WarioWare: Twisted!

Last week I picked up WarioWare: Twisted!, the latest WarioWare game to hit North America. (Though it was made and released in Japan before WarioWare: Touched for the DS.)

This installment has a pretty neat controller gimmick - a gyro sensor in the oversized cartridge is used to control the action though tilting... Or was it twisting? It sort of depends on the angle at which you hold your GBA. You're basically just rotating the base of the GBA on its horizontal plane.

Anyway, I hated it at first. Initially I tried the game last year with an emulator and Japanese ROM that had a d-pad hack, so that probably gave me misgivings. However, after playing through the first round of story mode I fell in love with the control scheme.

Like the WarioWare before and after it, Twisted! offers over 200 microgames to play and master. The main story mode is fairly quick to complete, as are the final three tower levels. The meat of the game, IMO, comes from unlocking every single microgame (a few hours) and then earning a gold crown on each, which generally takes about a month of small gaming sessions.

There are normally a few larger minigames to unlock, but Twisted! adds an excessive amount of random unlockables earned in story mode called souvenirs. This is probably why Twisted! came out third here - the localization efforts required definitely outweigh Touched, and Nintendo likely didn't want to delay the DS version to market.

Of note is 9-Volt's boss level, made up of rotatable mini versions of Super Mario Bros. worlds 1-1, 1-2, and 1-4.

It's actually too bad that the gyro and rumble features aren't built into the GBA or DS. A WarioWare game that combined d-pad, touchscreen, gyro, and rumble into the mix could be quite challenging.