Digitally Disillusioned

Tonight I stayed in with the wife. We’d been experiencing a need for some together time so we indulged each other. And no, not that kind of time. Geez.

What we did do was polish off a bottle of wine and play some Wario Ware Smooth Moves for Nintendo Wii. Now, its not the most obvious thing to connect the adult behavior of getting knackered with the rather youthful design of a game like this, but Nintendo - it seems to me - designed the game for exactly that sort of thing.

Shame, Nintendo, shame. You’ll undermine the morals of America at this rate.

I ran her through the first few levels of the single player mode as it is a bit more robust than the multiplayer. She had a bit of confusion understanding some of the more unusual modes of play, but quickly adapted. Much as I suspected playing it myself, it does seem to have a pretty short learning curve. But that’s not really a problem.

See, Wario Ware is a game of rapid learning - you have 5 seconds to understand and complete the scenario. It wouldn’t be much of a game unless you could learn to master it. It’s an a priori truth here, so no complaints.

She did like the single player, but the multiplayer really caused her to giggle like a schoolgirl. We were competent at darts, but it wasn’t that exciting to us non-dart playing folk. It was Bungie Buddies that really capture our heart: a game that demanded it be played with the artificial and not-entirely-necessary-but-fun-as-hell full immersion jumping. Sorry, throw tethered-together in there somewhere too..

Occasionally - regardless of performance it seemed to us - you are asked to strike a ridiculous pose together for no reason at all, and your only “reward” is an animated flower bed blooming. And what do you do? Well you jump to it! It’s hilarious.

Gaming wouldn’t be fun if every game was like this. There’s almost zero skill here that anyone but a retarded monkey could acquire with modest practice. But having a few games like this for random fits of joy is exactly what everyone needs. It deserves solid praise for that achievement.