K, so I went out and got Battlefield 1942’s expansion pack and also Wario Ware on Saturday. Since then, I’ve spent about four times as much time playing Wario Ware, so that’s what I’m going to talk about. Nothing against Road to Rome, which plays very nicely on Traitor and all that, but it’s nothing groundbreaking.
Now Wario Ware, that’s groundbreaking.
For those of you who haven’t heard of this game and are too lazy to read the reviews, here’s my capsule description. The game is made up of a crapload of crappy games. Too short to even be called mini games. These are micro games. They take 5 seconds or less to play. You play a lot of them. In most of the games, you hit “A” at the right time.
Yeah? So why is this amazing? I mean, it sucked in Die Hard Arcade, right (those stages where you had to jump at the right time or something)?
This is truly a game where, like improv, commitment is everything. They had a concept. They ran with it. The games come at you fast. You get a word flashed on your screen: “Aim” or “Deploy” and then the action goes and then it’s over and it’s on to the next one. You don’t have any idea how to play, except, of wait, if you’ve been playing video games forever, you do.
This game manages to distill early video game history into snack sized morsels and feeds them to you bit by bit, through your twitching fingers, into your brain’s “hell yeah” center.