The Stack

As per this blog’s charter, WarioWare, Inc. was deemed off the Stack as soon as I completed story mode, which happened before the last post. But there were a couple of days left of PAX after that, and of course the journey home, all of which involved waiting on line to one degree or another, and you know something? WarioWare is positively ideal for waiting on line. Particularly in Grid mode, where there’s so little at stake. So I’ve made some pretty good progress towards really completing the game.

So, here’s a brief description of the game’s optional goals. First of all, every microgame in Grid mode has a threshold, a number of iterations that you have to complete without running out of lives in order to get its spot on the grid marked with a red flower. Supposedly something happens when you get all the flowers. I’m still fairly distant from this goal, and it’s not clear to me that I’ll ever achieve it, unless I find myself in another situation involving lots of waiting in line. At the moment, I don’t even have all of the microgames available in the Grid — remember, they only show up there after you’ve randomly encountered them in Game mode, so there’s the whole last-pixel syndrome to contend with. Add to that the fact that Grid mode is the title’s tedious side, and this is a goal for the very patient.

Secondly, certain levels in Game mode unlock extra content when you pass indicated thresholds. It should be noted that these goals are impossible to reach the first time around. When you reach the threshold necessary to proceed with the story, you immediately get an epilogue to the current level and then get thrown back to the level menu. So in order to complete more microgames than it takes to continue the story, you have to come back to the level after completing it — which reinforces the idea that these are optional challenges, and not part of winning the game.

The content you unlock in this way consists mostly of additional games — mostly versions of the microgames that have been expanded into full minigames, which means they play continuously instead of being interrupted every few seconds. One of the unlockables is a full version of Doctor Mario, a game I recall mind-melding with in its coin-op incarnation back in my school days, an experience much like the play-by-brainstem necessary in WarioWare when it gets fast. It seems a little ironic to see it in this context, an inversion of the usual sort of unlockable mini-game, which is something less sophisticated than the main game.

It’s notable, however, that I’m definitely not playing the game in order to gain access to the unlockable content. This is clear because I delilberately threw access away. I actually bought this game used — something I don’t normally do, but this was at a rummage sale for charity, and it looked to be in near-mint condition, with its box and instruction manual and everything. The instruction manual contains a sheet of stickers, and specific spots marked in the manual for you to stick them, which tells you what audience they were targeting. The copy I got was pristine, with all of its stickers still on the sheet, which is a pretty good indication that the person who bought it wasn’t part of that target audience. Months later, when I actually got around to playing it, this helped me to forget that it was used, and I was briefly confused by how different my experience was from that described in the pristine manual: everything seemed to be already unlocked! Once I figured out what was up, I went into the options menu and reset the whole thing, erasing the previous owner’s progress.

This is because, to me, the point of unlocking stuff is simply to unlock it, not to have it unlocked. It’s not like I’m going to spend any significant amount of time playing the unlockable minigames. Their purpose is only to acknowledge by their presence what I have done, like an Achievement or Trophy on the newer consoles. These optional goals are, after all, the only way to win in a game that’s otherwise based on the sort of old-school arcade-game design where things just keep getting harder until you lose.

(Remember, this game is from 2003, so this sort of structure is retro. The game even acknowledges it by throwing in an entire level where the microgames are all simplified versions of Nintendo classics (such as Doctor Mario), some of which were otherwise never released outside Japan. The mere fact that it gives you lives is basically retro by now.)

WarioWare, Inc. is divided into a series of levels, each with its own set of microgames and its own host character who supposedly authored that section and also needs your help to get through the situation depicted in the level’s intro and epilogue. There’s some serious confusion of levels going on there; it’s as if Deus Ex started off with a cutscene of Warren Spector begging for the player’s help at defeating the secret organization pursuing him. No, that’s not quite right. That suggests a connection between the frame and the content. It’s more like Deus Ex starting with Waren Spector playing baseball at a company picnic, and every time you complete a mission, you get a cutscene of him hitting a home run.

The first and last levels are hosted by Wario himself. Because I’m primarily a PC gamer, this is the first significant exposure I’ve had to the character. I know of him, certainly. I was aware that he was a sort of evil twin to Mario, but I didn’t really know the details. Having seen him in action, I’d describe him not so much evil as somewhere between rotten and naughty, misbehaving like a little kid. He’s explicitly described as “sneaky” and “greedy”, and makes no bones about it, apparently considering those good qualities, because they’re his qualities and everything about him is by definition awesome. Which is also why most of the microgames on his own levels are about him. So I’d add “conceited” to the list, as well as “denigrating others”: he cheerfully tosses barbs at the player along the lines of “Huh? You beat that level? You?!?”

Come to think of it, he’s a lot like Strong Bad.

Also like Strong Bad, he comes off as childish partly because of his eagerness for characteristics that seem manly to him, like riding a motorcycle and punching at punching bags. Mario also has a sort of weird mix of adult and childlike traits, but they harmonize a lot better there, and seem to hit something of a sweet spot for acceptability by an American audience (unlike some Nintendo characters). Wario comes off like a grotesque caricature of this, exaggerated like a Mad Magazine parody. “No need to satirize us”, Nintendo seems to be saying, “We’ll satirize ourselves!” Since this is Wario’s game, it’s his world now, and it’s much more urban than the Mushroom Kingdom, more random and full of pointless conflict. The most innocent-looking of the hosts is pursued by police cars for speeding, and evades them by dropping banana peels in their path, making them skid and crash. They’re not bad guys, they’re just doing their job.

So, given this grotesque, childish, selfish, greedy, sneaky, antihero of a character, what role does he play in the game’s story? Why, that of game publisher, of course! His scheme is to get all these people, his supposed “friends”, to develop games for him, and then abscond with all of the profits himself. I can’t help but see this as reflecting the designers’ personal experience, and I’m a little surprised that Nintendo executives thought it acceptable — perhaps they didn’t understand what it was saying? Or perhaps from their perspective it looked more like a dig at little independent game companies trying to cash in on fields pioneered by others. Who knows.

WarioWare, Inc. is a collection of “microgames”. In fact, it’s the collection of microgames. I’ve seen things like this before, mostly in Flash on the web, which seems like a more natural environment for this kind of simple, disposable stuff than a solid-state cartridge sold in a box. But apparently WarioWare is the pioneer that these other games are imitating, and that makes it interesting to me. The idea of a pared-down minigame with distinct mechanics embedded in a larger work (usually as a bonus round of some kind) is something that’s been around for pretty much as long as there have been larger works to embed them in, but the creators of WarioWare were bold enough to ask if a viable game could be made entirely out of such pieces. (It seems like questions of the form “Can a viable game be made entirely out of [game element]?” are almost always answerable in the affirmative. See also the entire “Hidden Object” genre.)

So, what are microgames? Essentially, the atoms of interactivity that games are built from, isolated from context and limited in duration to a few seconds at most. A few seconds doesn’t sound like much, but it feels more comfortable than I was anticipating: the transitions are never sudden or unexpected, there’s always a bit of padding between microgames (an animation that tells you if you succeeded or lost), and when you come right down to it, all that any microgame asks of you is that you perform one essential action, one verb as it were, and few seconds is plenty of time to do that (or fail to do it). Some of the games in WarioWare are as simple as pressing a button at the right time — a fairly large proportion of them, in fact, although it’s dressed up in all sorts of ways, from sports to space battle to nose-picking. Others are more complicated, and involve aiming, dodging, or steering in various ways. Some are things that could have been sold as full games by themselves in an earlier era. Heck, some were.

In the main game mode, you’re thrown into a series of randomly-selected microgames, usually with a single word of instruction, like “Dodge!” or “Decide!” or “Potato!”, and have to try to figure out from that and what’s on the screen exactly what you have to do. To help you out, the controls are limited to the D-pad and a single button. If that isn’t enough, you can get fuller instructions for any microgame you’ve encountered by switching over to “grid” mode, which also lets you play single microgame types without the random switching. This is fundamentally less appealing to me. If you know what you’re getting, you lose the “think fast” factor, the rapid switching of gears that’s more fundamental to the game as a whole than the specific microgame contents. As you progress through a level, the pace picks up, becomes frenzied in a sort of Riddler mind-control way, the music speeding up until it doesn’t sound like music any more. It’s a twitch game, really, where you learn to react instantly to the stimulus of specific microgame screens.