1. If ever there has been a Nintendo game that stinks of low effort, WarioWare Gold is it. I am having a hard time giving enough of a crap about it to write this review. Suffice to say, had I arbitrarily decided to do 14 Points reviews, it would be too much effort for this game. Thankfully, I picked 13 so now you have to read this shit. You're welcome. Now pay me.
2. Okay, I'm being a bit harsh. WarioWare Gold is fun enough, it could just use some polish--a lot of polish, esp. in the main story mode.
3. Really, micro games kinda feel low effort by design so I'm not sure what I'm on about. You throw together some new assets and whatever IPs you are lucky enough to own. Make a couple hundred games that are two seconds long. Bam, done. I actually love this stuff so I'm just complaining in order to hear my voice echo in the void.
4. The way these kind of games work is you have to keep a myriad of different tiny games in your head and they come at you in rapid succession and it feels good to think fast and remember what you have to do for game after game after game. When done right, this establishes an addictive flow and getting on a good run gives that same rush as hitting a new high score in an arcade game.
5. WarioWare Gold's main story mode does not have this flow. That is why I complained into the void about it earlier. There are overlong (though admittedly skippable) cut scenes before each round of games and the little segments between each game take just a little too long and some of the games make you sit there and wait once completed. It is hard to explain in concrete terms but it just feels a little off and it's annoying.
6. It doesn't help that the cut scenes, while fully voiced, are cheaply animated, making you wonder why they put them in at all if they weren't going to do them right. They aren't funny and don't add anything.
7. Event this wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the story mode also functions as an entirely unnecessary tutorial and they force you to complete it to unlock WarioWare Gold's other modes.You spend a lot of time just hoping you don't screw up so you don't have to play through that set of games again.
8. There is a little more unlocking to do once the story mode is finished but it's thankfully mostly really quick. The extra modes serve up the meat of the game and were what kept me sinking time into it after an initial bumpy start.
9. The micro games themselves are actually just fine. It is a mashup of games that worked in previous WarioWare games so, you know, nothing new under the sun but there is something to be said w/ going w/ the tried and true. They all work well enough and only very rarely feel unfair or even difficult on their own. The challenge is in how they string together.
10. Stringing them together differently is what the extra modes do differently. It is always the same games. There's a ton of variation though and a lot of it is really fun. You can, for example, play just one game over and over. You can play a mix of games in their hardest versions. There's modes where you control how fast the games go by tilting your system. One where Wario throws distractions at you. Another where you don't get any times between games. And more than that. Pretty much every one of the modes induced me to play through more than a few times to at least get to point where I was no longer doing better every single time. Some of them pushed into serious white knuckle, one-more-try over and over territory.
11. You are rewarded for getting high scores and such by getting various unlockables such as terrible videos you never want to watch and things like that. Some of the stuff is okay--like additional mini-games--but really what keeps you playing is the little endorphin rush you get from beating your high score.
12. Outside of the story mode, you can always pick what kind of games you play. The ones where you turn the system side to side can be a bother on airplanes or public transit so it's nice to be able to avoid those specifically.
13. Unless you have only have one of the really crap version of WarioWare like WarioWare: Snapped, it kind of hard to justify a purchase of WarioWare Gold unless you are just crazy for playing 2D only games on your 3DS. It is admittedly a hell of a lot of fun once you get past the annoying story mode but it really adds nothing exciting to the equation at all. I typically try to avoid judging games based on price but this really seems better suited to being a budget downloadable title rather than a full-priced retail release. It goes as far as to wear the fact that its a rehash of old favorites on its sleeve and, really, just doesn't end up being too impressive a collection as a result.
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