Dauntless Hunter | Posted 12/8/2011 4:28:16 PM | message detail | quote
Touched is the worst Wario Ware and the only one that's a bad game.
The touchscreen is just too freeform for a game like Wario Ware where it gives you 5 seconds to follow one-word instructions. With Mega Micro Games and Twisted your input options were limited enough that you could easily figure out how to do what it wanted you to. But with a touchscreen you can just do anything, how am I supposed to figure out that "Swim!" means draw circles over the swimmer's shoulders with enough time left to finish? Plus there's the fact that, as an early DS game, the touchscreen input was extremely unrefined so even if you were trying to do the right thing a lot of times it wouldn't recognize it as having been done correctly (the kanji-racing game leaps to mind immediately).
They smartened up with Smooth Moves. The different Wii Remote positions they tell you to use really help make things more intuitive.
I kind of agree with this, but Smooth Moves' faults are worse in my opinion, namely that Wii controls just tend to be sort of finicky and it makes playing the game more annoying. This isn't really their fault, they did what they could with what they have, but I just don't enjoy it as much. The fact that there's always a pause to let you switch forms also hurts, because while necessary, it slows the game down and I want WarioWare to be as absurdly fast and madcap as possible.
I think this is why Twisted works so well - it's fast paced, but unlike Touched, you're not going to run into situations where you don't know what to do as often because pretty much all you can do is spin it and press A sometimes. It's a lot more interesting than the original WarioWare's basic control setup without sacrificing any of the intuition that comes with it.