Get this game to put the smooth moves on the ladies. Also bring a fake moustache and a pillow stuffed under your shirt.
User Rating: 8.5 | WarioWare: Smooth Moves WII
Wow, talk about a game that takes advantage of the hardware. At times it's quite shocking what the game does, the information it pulls up, the graphical techniques that are used and the general ingenuity of the controller use. Putting online aside and I think its fair to do that considering the lack of support from just about any Wii game so far, this game uses it all. The speaker is the first revelation. What were your first impressions of this addition? A gimmick when you heard about it, a nice touch when you experienced it, an immersive little nod in the right direction in Zelda? But here it is so much more. It becomes as integral as rumble, a wonderful, immersive tool that directly links you to the game in hand. Warioware has the advantage, it can draw upon its 200 or so microgames to pull upon all sorts of weird and wonderful sounds and each one brings about a visceral delight. The best example would be a puzzle game, which you rotate to drop a ball bearing out of. You hold the controller horizontally and twist left and right, only the speaker emits this clacking-of-gears sound from the palm of your hand that directly puts the puzzle in your hands and the variations of the sound allow you to moderate the angle of your tilt. It's a wonderful little piece of sound design. The other examples of speaker ingenuity also come with examples of controller ingenuity. Lay the controller flat on a surface, discard it. The pick it up as if you were answering a ringing telephone and the voice at the other end speaks through the controller to you. Turn the controller on its side and pump up a baloon, only the sound comes from your hand like a bicycle pump and like the clacking of gears, the whooshing of air variations allow you to moderate the action perfectly. Another simple delight is a micro-game that uses the wriststrap. I did say that this game uses every conceivable facet of the Wii in some way, did I not? It' my personal favourite, a shrill game of dare. By now you've most probably read the whole furore over weakened wrist straps, you've probably even coddled your Wii controller for being the advanced piece of technology that it is. So the microgame of Bungee is a savage test of your own fears. A hand is represented on the screen with a man (the Wiimote) attached to the hand by a bungee cord (the wrist strap) and it tells you to let go, have no fear. And you just let go of the controller and you can hear the wail of the little man dropping from the palm of your hand, through the wiimote speaker as the controller dangles from your wrist. The game also uses your Miis, I've had an arm wrestling match with m0zart and flown against my virtual mother. Very fun and it even surpasses Wii sports use of the miis imo, giving them better graphics and more unique situations to play in. The game also uses your personal information against you in a quiz, testing your nerve as you decide whether to nod or not. It reads the date and time from the wii, your Mii details like favourite colour and gender and asks you questions about them in a micro-game. Very suprising and very good. My other muddled throughts on the game cover its graphics. The small portion of games that are in 3-D, shockingly have some of the best graphics on the system so far. If this is any indication of what we have coming from Nintendo than I think people will be pleasentely suprised by the games that are to come. Again they fall somewhere past what the Xbox can do, clear, vibrant and well rendered. The videogame inspired micro-game sections are pieces of nostalgia driven beauty. Whereas past WW games had basic emulations of 2-D retro classics, Smooth Moves goes the whole hog, giving you slices of recent 3-D Masterpieces. Roll Samus into a ball on the palm of your hand and knock over a barell, hold the controller like a hose and use your Fludd to put out fires. Hold the controller above your head like a giant leaf and guide cel-shaded Link to safe land. It's all here and more, including a fully fledged level from Starfox on the SNES and a ballon fight revision that has you using nunchuk and mote in seperate hands to flap your way to points and prizes. Another shrill, thrill comes from actually yanking out the master sword from its plinth in the ocarina of time and watching as Link goes from toddler to grandfather in a second as the result, or turning into a chicken on one occasion. The best one has to be the pikmin game, where you play as the giant worm creature and roll the controller left and right, spinning it over and over in your hands to squash the helpless Pikmin. It gives you (as the best games do) pinpoint control, with a physical reaction and when some of the pikmin start getting smart and dodging your attacks, you cannot avoid the grin that cracks across your own face. The best games, show in stark terms where the wii controller will be best used and where it wont, not just in this game but in all Wii games that are to come. The controller works best when married to physics, seeing the subtle variations in your actions playing out on screen and not merely being a physical replacement for a scant push of a button. Some of the microgames based on that physics based philosyphy are much deeper and more satisfying than many others. So, whether to buy this game or not? That is the question you are surely asking yourself. The answer is difficult, I have owned 2 previous warioware games so I knew what to expect from this, but if you've never played one of these games before you may be quite shocked, because it's simply not like 95% of the other games out there. It's arcade based in terms of length, you can beat it in a few days but you wont have unlocked even 65% of the micro-games held within itself. The pleasure will come from replaying it in short bursts like the best arcade games, only you will look at the clock only to notice that your intended 15 minutes has turned into an hour. All I can say is that I'm having a lot of fun with it, but you have to manage your own expectations of what you like in a game or not, because I'm sure that there are some out there that wont 'get' Warioware. And you are all, cold, heartless freaks.
Note: Gamespots mathematical equation for final review score doesn't gel with me so I've slightly changed the invidual scores to reach the overall score I feel appropiate
