Review by: Danielle Riendeau

WarioWare: DIY is the “new” Nintendo at its absolute finest. It’s quirky, innovative, friendly, and so expertly designed that almost anyone can have fun with it – a tall order for what is essentially a piece of game design software. See that “DIY” in the title? It’s no joke.

When you first load up DIY, you’re treated to a wacky cutscene that introduces the “MakerMatic 21” – the miraculous machine that you’ll soon be using to design your own “microgames”. If you’re a WarioWare newbie, that’s just the term for all the tiny (4-6 seconds long) mini-games that make up the larger whole. Goofy, funny and quick, microgames require you to twist, poke, pull, etc. your way to victory in the tiny time span, and the WarioWare titles have been innovating with new input methods and gameplay styles ever since the first iteration on the GBA back in 2003.

It makes sense, then, that Wario’s latest evolves to the point where players (really, makers) can get their hands on the guts of the game and start making their own devilish creations.

I spent my first hour just exploring the options and unlocking the available microgame collections. After playing a few creations, however, I was ready and eager to enroll in the Makermatic 101 session – the ingenious tutorial that opens the doors to the impressive design suite at your disposal.

It’s the longest tutorial you’ll encounter in a handheld game (it takes about an hour, if you go straight through), but it’s entertaining and broken down into manageable bits. Better yet – it’s actually quite entertaining. Once you pass design 101, you get free reign over your very own MakerMatic. You can take design “jobs” at WarioWare Inc. or you can make your own games from scratch.

Herein lies the meat of the DIY experience – the business of designing new games from the ground up. All games are broken down into three main tabs – each with several components. In creating a game, you first compose the art, then the music, then and the assembly - where you create the AI (or, “action instructions).

In Art, you create all of your assets. You design the stage background, draw the objects, and create the animation by drawing simple “cels” of your objects. In Music, you can compose your own soundtracks using several instrument tracks – or you can select “moods” and tempos and have a little composer dude create a melody for you. Both of these areas feel much like a stripped-down version of commercial creative software. The Art tabs work much like Photoshop does; while Music is created much as it is in something like Garageband. It will feel familiar and easy to anyone who’s used those applications before, and simple/straightforward to a complete newbie.

It’s in the Assembly section that things become a bit more complicated. Thankfully, the process is streamlined, with plenty of helpful prompts and icons. You basically set a simple string of “if, then” statements and create win conditions. It’s as easy as very basic programming can be, and surprisingly painless, given the breadth of options available to you.