If one were to quest for a single word to describe WarioWare it would be difficult to decide which assortment of letters from any language could best encompass its ideas, its style, and its structure. Everyday words like unique, intriguing, or wacky come to mind but none seem to do Nintendo's GBA concoction justice for audiences unfamiliar with its presence. Ironically, WarioWare is truly a surface level game if you were to analyze it on a surface level, but like few things in life, a deeper gaze seems to reveal subtle and not-so subtle commentaries on the gaming industry as a whole and the state of gameplay as approached by today's video game creators.

The idea is simple: Take hundreds of three second-long minigames and cram them into one larger, digestive package. These "microgames" range from all sorts of themes, genres, and motifs such as sports, puzzle, strange, and even Nintendo emulation. The gimmick is the speed and relentlessness in which WarioWare bombards you with these microgames and how the utter randomness leads a player with no hand to hold while he or she attempts to decipher sheer game communication, an area in which WarioWare succeeds. The games' main focus is in keeping the player on their toes and entertained at the same time through overcoming wave after wave of streaming microgames, all with their own set of control schemes, conflicts, and nuances. The games are certainly limited and efficient, but their strict nature is 100% deliberate.

Amazingly enough, WarioWare's artistic direction and musical integration accentuate every nook and cranny of the play experience. At first glance, the game can come off a tad crude and even insulting as far as competency and visual style goes, but further examination allows WarioWare to show function for its form. Hazards and controllable personalities for the microgames are almost immediately conveyed through the use of bright colors or distinct animation while backgrounds are deemphasized with duller palettes or static imagery. Of course, WarioWare also features trademark WarioLand tunes from various stages of his past games and voice samples and his own verbal exclamations. Aural cues and other sound effects remain memorable as they exist and thrive to highlight key moments or reward you when you thwart the games copious challenges.

What's interesting about these microgames though is the set of cyclical and developing variables that each individual game comes readily equipped with to tickle your timing, coordination, or concentration. As players progress in the prepackaged sets of microgames things begin to speed up and elements of the microgames you would normally begin to memorize now start to change and evolve in order to heighten challenge and keep the messages of the game fresh. And to a degree, this is exactly how the game plays out for fair amount of play time. However, to say the game can be as effervescent and stupefying forever as it was the first handful of times the power was tripped would be a lie. Repeat play will abuse many people for a quite a spell, but the novelty of WarioWare is in the impression and amusement one can extract from a brief and satisfactory love affair. It's the memory the game imprints upon you that becomes almost more fascinating than the product itself. Almost.

But one of the other more gratifying things about WarioWare is how different people will appreciate different details about the game throughout its entirety. There's certainly a lot to dig into if the game sucks you in, be it the attitude presented by the story and characters or the sheer craziness of the microgames. There's also some underlying statements being made about the business of games, and they are presented in a light and comical manner but seem to hold weight.

The jabs at Microsoft are fairly obvious, even to the casual consumer. The "Microgame$" spelling in the title makes it evident from the start but even the game's presentation takes on that of Wario's laptop Operating System. To further fuel the fire let's acknowledge that Wario himself embodies the mental image people have of the "evil corporation" when you consider Wario has always existed in Nintendo's world as a personification of greed and contradictions. Having such a character assume the vehicle for this endeavor is glaringly suspicious and apparently conscious. The story furthers the visual clues since Microsoft's head-first dive into the world of video game consoles with Xbox is paralleled by Wario's awareness of their profit and his desire to do the same in the animated intro sequence.

Even the throwbacks to older Nintendo, Atari, and arcade classics seem to say something about the current industry-wide moves of the repackaging and porting of game content from yesteryear to make a quick buck this year, a practice which Nintendo is a big supporter of. Whether this lives as an erroneous contradiction about Nintendo and its business practices or as a declaration about the state of affairs amongst the company and its peers is unknown.

All politics aside, we find ourselves in a day and age where game players are often concerned with the latest gaming trend and hyperbole-fueled PR gimmicks. With WarioWare in mind it's refreshing to see a game that is not only incapable of such inclinations, but ignores, mocks, and arguably outdoes them with a more modest and less imposing wrapper.