Collection essentials #542: WarioWare, Inc.: Mega MicroGame$!

By the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the concept of “minigames” were becoming popular with game developers. A “minigame” is basically some small standalone bit of gameplay that is fairly simple, doesn’t last a real long time, and is distinct from everything else in the game. One of the games that popularized minigames was Nintendo’s Mario Party, a “board game video game” that featured a minigame between the four contestants at the end of every turn for the reward of coins. WarioWare takes this concept a step further and invents the concept of “microgames,” designed around a bunch of games that only last a matter of seconds! The concept was first seen on a certain bonus mode in an obscure Mario Artist title on a failed system, so WarioWare fittingly fleshed it out and brought it to a mainstream audience.

Basically, in WarioWare, the idea is to clear as many microgames as possible before you mess up too many times and get a game over. Each microgame gives you a little prompt to tell you what you’re supposed to do, and the games are brief so you gotta think fast. You get four “lives” for each stage, with the chance to restore one every once in a while. There are “boss” stages that occur after a certain number of microgames which take longer and therefore are more like a minigame. The more you play, the harder and faster the microgames get. Each level in the game has a set of microgames which may appear, sometimes with a certain theme. But no matter which level you’re on, if you haven’t played the game before, you can’t have any idea what to expect. This is one of those games that taps into the weird and whimsical, and uses it to great effect. You might have to pick your nose, cut someone’s hair, play an old-school Nintendo game, bend a spoon…and all kinds of other things. 

What makes this game even sweeter are the bonus unlockables. These include special challenge levels, and bonus games including a couple old Nintendo titles with Wario replacing the previous main character.

While the game reuses some of the sounds of Wario Land 4, the developers largely decided to create a new universe for this game that has pretty much nothing to do with Wario Land. The plot of the game is simply that Wario finds out how popular and lucrative the video game business is, so he calls up a bunch of his friends to make a video game that will net him tons of cash. These friends are a slew of diverse, colorful, brand new characters, who represent the game’s levels, such as the alien with shades Orbulon, the disco dancer with a stylish blue afro Jimmy, the ninja girls Kat & Ana, and more. Wario Land as a series didn’t die when WarioWare was released, but the WarioWare universe is now the primary way that Nintendo tends to represent Wario.

I remember when WarioWare first came out, reading about it in Nintendo Power magazine. I think I had a bit of a hard time truly grasping what the game was like since it didn’t sound like anything I had played before. The concept quickly made sense once I saw it at a demo kiosk at a store. The game came out in the spring of 2003, and I think I got my hands on it while on vacation that August. It wasn’t long before it became one of my absolute favorite GBA titles. I played it to 100% completion, which takes a while and can be a little tedious…and then I think one of my sisters erased my data! Aaaaaugh!

WarioWare Inc. is a fantastic and addictive game with a gameplay formula that’s pretty unique even to this day. It’s another game that’s available with the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. I highly recommend finding a way to get your hands on it, even if it means making greedy ol’ Wario happy. It’s a quintessential GBA essential in my collection for sure!