably effective format. WarioWare Gold is about the excitement of trying to keep up as simple but entertaining actions become more challenging to react to and complete, hanging in there to get further an effective goal for most play and still allowing the game to provide plenty of fun on return visits even if it takes only a few hours to see the breadth of it all.