WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! (Game Boy Advance Review)

WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames!
Platform: Game Boy Advance
First Released March 21, 2003
Directed by Hirofumi Matsuoka
Developed by Nintendo
Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
Listing at Mario Wiki

Behold: the one and only time I won the third stage of the nose picking game. My skills have eroded badly.

When I started Indie Gamer Chick, if you had asked me what my all-time favorite video game was, this would have been my answer. WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$! for the Game Boy Advance. Not the best video game I’d ever played. That still hasn’t changed. In 2011, I would have answered with Portal, Tetris, or Shadow of the Colossus. In 2025, I’d narrow it down and say Shadow of the Colossus is the greatest achievement in game design of all-time. But that’s the BEST video game, and I think it’s okay to name one game the best and another your personal favorite. I’m talking about the game that, for whatever reason, I personally had the best time with.

I had to reach a score of 80 on Crygor’s stage (my highest of any of the levels BY FAR this entire play session) to get this, the last mini-game I needed for a full set. It just would not spit it out.

WarioWare wouldn’t even have that title today. If I was stuck on a desert island and given the option to only have WarioWare or Super Mario Odyssey, well, I’d probably say “f*ck that” and swim for it. Assuming that wasn’t an option, I’d take Mario Odyssey. Which, by the way, I take a lot of comfort from. Today is my 36th birthday (at least it was when I was typing this review, but I didn’t hit publish until after midnight the next day), and I think it would be tragic if I’d already had the best time I will ever have playing a video game when I was 14. The fact that it took fifteen years for that to be taken over by a different game is fine, because that means it could change again. Gaming probably hasn’t “peaked” for me at 36. That puts a smile on my face.

Goddamn this game is full of nightmare fuel. That’s not even the scariest potato in the game.

Now granted, people have ALWAYS been baffled by how I could love WarioWare as much as I do. And by that I mean the first game and not the franchise. For the most part, I don’t even like the WarioWare franchise. That’s the thing that really bugs everyone. I only really loved the first one. A few years ago, I enjoyed WarioWare: Get it Together just fine, but even though I spent over a week playing it when it came out, I can’t name a single micro game from it. Not one. My brain just completely bleached its existence from my head, and I didn’t even bother buying the latest game in the series. WarioWare was fun the first time, but it’s only the first one that really avoids that “trying too hard to be quirky” vibe. The others all feel like they’re trying to top this game in terms of weirdness. But, I didn’t play this because it’s weird. Oh, that got my attention, but it was the score-driven gameplay that hooked me.

As a kid, I hated this game. I fancied myself smart, but I could never properly calculate this one. Today I……… uh, well, I mean….. yeah.

The strange thing is, besides pinball, I’d never really been into high score games, but that’s all WarioWare really is. Try to complete an increasingly difficult series of bite-sized mini-games that are shot at you at an increasingly higher speed until you run out of misses. It’s such an uncomplicated game that you only use the D-Pad and one button, the A button. Everything else goes unused, and they mined this simple control scheme for 150 micro-games, though some are just the same game reskinned. There’s also tons of games that are just about mashing the A button or stopping a meter in time.

This is one of those games that, for whatever reason, was one of my weaknesses.

But, while it’s impossible to claim that all the games feel distinct, that’s not the point. It’s the random nature of “you never know what games will come in what order” and the fact that the action speeds up. Later versions of WarioWare did a much better job of tying each level’s games to a central theme, but MOST of this first game isn’t like that. Sometimes it is, like all the games in Orbulon’s stage are “intelligence-based” so they’re like IQ test type of things and have a longer time limit. The games of Jimmy the hipster are sports-themed. But, most of the mini-games could be in any character’s collection. In fact, many actually do repeat even outside the levels that feature games from every collection. But, what makes it work over future installments of WarioWare is that there’s no sense of gimmickness to it. This is gaming stripped to its purist minimalist form. In a sense, this is the closest Nintendo ever came to their old Zapper games where personality needed to carry otherwise VERY simple gameplay.

Here’s the game’s most evil potato. It’s still only the second most evil potato I’ve encountered in my life. It’s evil, but not as evil as the one that told me I should set my parents’ bed on fire.

And that’s why it succeeds. WarioWare is oozing in personality. There’s no one graphical style and seemingly anything goes, from a girl who has to suck her snot back up her nose to navigating a mosquito past bug spray to bite a baby. Actually, if not for all the Nintendo stuff, I don’t think anyone would ever guess this was a Nintendo game. Some of the graphics are hand-drawn. Some are pixelated. Some are stick figures and others are actual digital photos. It’s so completely weird and original. Like, one game looks like this:And the next might look like this:

And you have to process the change in graphics and gameplay style and react right away. But it works. The simple instructions and simple objectives make this the greatest quick-draw game ever made. Even in the days before online scores, I found myself trying to play long enough to just make it one game further than my best run on any level. It’s addictive. And it does hold up to the test of time. I don’t think any of the ones that followed would have. I didn’t even really like WarioWare Gold. I also didn’t play too many of the side-quest mini-games and I never even tried the multiplayer games in WarioWare before yesterday. I did this play session and exactly one of them was fun. It’s this one:

I was the top player. I fell off the cliff seconds later, but we don’t need to talk about that, Sasha. Oh, and show of hands: who thought the thing on the bottom half of the screen was SpongeBob SquarePants the first time they played this? (raises hand)

Chicken Race actually does use L and R so that two players can compete on a single Game Boy Advance (or Nintendo Switch in this case). Both players hold and release their respective shoulder buttons and try to get as close to the cliff as possible without falling off. I wanted to play a couple rounds and Sasha and I ended up playing it for half an hour. As a kid, I also played a ton of the paper airplane game, where you have to guide an airplane as far as you can without crashing. WarioWare offers tons of distractions, but none of them can hold a candle to the core gameplay. It’s easily Nintendo’s best arcade game since they got out of the arcade business. They should do more games like this, really. I don’t mean more WarioWare, but more simple, scoring-driven arcade style games. They’re really good at it.

My best this session was 125. As a kid, I got into the 300s a few times.

Playing WarioWare today, it’s not hard to imagine how this could have ever been my #1 favorite game ever. I played it for close to a week and the only reason I’m stopping is to write this review. Then I have to move on to other games. I never did end up breaking for 100 points on any of the levels like I did as a teenager. I’m old now and my reaction time sucks. But I accept the new reality of my increasingly decrepit state and so when I had 44 in one round and 46 the next, I felt pretty damn good about myself. WarioWare is STILL fun to challenge yourself with. Eventually the personality that eases you into the game gives way to one of the most white-knuckle tests of your muscle memory that you can get on Switch Online.

My arch nemesis with WarioWare in this play session was any game that required button mashing, of which there are far too many. This is one of them. This should count as my Metroid 1 review, by the way. No? Fine.

Playing WarioWare today reminds me of how STUPID I was as a kid. Not for choosing this as my #1 game. No, it was a good choice. WarioWare isn’t perfect. Too many button mashers. Not every game lends itself to speeding up. Some of the games don’t scale well enough to have three difficulty levels. But as a first-of-its-kind experiment, it’s fantastic. One of Nintendo’s best games ever, really. And I was stupid for not realizing that challenging my own high scores is something I would enjoy in other games. I had a snobbish streak even through my 20s. I didn’t understand the point of chasing offline high scores at all, except for this game. These days, I can sit down with Pac-Man or really any 80s arcade game and just chasing the score alone makes my play session fly by, which makes my review process easier even for bad games. WarioWare hasn’t changed, but I have. Do I like WarioWare as much as I did in my youth? I don’t know, but I know I admire it more now than I ever did before.
Verdict: YES!