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The game that best caters to gamers’ ever-atrophied attention spans makes its triumphant debut on the Wii with WarioWare: Smooth Moves. Once again the colorful cast of characters will have you piloting a giant proboscis, inserting dentures, waving away massive fart clouds, and accomplishing over 200 other unthinkable feats of absurdity.

The Remote Control

As in past WarioWare games, Smooth Moves provides a map from which you can choose different character’s stories to play. Each story in the main game is comprised of 10 – 20 progressively accelerating “microgames” followed by a boss stage. You have four lives to successfully complete a story and unlock new microgame collections and other goodies.

WarioWare titles always give a heads up on how each mini-challenge is executed, but Smooth Moves also provides a prompt explaining how to hold the “form baton” (Warioware’s cute code for Wii Remote). These cues describe the various ways to clutch and fondle your Wii remote in order to best complete the task at hand. The brilliantly tongue-in-cheek explanations are crooned with the dulcet tones of a self help guru who should be made poet laureate for his efforts.  Nintendo dreamed up an impressive array of stances ranging from the conventional “remote control” to the positively kooky “mohawk”.

The Sketch Artist

Nintendo continues to take advantage of the rare understanding that visually interesting game design is not dictated by graphical realism. Smooth Move’s 2D art is a pleasure to watch, and the microgame graphics get the 3D update that was conspicuously missing from GameCube’s Warioware: Mega Party Game$. The graphics certainly aren’t cutting edge - the low poly models look blockier than a bag of legos - but everything is in the service of the game’s hodge-podge aesthetic.

The Mortar and Pestle

The WarioWare series is now in its fifth installment, so the measure of Smooth Move’s success rests on how well it innovates. Thankfully it delivers on this most crucial level with its truly original use of the Wii Remote. You are called on to manipulate your unassuming white wand in ways unexpected and infinitely creative. Once in a while you’re faced with a maddening control scheme – spatially sensitive games are particularly finicky – but these minor annoyances are dwarfed by the overall ingenuity of the controls.

WarioWare is full of the ‘neat-o’ moments you would expect from a game perfectly suited to show off the Wii’s unique capabilities. I defy even the most testosterone-fueled FPS lovers to conceal their girlish glee while they experience the feedback of bouncing a ball on a tennis racket or pick up the “phone” to be greeted by an actual voice.

Of course WarioWare also tests new levels of players’ capacities for the ridiculous. You will find yourself furiously gyrating, squatting and flapping to appease relentless microgame gods. Any attempt to play sitting is an exercise in futility. Luckily throwing in the towel of dignity opens the door for tons of fun. With the help of WarioWare you may just uncover your true destiny as a hoola-hooping mime. Consider it an added bonus. 

The experience of discovering the untouched microgame for the first time is completely thrilling, but even slapping Wario awake or navigating Link to safety grows less exciting with repetition. On top of this the games are less varied and more predictable than in previous iterations of the game. Nintendo is also guilty of recycling a fair amount from older WarioWare offerings. And, in the end, a nose picked is a nose picked regardless of whether it is fully rendered in three glorious dimensions.  That said, thanks to WarioWare the exciting day has arrived where I can claim to have picked a man’s nose on over four different platforms.

Aggravating these issues is the fact that the main game is painfully short. All of the characters’ story lines can be completed in an hour or so – and that includes necessary breaks for laughing at your friends’ uncoordinated flailings. Of course, beating any one story line entails playing through only a fraction of its microgames, and the game encourages players to return to strive for ever-higher scores in an endless mode. Sadly the game’s startling brevity accentuates the sting of its $50 price tag. In this sense WarioWare’s roots as a portable game made to play in short bursts show more than Courtney Love’s month old dye job.

The Tug of War

Luckily, multiplayer can go a long way toward extending the life of this brief game. It allows up to 12 friends to join in on the action. The unlockable multiplayer section consists of four main games and three minigames that range from the conventional (darts), to the outlandish (racing noses with an insatiable hunger for fruit). The four main multiplayer modes have a good diversity and facilitate a spirit of competition. The real drawback to multiplayer is the requirement to pass one Wii Remote between all players. While this may add an extra level of difficulty (try lasting through a round of hot potato without madly flinging the remote at a friend’s head) it represents short sightedness on Nintendo’s part.

The Big Cheese

WarioWare: Smooth Moves can’t quite conceal its lowly portable origins, but that doesn’t stop it from being a truly fun and innovative game. Moreover, it’s a great way to scratch that multiplayer itch while you wait for Mario Party or Wii Play to arrive. Smooth Move’s brief main game and its inability to completely distinguish itself from previous WarioWare titles prevent it from being truly stupendous. But it can’t be denied that the bells and whistle on this game could wring joy from Mary Todd Lincoln’s scowling corpse. With a smaller price tag or a more robust main game Smooth Moves would easily swing a five. We can all breath a sigh of relief that the Wii’s first foray into the mad mind of Mario’s arch nemesis does not disappoint

Article by: Emily Mollenkopf
Video produced by: Michael Benson