GDC 2009: WarioWare: Snapped Hands-On

The title of this preview is actually a little misleading. Although we did play WarioWare: Snapped today--the newest collection of strange minigames from Nintendo--we never actually got our hands on anything. That's because Snapped, which will be available on DSiWare for the about-to-be-released DSi, is played entirely using the new handheld's camera, making it a mostly hands-free experience.

To play Snapped, you'll need to position the DSi on a table or other stable surface with the game's internal camera pointed in your direction. The game will initially ask you to hold your head and right hand in a certain position for a few seconds for calibration; the DSi's top screen will show your silhouette, so it's easy to see where you need to be.

From there, Snapped will throw you a series of minigames, each lasting only a few seconds, in which you have to do specific movements to advance. In our gameplay session, we had to massage an old woman by forming a fist and moving it in front of the DSi camera, wave goodbye five times in quick succession, play peek-a-boo with a baby onscreen, and more. After the first wave of games, we were then treated to a quick photo slideshow. Apparently the game had snapped a few stills of us making our movements and wanted to show us how weird we looked while doing them.

Snapped is typically WarioWare wacky, although it did seem to be a bit more generous than other games in the series when it came to how much time it gave you to figure out what to do with each minigame. WarioWare: Snapped is expected to launch at around the same time as the DSi in the US, Europe, and Australia.