I’ve made my search for the next great party game abundantly clear, and it seems some cosmic power is listening because we may have another strong contender in the upcoming WarioWare: Move It. This new collection of microgames continues Wario’s tendency to bring out Nintendo’s wackier side. It’s a side that I really admire largely due to the fact that in order to complete the games and presumably win when you’re against other players, you’ve got to objectively be the absolute silliest goose. Though it isn’t doing anything really new, WarioWare: Move It at least makes it all the easier to laugh at, and with, your friends. And that, folks, is what it’s all about.
As a warm up at my preview, me and the Nintendo rep walking me through my demo perused the WarioWare: Move It‘s new Museum. Here, I was able to get a sense for the sheer amount of microgames that the game contains, even if I wasn’t able to actually see and play them all. While I’m missing a firm number, believe me when I say it’s a lot. I suspect that without the complete Museum, folks can expect to have to throw a few parties themselves in order to see them all. It seems like playing them once will ensure that they are added to the Museum where players can pick them up at their leisure, though, which will make revisiting favorites all the easier in this title. This is great news because based on my time with the game, there’s already a few that I hope to call up at my next gathering.
The first microgame I tackled involved making a motion to suggest that I was cleaning my back with a towel. Except instead of being a normal person, or whatever the equivalent of that is in the Mushroom Kingdom and its adjacent worlds, I was a humanoid turtle. Another turned me into a hungry chicken looking for its lunch. The game—which is about as simple as ever since all these tiny microgames take literal seconds to complete—accomplishes these inane little skits by first asking players to look very silly and strike certain poses or forms. These forms are repeated across various minigames, but in my short time with WarioWare: Move It, I could already begin to see how the developers managed to wring a surprising amount of variety from a fair few, like the chicken game’s Ba-kaw form, which recurred in brilliant ways throughout my demo.
Others are a bit more of a workout, like the Squat pose which came in handy in an utterly ridiculous fishing minigame and another that’s quite literally a test of your twerking and artistic abilities in equal measure.
Once I’d tried my hand at a few Museum levels, I was taken into the story mode which revealed very little but promised to be about as unhinged as you’d think. Wario takes off to a new island destination where things go astonishingly poor in record-breaking time. The first stage, set as Wario is running away from his pursuers, seemed to be themed around introducing the first of the game’s many forms. I expect a lot of WarioWare: Move It will follow a similar formula until you’ve accumulated every pose, at which point the game will likely go into overdrive mixing and matching them as is often the case with these titles.
In the final stretch of my preview, four of us were bunched together onto a board game map that’d be familiar to anyone who’s played Nintendo’s other famous party games, the Mario Party series. And while that game is known for ruining friendships, as it regularly prompts you to screw each other over in order to succeed, I do think this one will make you and your friends more likely to join hands against the game more than anything. True to Wario’s nature, rolls could be as surprisingly beneficial as they could be obviously dastardly; interestingly enough, winning games was the way to ensure that you could actually progress rather than following a turn order. Pair this with WarioWare: Move It‘s humbling poses and you’ve got a surefire recipe for a night full of hearty belly laughs and at least a few expletives.
Though I’m a relative stranger to the WarioWare franchise, my demo of WarioWare: Move It made me a bit of a believer. While I’m still left to wonder how strong a game made up of the tiniest minigames can actually be, I had more than enough fun with the few I could fit in half an hour to trust that there are plenty more tricks up its sleeve. After all, I seem to have only scratched the surface of the poses and microgames available—of which there are seemingly over 200—and that’s without diving into the very promising nature of the new devious and board-game-like Party Mode. So if you’re like me and want to play host to all your friends, WarioWare: Move It seems like the next promising way to ratchet up an already silly night in the foreseeable future.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.