By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Well, it's certainly an experiment...
Yesterday, Nintendo published a demo of WarioWare: Get It Together! on the Nintendo eShop. You might remember it from Nintendo's E3 2021, where it was a featured Nintendo Treehouse Live game. The full game will release on September 10, 2021, at a price of $50. It's developed by Intelligent Systems, and the last thing they did was Paper Mario: The Origami King. That specific bit of knowledge will come into play later this article.
The demo starts with an opening cutscene of the members of WarioWare Inc. gathered around Wario, with the mogul claiming he completed his project. ...Instead of working as Wario presumably planned, the device he was holding up digitised and inhaled all the employees, and the demo actually begins. This has pretty much the same premise as Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, and that didn't go very well.
There's two modes: Start (for one to two players) and Local Wireless (where you and presumably someone else play with two systems). I only have one system and one player (me), so let's Start... By the way, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes also had multiplayer... Anyway, the only thing to do after Starting is to press a Play mode with stages apparently made just for the demo. (You later unlock a Practice controls option.)
Mr. Wario is the first character, and he's on a jetpack for free movement. Pressing the action button will get him to use his shoulder charge to... hit things. A few games later, Young Cricket appeared, and he can jump or high jump. ...Which seems to suck in comparison with Wario's jetpack. 18-Volt appeared at the same time, and his gimmick is that he can't move, but he can use the control stick to aim and throw discs from his head. These can also hit things, and also somehow collect items like coins because he threw a disc. It's not like the disc is a boomerang and comes back. It keeps going after you throw it and if a coin is in the way it comes to 18-Volt. But he can use the disc as a hookshot...
Funny I mentioned boomerangs, because after scoring 20 and losing, Mona joined my party, and her gimmick is riding on a hover-scooter and throwing a literal boomerang with the action button. When the boomerang is out, you can directly control its motion (and Mona stops moving until she catches the boomerang again).
I tried again and got a high score of 25. Mona is much more useful than Young Cricket. After her, I got access to Kat & Ana. They jump non-stop and you can directionally influence them with the control stick, and throw shurikens with the action button. Kat throws right and Ana throws left. Kat is for Player 1 and Ana for Player 2, but since I'm alone, I only got Kat. Kat and Ana do jump higher than Young Cricket, though. Except she's very inconsistent because of her automatic jumping and forced right-facing. With her, Wario, and Mona, I only got 21 points.
The last character available in the demo was Orbulon. Orbulon also has flying saucer/jetpack movement like Wario, and his action button allows him to activate a beam that sucks up everything below him. At this point, the demo lets you choose a Crew of 3 or Use All (six). I did another Crew of 3 with Orbulon, Mona, and Wario and scored 36. I tried Use All and got 34... losing because of the Splatoon 2 minigame where you need to side with Judd or Li'l Judd on which team covered the most turf. I often get this wrong in actual Splatoon Turf Wars, so it figures I wouldn't do well...
I have zero intention of actually buying the game. After playing it, I actually dislike the character avatars. The game feels like something I could play on Newgrounds, and I don't think it challenges your thinking any more by having the microgames cycle through different characters. That's especially because the character will announce themselves with a quote lasting a couple of seconds (and I do like the tempo of the voice-acting with the music in the demo) and you'll always know what the controls of the microgame are before doing it, which makes you have to be less mentally nimble. Some microgames still require mental acuity (especially the one with wanted poster in the Western saloon where you gotta shoot the wanted Wario), but not based on the controls/characters. And some characters are just clearly better at microgame completion than others... Or more accurately, some are worse.
Are you a WarioWare kind of person and want to spend your money on that? Or do you just want to beat Ludwig's pretty low scores? Let KoopaTV know in the comments section.
Ludwig also demoed WarioWare: Gold for the Nintendo 3DS three years ago.
Yesterday, Nintendo published a demo of WarioWare: Get It Together! on the Nintendo eShop. You might remember it from Nintendo's E3 2021, where it was a featured Nintendo Treehouse Live game. The full game will release on September 10, 2021, at a price of $50. It's developed by Intelligent Systems, and the last thing they did was Paper Mario: The Origami King. That specific bit of knowledge will come into play later this article.
The demo starts with an opening cutscene of the members of WarioWare Inc. gathered around Wario, with the mogul claiming he completed his project. ...Instead of working as Wario presumably planned, the device he was holding up digitised and inhaled all the employees, and the demo actually begins. This has pretty much the same premise as Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, and that didn't go very well.
There's two modes: Start (for one to two players) and Local Wireless (where you and presumably someone else play with two systems). I only have one system and one player (me), so let's Start... By the way, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes also had multiplayer... Anyway, the only thing to do after Starting is to press a Play mode with stages apparently made just for the demo. (You later unlock a Practice controls option.)
Mr. Wario is the first character, and he's on a jetpack for free movement. Pressing the action button will get him to use his shoulder charge to... hit things. A few games later, Young Cricket appeared, and he can jump or high jump. ...Which seems to suck in comparison with Wario's jetpack. 18-Volt appeared at the same time, and his gimmick is that he can't move, but he can use the control stick to aim and throw discs from his head. These can also hit things, and also somehow collect items like coins because he threw a disc. It's not like the disc is a boomerang and comes back. It keeps going after you throw it and if a coin is in the way it comes to 18-Volt. But he can use the disc as a hookshot...
Funny I mentioned boomerangs, because after scoring 20 and losing, Mona joined my party, and her gimmick is riding on a hover-scooter and throwing a literal boomerang with the action button. When the boomerang is out, you can directly control its motion (and Mona stops moving until she catches the boomerang again).
I tried again and got a high score of 25. Mona is much more useful than Young Cricket. After her, I got access to Kat & Ana. They jump non-stop and you can directionally influence them with the control stick, and throw shurikens with the action button. Kat throws right and Ana throws left. Kat is for Player 1 and Ana for Player 2, but since I'm alone, I only got Kat. Kat and Ana do jump higher than Young Cricket, though. Except she's very inconsistent because of her automatic jumping and forced right-facing. With her, Wario, and Mona, I only got 21 points.
The last character available in the demo was Orbulon. Orbulon also has flying saucer/jetpack movement like Wario, and his action button allows him to activate a beam that sucks up everything below him. At this point, the demo lets you choose a Crew of 3 or Use All (six). I did another Crew of 3 with Orbulon, Mona, and Wario and scored 36. I tried Use All and got 34... losing because of the Splatoon 2 minigame where you need to side with Judd or Li'l Judd on which team covered the most turf. I often get this wrong in actual Splatoon Turf Wars, so it figures I wouldn't do well...
I don't think a few more seconds of thinking time would've helped me reach the definitive conclusion that the yellow-ink team won. |
I have zero intention of actually buying the game. After playing it, I actually dislike the character avatars. The game feels like something I could play on Newgrounds, and I don't think it challenges your thinking any more by having the microgames cycle through different characters. That's especially because the character will announce themselves with a quote lasting a couple of seconds (and I do like the tempo of the voice-acting with the music in the demo) and you'll always know what the controls of the microgame are before doing it, which makes you have to be less mentally nimble. Some microgames still require mental acuity (especially the one with wanted poster in the Western saloon where you gotta shoot the wanted Wario), but not based on the controls/characters. And some characters are just clearly better at microgame completion than others... Or more accurately, some are worse.
Are you a WarioWare kind of person and want to spend your money on that? Or do you just want to beat Ludwig's pretty low scores? Let KoopaTV know in the comments section.
Ludwig also demoed WarioWare: Gold for the Nintendo 3DS three years ago.
Yeah I didn’t think it’s be that great. Having the character icons forces you to focus more on character playstyle than the micro game. This can be find for the first few rounds but as the game gets faster I imagine it would just end up feeling unfair. An example “Get the key!”. In past games seeing those words would probably prompt you to just push left on the d pad and grab the key, whereas in this game you’d have to be paying attention to who your playing as and what tools they have to get the key. Sounds like it’d spice up gameplay a bit, but it’d end up hurting the long run of how many levels you can get through. Warioware is a bit of a memorization game, but this is jsut too much.
ReplyDeleteAlso! What’s the point of Chibi-fying the characters when they were already Chibi-ish from the beginning. Warioware gold simplified the character designs and this game worsens it. I hate to think what their gonna look like in the next game.
Yeah, you may remember back at E3 2021 I thought this would be a cool way to spice things up and think faster on the feet... but...yeah, I don't think it's worked out like that.
DeleteI'm fine with the art style though.