WarioWare Touched! Nintendo DS Review

Wario makes his mad debut on the Nintendo DS with 180 all-new, factory-fresh microgames! WarioWare, Inc. DS features all the frantic five-second microgame action of the previous WarioWare games, but with a touching new twist.

Gameplay

As you know WarioWare Touched tests your ability to react and figure out things out quickly. It may also improve your hand-eye coordination if played enough! The microgames range from challenging you to draw a line to detonate some explosives, or scratch the screen to revel a coin! While none of these seem very challenging or fun all that changes while they are franticly thrown at you in 5 second bursts. If you have played another one of the WarioWare instalments before then you should already know what to expect, if not then you should get ready for something very surreal!

The games are accessed by tapping on one of the characters that wanders around your DS screen. Each of them has their own style of games for you to play. For example Mona’s games involve a lot of using the stylus to “slice” things on screen, while 9-Volt has games based solely around Nintendo back catalogue of sub 16-bit games. Each of the 180 games offering a varying amount of things to do and there is simply not enough space in the review to list all of them.

Graphics

Graphics is a difficult aspect of the game to talk about! As you know most of the game relies on 5 second nuggets of old games to propel you though the title, but once you are not expecting the game to boost the DS onto a new graphical tier then you should not be disappointed. All the old games look fantastic and are lovingly created on the DS’ screen. While not playing the game there are also some nice cartoony cut-scene’s for you to watch which are more pleasing to the eye than some of the games. Although WarioWare is not pushing the DS to it graphical limits it sill manages to look great at times throughout the title. If you think about it, if the graphics were any more detailed then they would take longer for the player to interpret, and title would lose a considerable amount of its appeal.

Sound

Once again most of the music in the game harks back to loads of old titles and their audio is captured very well in each one of the games included on this cart. There is also a small amount of voice action used in the game although it’s not very impressive. There is also some music that plays during the course of the set of microgames that belong to each character, and this music will increase in speed the further you get to the end of their set of games, which helps to set a frantic feel to the way you play the game. Each character in the game also has their own theme, the most memorable of these undoubtedly being Mike’s as I think the song has stuck in my mind for life. It really is that catchy!

Lifespan

WarioWare Touched is a very short game; you will see the end credits in about 3 hours of continuous play. Thankfully there are a few more ways to make the title offer value for money. For starters on your first play though the game you won’t play all the microgames as you just play a random selection of them on each level, so you will have to play each level more than once to see everything the game has to offer. Next is the “Toy Room” where it is possible to unlock a few extras although some of them are very, very odd and one of them makes no sense at all.

Overall

WarioWare Touched is a very interesting and fun game to play but in my opinion is not the best WarioWare you can play as the original offers more fun. The title relies heavily on the touch screen with almost all the games involving the use of it. For a game called WarioWare Touched you would expect a lot of touching to be involved but over the course of the 180 games I think it is seen far too much. They could have easily shaken things up a bit by using the buttons in some of the games and they could also have used the microphone more. Even though the title is very short it can get repetitive before you reach the end, which is not the sign of a quality title. Nevertheless it is a very interesting title and one that should have taken pride of place in you collection had more been done to make it better.

7.4 out of 10