The promised week has arrived and the new WarioWare has dropped. After playing the demo for two weeks straight, I was super excited to see what the full package had to offer. I started playing the second the digital version released and beat the main story in about two hours. As far as WarioWare experiences go, I think it’s the absolute best one to date. I have no doubt I’ll be getting the most playtime out of it through the single player alone. I can only imagine how much I’d get if I had a co-op partner who shared my interest. There’s so much about the game that impresses me, but there are unfortunately a few niggling issues that don’t sit well with me. I love that the game lets you customize the color schemes of your characters, but it’s so aggravating that it doesn’t let you color them completely. Wario’s pink pants and 9-Volt’s red shirt are unmodifiable, so those colors remain locked on their palette. It ruins my attempt to go full blue on everyone. It’s also super annoying that the game doesn’t let you play as Ana or Spitz in single player, even by manually selecting them. They’re essentially clones of Kat and Dribble respectively, just swapped around, but the games are still designed to be playable with them. They’ve got unique voice clips and everything, why not just give us the option? I also really like that they record your play data for each character, but unfortunately that menu was completely bungled. It aggregates all of your play data from every mode together and just tallies it up. So when you play the Wario Cup as 9-Volt 7 times or try to get a 45 score for Penny’s Mix, these two characters shoot up in the play count numbers, leaving everyone else in the dust. There’s no control for the difficulty when measuring the win ratio, so a character can end up at the bottom from losing Super Hard over and over, while another character can be at the top because you used them once in Story Mode and won.

I’m glad they brought back Boss Battles, though I think it was a mistake to have boss battles followed by a bonus round every 10-15 microgames. It kills the pacing and intensity that the demo had, making it just take longer to get to the good part. WarioWare is not the sort of game that should be making a player wait, and some of the boss battles definitely slow things down with how long they take to start, especially Orbulon’s. It would be nice to have a Story Mode that lets you skip the boss/bonus rounds, or at least just the bonus. The chance for an extra life is probably worth keeping the boss battle around, though the intro sequence should at least be skippable. The mode that lets you give your characters presents is a great addition for completionists. I’m looking forward to maxing that out and trying to find the perfect color palette for all of the characters. Maybe I can post that on here once I get it.

WarioWare disrupted my other work somewhat, but I’m getting back on the train today to make progress on Wakeup Call, Cosmic, and my simulator. My simulator in particular got disrupted after I came up with a new idea for an actual video game that I want to pursue. We’ll see if we get anywhere on that front, but I do like the concept. I’ll share some details once I have some more concrete ideas. Oh yeah, and I’m thinking about making another YouTube video next month. Don’t want to promise anything yet, but there’s a topic that’s been on my mind lately that I want to explore in video form. Let’s just hope I can improve my acoustics for it this time.

I think that’s about it. Time to get back to work. Make the most!