Wahaha! WarioWare Gold! Demo!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - My scores are pretty good.

If you still have a Nintendo 3DS and have at least 816 blocks of storage on it, I recommend you go download the demo for WarioWare Gold from the Nintendo eShop. It's quick, full of charm, and fun. It's worth downloading for the virtual instruction manual alone, which is written in first-person by Wario.

The way Wario describes his microgames reminds me of how I'd describe KoopaTV articles.
Super-awesome and created by me and my flunkies, but mainly me. (Though it actually is mainly me. Wario's lying.)

 
WarioWare Gold has 4 ways to play the 300 microgames included, each lasting around 5 seconds long. 

1. Mash, which involves using the D-Pad and A button
2. Twist, which involves using the 3DS's gyroscope to move it left and right, along with the A button
3. Touch, which involves using the touch screen with your stylus (or icky finger)
4. Mic, which involves using the microphone. Handily, the instruction manual tells you where your 2DS or 3DS's microphone actually is, providing a different diagram for all of Nintendo's different versions of the handheld device

The demo only has Mash, Twist, and Touch modes, which include six microgames per mode. That means you're demoing a healthy 6% of the full game microgame content, which doesn't include all of the other goodies the full game will include. The demo spares no effort to give you a cutscene after you're done playing a mode, telling you about different features in the full game.

Speaking of cutscenes, there's a fair amount of fully voice-acted cutscenes featuring Wario in the demo for you to enjoy, with more in the full game featuring his friends.

After going through Mash, Twist, and Touch, there's an Ultra component that combines all the game types, so it's a medley that has you swap how you play from microgame to microgame, similar to a Bop It toy. For all the modes, you get four lives to go through the rotating set of microgames available in the mode, as they get faster and faster until you lose.

My scores in the demo. Can you beat them?
Mash 33
Twist 40
Touch 37
Ultra 29*

My favourite microgame is Play, from Twist. That's where you control a human girl playing a song on her instrument, and you need to twist to play the proper note, of three options. It reminds me that I'm supposed to be a musical savant.

My least favourite is Digest, also in Twist. A dude digests a food, and you need to twist your 3DS so it goes from his mouth to out of his butt. I don't like it not because of the imagery, but because you can lose very easily. Some microgames are a lot more difficult than others (and can be very unfair in terms of how fast they expect you to react at later speeds), but at least the controls are very responsive and act the way you'd expect.

Anyway, fun demo overall. Will I get the whole game? Probably not, until further notice.

By the way. The demo saves your scores if you close it and go to the HOME Menu. Good. 


If you get better scores than Ludwig, he's competitive enough that he'll try to keep playing until he can beat your score. You're also free to give Ludwig further notice on if he should buy the game. * = Since taking the photo, Ludwig has upped his Ultra score to 33.


The next WarioWare demo that Ludwig wrote about was WarioWare: Get It Together! for the Switch.