I’m not going to do a full review of this game. There’s a simple reason for that. I really don’t like WarioWare. At all. It’s easily the worst thing ever to happen to Wario, a character that was dear to me before WarioWare appeared. I understand the series’ popularity, kinda, but I can’t find anything in it that makes the games interesting to me.

Maybe I’m just weird. Maybe it’s because my attention span is longer than 5 seconds, so I can’t really have any enjoyment from those “Micro-games”. But whatever it is, I don’t like WarioWare. The only one that managed to give me any kind of enjoyment is Smooth Moves on Wii, but that was just because of the hilarious narrator explaining how to hold the remote, that guy was awesome.

Yet, despite not being a fan of the franchise, I couldn’t help but have a bit of interest in WarioWare D.I.Y. The game-making aspect of it definitely made me curious.

So read on and see what I thought!

Playing the games
The games themselves, may it be user-created games or the few games that come pre-made, only have 1 control method: tapping the screen or objects. Nothing more. That kinda limits what you can do, and makes the game overall lack variety. There’s no drag-and-drop, no button presses, just tapping. Of course the games themselves aren’t terribly fun to play, though I did find a few relatively well made games that weren’t TOO bad to play. But at around 5 seconds each, it’s just not really interesting.

One thing I find interesting though is that all the mini-games that are pre-made here are all made using the same tools the users have access to. So everything you see here can be done by you. The developer didn’t just give you dumbed-down tools while they all had the good stuff. So all of your games can potentially be just as “good” as what the developer itself made, if not better. Definitely really cool. They only thing the developers did that you can’t do is boss levels.

Making games
So about making the games. You can do everything: backgrounds, graphic, music, and “gameplay”. Each are pretty nicely done.
Just a note, there’s tutorials for everything, and they’re very detailed. If there’s anything you’re unsure about, the tutorials will definitely help you. And there’s one tutorial that you NEED to do if you want to make games at all, so they don’t throw you in there blindly.

Graphics
The graphic side of thing is limited only by your imagination… and drawing talent. There’s some things that are pre-drawn like trees or rocks and such, but in the end you want to make you own things, right? So there’s 2 types of art you can make. Backgrounds and objects. The background is static, while the objects are what you can actually interact with. There’s various functions for both of those. Objects can have up to 4 “arts”, each of which can have up to 4 frames of animation. Using “programming” later you can interchange between different arts on the same object.

You can color fill, use pens to draw lines and stuff, use a stamp to put pre-drawn objects, spray-paint, and probably the most important for some people, zoom in up to 16x to make sure every detail is just right. Really nice, and quite easy to use.

One thing that struck me was that a lot of the art part of the game is ripped out of Mario Paint. No, really, they reuse some of the same icons, “textures”(for the color-fill), sounds, tools, and visual effects(like the various “erase” methods, and the color-fill animation). It’s almost a straight-out Mario Paint rip-off with very few added features… Which isn’t exactly a bad thing, right?

Music
The music part is pretty cool. There’s a whole other section to make longer songs if you really like it as well. In the game making section, music can be around 6 seconds long (aybe longer if you make a “long” game, I haven’t tried).

You can have up to 4 tracks, and a fifth track for the rhythm. In the 4 “normal” tracks, you can have one note for each part of the song’s timeline. The rhythm track let’s you have up to 4 sounds at the same time for each part of the timeline. You can also set each track to a different instrument to fit your song’s “needs”. It’s really simple to use, but you can do some really cool music there. And the Record-making part let’s you do longer songs which is pretty cool.

If you’re really into it, you can also hum a tune in the DS’s microphone and the game will try to get the right notes, or you can get the game to write the music by itself (just tell it what kind of music you want and you’ll get a randomly-made tune).

Overall the music-making program is really nice. And what’s nice is that the game automatically speeds up the music when it needs to in the game, which is surprisingly well done.

Gameplay
Probably the most important part here. Here you can give functions to various objects, and actually make your games playable.

You can decide what an object will do once you either tap it, or tap anywhere on the screen. That’s probably the most important thing you can make objects react to. Other than that you can make an object react to: touching another object, winning or losing the game, certain time passing in the game, and the object’s animation finishing. Each of those is a “trigger” that you insert in an AI for that object. After that, you decide what the trigger does. You can make the object move, make the object’s animation play, play a sound effect, make one of the few pre-determined special effects play, make you lose the game and, most importantly, switch the object’s “Switch” on or off.

When you’ve done what you need for each of your objects, you have to set the conditions for winning the game. Here, you have to select objects, and say if their “Switch” needs to be on or off to win. For example, you want the player to win by tapping an object, so turn the switch on when the object is tapped, and add the victory condition that says that you win if Object A is switched on. Each “Condition” can have multiple “Switch checks”. So you can say that someone wins if both Objects A and B have their switch on. You can have multiple different winning conditions too, so if you want the player to ALSO be able to win if Objects C and D are switched on, you can have that too.

From there you’re limited only by creativity in regards to what you can do in games. As long as it doesn’t require button inputs, or drag-and-dropping.

Overall
I still don’t like it. There’s something with WarioWare that just doesn’t strike a chord with me. But while it might not do it for me, but fans MUST check it out, no questions asked.

Being able to make your own games and sharing them with people is really cool. The only problem with sharing is that you have to share friend codes, which is STILL the most retarded online system yet. Why not something similar to LBP’s level-sharing system? That’d be PERFECT. But at least sharing friend codes isn’t TOO complicated since the internet exists, and there’s a big community for this game.
In addition to sharing games with other people, you can get games from the “NinSoft” store using Wi-Fi, so you can add various games made by other people (selected by Nintendo) to your collection. And the coolest part of the “online store” is that you can check out games made by big names in the gaming industry. For example, as of the writing of this post, there’s games made by Masahiro Sakurai(of Kirby and Super Smash Bros fame) and Yoshio Sakamoto (of Metroid fame). Nice.

Overall, it’s not for me… but it’s worth checking out nonetheless.

(I didn’t comment on the Wii compatibility since I don’t want to try it out)

jobocan ds, Games, Handheld, impressions, wii