In its newest addition to the WarioWare line, Nintendo may just have outdone themselves. The WarioWare: Twisted! gameplay is innovative while at the same time giving the player everything he has come to expect from the WarioWare series. A game that must be experienced to be understood and appreciated, WarioWare: Twisted! is almost sure to win the hearts of just about any GBA player that gives it a spin.
Right out of the box, you can tell Twisted is a different game. On top of the cartridge is a bulge that is easily three times as thick as the cartridge itself. Inside Nintendo has built in a “gyro sensor”, and it is this little gizmo that makes this game so different. Once the cartridge is inserted and the GBA turned on, the gyro sensor becomes the main control for playing Twisted. Holding the GBA a bit like a steering wheel, the player will twist the GBA either to the left or right or even spin it completely around to control all the game action. Occasionally the A button is also employed.
The games that you will be controlling consist of over 200 new microgames of the type that have become very popular with WarioWare fans. Microgames, for those unfamiliar with the term, are games so short that they would not test the concentration span of a chipmunk with Attention Deficit Disorder. If there is anything to be said against these little games, it is that they often last such a brief time that you can’t tell what you’re supposed to do before they are over, necessitating a couple of tries to understand the game before you can actually start applying some skill to beating it.
The games vary widely and are broken up into groups that are strung together by a central character theme. In one game the player must balance an umbrella on the tip of a finger. In another he might play the shortest version of a classic Nintendo Entertainment System game ever. In each the controls are the roughly the same: tilt and spin the GBA to the left or right and perhaps tap the A button. In some that may mean a quick seesawing motion to either side. In another it may only be only one direction in a more precise manner in response to what is happening on the screen. No matter what the specific game asks you to do in the way of twisting your GBA, it just never seems to get old.
As the player works his way through the games, he will also unlock more than 130 different souvenirs in seven different categories like toys, records and games. While these are generally pretty silly items, they do give the game a bit more replayability and the stuff can be lots of fun to fool around with.
Graphically the game is about what you’d expect from the Game Boy Advance—2-D with text bubbles for dialogue. Colorful and whimsical, it is definitely not shooting for great realism, but it works wonderfully for this game. The sound is okay with some nice tunes to play by and small sound samples thrown in for good measure. Fortunately the music never gets annoying as it so often does in GBA games.
While recent events, like Nintendo’s showing at Electronic Entertainment Expo 2005, indicate the Game Boy Advance might be losing some of its thunder to the newer Nintendo DS, WarioWare: Twisted! shows that the little handheld can still provide a lot of entertainment. It is a terrific game with an innovative control scheme that really has to be tried. My only concern is how silly I look while playing it in public. The cool factor goes right out the window. I also sincerely fear if I played Twisted too close to an insane asylum that they might take my weird gyrations for some form of illness and attempt to throw a net over me. The game is good enough that I guess I’ll just have to take that chance.
