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Replay - WarioWare: Twisted!

I like to move it move it

Replay - WarioWare: Twisted!

In Replay, we take another look at handheld and mobile games that have defined genres and pushed boundaries. This week, Peter Willington gets physical with WarioWare: Twisted!

Nintendo knew it had a critical darling on its hands with the original WarioWare for Game Boy Advance. It was well received by critics, and cherished by the Ninty die-hards to whom the stripped down play and constant NES references scratched a Miyamoto-style itch.

Follow up WarioWare: Twisted! could be said to have more in common with the Nintendo Wii, rather than the NES. Both the title and the seventh generation system hinged on motion controls to provide a new experience.

The Wii Remote would go on to revolutionise the console market, with waggle-centric games that allowed non-core audiences to better access traditional play styles.

The second WarioWare portable outing would take the opposite approach: making well known gameplay ideas challenging again through this fledgling technology.

And it worked: Twisted! is a hardcore delight, providing incredible difficulty as the speed and complexity of the microgames ramps up.

Small pleasures

These morsels of gaming, accompanied by short descriptions as to your objective before they begin, change rapidly, with some games lasting just seconds before moving on to the next oddball idea. Always requesting you to perform a single, very specific action – such as hitting the correct key on a keyboard – the goal is always very clear, achieving it is not.

Kicking your brain into performing quickly and accurately can be a torturous exercise in discipline, and you begin to slip up through a lack of concentration or due to the blinding velocity at which play changes.

The extra layer of difficulty though, the thing that takes it a little further away from the original release's “straightforward”, almost Simon Says style of game, is the cartridge's inbuilt gyro sensor.

Replacing the first game's D-pad input for movement, with actual turns of the GBA hardware, the WarioWare microgames add another layer of mind bending in their demand that you master your own physicality.

A bad workman

The sensor is wonderfully accurate, even by today's standards, and allows the games to require either very small and precise movements or big overblown gestures.

Finding the exact focal point on a magnifying glass with tiny movements is tricky, but doing it on a timer immediately after wrenching your arms clockwise on a steering wheel to avoid oncoming traffic? That's tough.

But no matter how molar mashingly mental things get, when you make a mistake you always know it was yours to be made, and not an issue with the technology. It's just so robust, so well calibrated, that errors are doubly infuriating since you can't blame the tools you've been given.

Mixed up

It's also surprising just how much variety of play Nintendo packed into a limited tool set. The DS had shipped and the GBA was looking dated when sat next to it, certainly tilting something left or right and hitting the A button doesn't sound terribly fascinating at first blush.

But the games weave from having you defend yourself with a samurai sword, to gently shaving a man's face. Yet somehow the controls suiting every occasion perfectly.

With the addition of the included rumble for added feedback, WarioWare: Twisted! is a delightfully physical, supremely tactile experience.

If you've an eye for imports – the game was never released in Europe – Twisted! remains one of the best examples of motion gaming you can get.

Its significant but surmountable challenge, flawless technical polish, seemingly endless content and unlockables, and cheeky art style make it just as funny, bizarre, and addictive as when it first released way back in 2005.

Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.