LogFAQs > #932656736

#37





Years of release: 2009 (3DS, Japan), 2010 (3DS, NA/EU/AU)
Beaten?: Not really applicable

This might be the only 2009-Japan game that I actually remembered to include on my list. Since it's a 2010 release date here, it's eligible.

I think this is a low-key masterpiece of a game that almost everyone skipped over, somehow. I was really skeptical of the idea of this game when I first heard about it. Create your own WarioWare microgames? That sounds like an incredibly ambitious project. Surely it wouldn't let you do anything you wanted at all. It had to be limited in some way. Maybe you'd be able to determine some of the visuals in some preset games, maybe adjust a few gameplay variables here and there, but create from scratch? That's a big ask.

That's what it was, though. You get to create your own WarioWare microgames from scratch. It's a legitimate game design tool.

Well, "Game design tool" is strong phrasing - it feels more like a game design toybox, but that's almost better, because creating a game here feels really intuitive and fun and never like work, to me. But it's still pretty difficult to do - you have to spend several hours in tutorials, learning how to use the game's programming tools, its art and music tools, etc.

It feels like engaging in real game design. The game almost feels like a puzzle game with multiple parts. The first part of the puzzle is even figuring out how to design a good minigame idea in the first place, trying to think of fun gameplay and thematic concepts and put them together. The second part of the puzzle is making it work. I said this before, but real coding feels kind of like a puzzle game to me, figuring out how to make all these different things work, how to carry information from one place to another, etc. It's one hell of a hard puzzle for a non coding genius like me, requiring several hours of sitting down and crunching all of the different elements to get it to work right.

This also feels in some ways like the spiritual successor to Mario Paint that we never got. You get to create all of your own art and music here, and opening up the basic art and music creating apps and just doodling some shitty sprites or making a short little 5 second song loop is just plain fun. The artsy aspects of this are nearly as fun to tinker with as the coding aspects.

Most of the fun in this game is self-directed, but there is a WarioWare game here as well, a set of about 100 or so preset games that are all designed within the game's own game-designing framework. They're all pretty simple since they're a little more limited in their design, but the great thing about these is being able to open each one of them up in the game editor and seeing how they were all created, reverse engineering the little programming tricks that made them work. There's a lot of surprising ways that some of the games function and it felt like I was puzzling out secret techniques for making games by pulling each one apart.

I only have two complaints about this game. One is that there isn't really a way to just create a "variable" - you can do it but you have to do it through weird, roundabout methods, and it would be nice if some of the ways you had to do certain things weren't quite so unintuitive. It would be a nice thing to see fixed in a sequel, but unfortunately, that's my second complaint - that we'll probably never see a sequel to this, since it received so little acclaim when it came out. Unfortunately, this is another game that we have truly lost in 2020, as I believe all the infrastructure that you upload and download other peoples' games have long been lost to time, which is too bad, because some people made some really clever little creations. I don't think you can even download the WiiWare expansion to this either anymore, which included more preset games and allowed for more storage, as well as uploading/downloading games through the Wii. I feel bad, because I feel like I really didn't engage with this game as much as I would have liked at the time, and now I'll never get the chance to - it's in the past now. I only managed to make a few completed games myself, and it's telling how much a relic of the past it is that my most recently created game was one in which you have to guess whether or not a football player caught the football or not, in reference to the infamous Monday Night Football game between the Seahawks and Packers in 2012. Really hits me with a gut punch just how long this decade has been after all. Pour one out for WarioWare D.I.Y., a creation game that was ahead of its time.