16. The Maze That Pays
Command: Collect!
Source: WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! (GBA)
The first example of the original WarioWare's dedication to gaming history, this early surprise sees Wario thrown into a simplistic Pac-Man-esque maze to collect coins. It's a very clear homage to a non-Nintendo franchise, which is vanishingly rare on their own systems. The scene even "wraps" around itself, a necessary shortcut on the higher difficulties.
15. Wrap Sheet
Command: Squish!
Source: WarioWare Touched! (DS)
You've got a Nintendo DS. You've got a stylus. You've loaded WarioWare Touched. There's bubblewrap on the screen. And you know exactly what to do. It's almost impossible to actually fail – who could resist popping those bubbles — but this marriage of sheer banality with real-life compulsion remains exceptionally funny.
14. Hit the Gust
Command: Drive!
Source: WarioWare Touched! (DS)
A sterling use of both DS screens, this one shows your little wind-propelled car on the touch screen and a side view of the proceedings above. You must blow into the DS microphone to propel the car forward, keeping an eye on the top screen as best you can. Marvellously clever, and only possible on DS.
13. Ultra Hand
Command: Get (colour)!
Source: WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! (GBA)
This one is a reference to 1966 obscure Nintendo toy, showcasing the deep dives this series goes to in celebrating not only Nintendo's history in video games but daring to dig down even further into their heritage.
Other Microgames celebrate the bizarre likes of the Chiritorie remote control vacuum and the Beam Gun Custom Gunman. Know your roots!
12. Ice Cream Lean
Command: Keep it up!
Source: WarioWare: Get It Together! (Switch)
Dropping your ice cream is among the most heartbreaking things that can happen, so it's here that you get to avenge your own fallen soft-serve by preventing this kid — who is licking a mile a minute, incidentally — from overzealously slobbering his own tasty treat to the ground. It's tight and terrifying, because you have way more leeway than it initially seems.
11. Flower to Tower
Command: Rotate!
Source: WarioWare Touched! (DS)
In this visually attractive game, you've got to turn a crank to raise a pulley that lifts a prince into the range of his tower-bound princess. Unfortunately, he's also being set about by archers. Clever, creative use of the Nintendo DS's then-novel dual screens to hammer home the height of the tower makes this a stand-out Microgame.
10. Super Mario Bros.
Command: To the castle!
Source: WarioWare Twisted! (GBA)
You've never played Super Mario Bros. like this before. A rotary take on Nintendo's stalwart classic, you'll need to spin your GBA to adjust Mario's movement speed — and, brilliantly, this also affects the tempo of the music. It's a panicked, perfect take on the iconic game, and it fits Twisted like a glove.
9. Heads Up
Command: Catch!
Source: WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! (GBA)
You are a man with an enormous catcher's mitt. A baseball is flung towards you from another chap in the distance. You must tap left or right to line up your mitt with the ball and catch it. Simple? At first, but as the difficulty rises, the glove shrinks. Also, hilariously, when you miss, the ball appears to have smashed through the glass of your GBA screen.
8. WarioWare Twisted!
Command: Gobble!/Shave!/Flip!
Source: WarioWare Smooth Moves (Wii)
The series gets dangerously meta here, with your Wii Remote taking the place of an on-screen GBA with a WarioWare Twisted cartridge inserted in it. Layers upon layers of absolutely self-indulgent madness, only a series with supreme confidence can get away with something as cheeky as this one.
Comments 59
I love the one where you pull the Master Sword out in Smooth Moves. My favourite is maybe the one where you avoid the arrows as a ninja though.
I found Twisted Mario Bros to be one of the most memorable, and often wondered what it would be like to play the entire game like that!
Removed - unconstructive
I love all warioware games… how can I pick a favorite minigame?
Rainbow Juice is absolutely worthy of the #2 spot for the music alone - Drawbridge Dilemma comes very close too, as much as I love GIT Drawbridge Dilemma was the only part of the game that gave me that same sense of wonder the more atmospheric parts of the early WarioWares gave me as a kid.
Good picks. Many great games in the WarioWare séries, but Twisted is still the best.
I’m not seeing any of my DIY microgames on this list. 🧐
WW Twisted is indeed the best game, too bad my cartridge is unreliable now…
@Paulo I love how fancy it sounds when you put an accent in séries. What, perchance, is one’s favourite microgame in the WarioWare revue?
I'm still extremely partial to Over the Hump's concept from Gold, but gameplay-wise, I really like both Labyrinth and Pushmo from that game. Also found it to be a shame that both The Maze That Pays and Diamond Dig didn't make it into Gold
I also think Wario Mambo is one of the best microgames in the series. Might even be one of the hardest in the series, too.
I love this series (obviously) and rank Twisted, which I had to import from the States, as the best. Controversial perhaps, but Get It Together left me a bit cold. There's a large focus on multiplayer but nobody else amongst my family and friends likes Warioware so I'm stuck with single. This left the Switch game feeling a bit bare bones to me, unless I'm missing something. Most of the unlockable, er, macro... games (?) are multiplayer focused and there was a lack of things like the daft toys from the capsule machines and stuff like that that kept me playing with the other entries. Still fun, but it didn't hold my attention like previous entries.
Spotted a typo for #10 - There shouldn't be a 0 after the 1
Nothing from Party Games, DIY, or Game & Wario?
I counted three games from the Switch. That's 12% of the games that made the list, were from the Switch. So 88% of the best 25 games are from other consoles.
Oh dear.
"Namely, making you think about Wario's tax record. Which one can only assume is quite bad."
Still better than Yoshi's.
I like the one with the giant woman with the runny nose from the gamecube game. Her snot falls to the ground while you rund around and try to avoid it. When it misses it destroys the ground so you have less and less chance of avoiding it after a while. Get very hectoc with four players.
@nessisonett too many excellent microgames. I honestly prefer Twisted due to its wackyness, fun factor and body of work, surpassing the original. Even Nintendo of America knew Twisted was better than Touched (which is still amazing) because they held on to it to release after the DS entry, since the DS was new to the market.
Wario Mambo frustrated me to no end.
Grow Wario Grow, from the first game, where you have to get the mushroom before Mario in Mario Land setting, has to be my favorite for visuals alone.
the best one ever was in Smooth Moves when you got to play STAR FOX with MOTION CONTROLS and it's the best feeling you will ever have playing a video game in your life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEwJHpEprIw
Pretty much everything 9Volt does is my favourite, although the recreation of level 1 from Starfox on the Wii is my definite favourite. I still think the GBA original is my favourite from the series.
God I hate the egg minigame in Twisted. It's consistently a run killer in super hard, especially if you're using an SP.
@zool You compare 1 single entry over 5. Obviously it's skewed. By your logic, WarioWare Touched is the best entry in the entire series since 6 microgames are represented here and Smooth Moves is one of the worst with also just 3!
@Deusfaux party games is just mega microgames on gamecube, and if we're being real, I doubt any of the microgames from "Gamer" on game and wario are winning any awards
the lack of DIY is a bit odd, mind
In Smooth Moves, I love the one where you simply...push someone over. They're facing you and coaxing you to do it. There are three different people, and three different 'winning' animations. All of them are HILARIOUS!!! I recall kitty cats all appearing...and Mt. Fuji going off XD
@Deusfaux Party Games reuses the same microgames from the first game.
Of all the hilariously brilliant micro-games that this series has produced, I am puzzled by many of the bland and forgettable choices on this list.
The 360 degree Super Mario boss stage from Twisted is absolutely brilliant, and Mambo was traumatic enough that I'd almost forgotten all about it. It's far too unreasonable in its difficulty, I feel. There was also a boss stage (probably in Touched) where you have to avoid being shot at, but there are so many waves, with an ever increasing number of projectiles that are almost impossible to avoid that it quickly descends into a miserable experience. I also love the dance stage in Smooth Moves, but the controls can be unreliable, and sadly ruin the experience a bit.
A few motion-related hiccups aside, Smooth Moves is sheer brilliance on a disc and is byfar the best in show in the WarioWare series. The addition of very inclusive multiplayer modes (accommodating up to 12 players in one, and the 5-player rope-cutting mini-game which allows everyone a shot at winning, no matter how badly you performed in the actual micro-games) was the icing on a cake and is probably the funniest local multiplayer game I've ever had the joy to play (and watch). Twisted is an easy second.
As much as I have been enjoying Get It Together, after 60 hours, I'm a little bored with it now, and I wish that it had included at least 300 micro-games as it's become just a touch too repetitive too quickly (even with its cast of characters). My main disappointment with it though is that it wasn't a follow-up to Smooth Moves.
Fronks was probably my family’s favorite but I don’t think that counts as a mini game.
I think it’s impossible to narrow it down to a top 25… honestly you’d be better off trying to figure out what the worst ones are
Honestly my list would nearly entirely be 9-volt’s microgames. I guess I just like the nostalgia?
There are a bewildering number of ones I like. Pound for pound I'd say Warioware touched is my favourite set of microgames
@JoeyTS I didn't pick the list of 25.
@zool Obviously not, but when you say 88% of the microgames are on other consoles, those 88% of microgames are spread across 5 different games in the series. So don't go "Oh dear" when you're putting the percentage of a single game up against 5 other games in the series.
@sketchturner hmmm, but that is exactly what it sets out to be! I must admit that the fun fades one you've memorized all the minigames.
If someone feels this way as well, check out warioware gold. It has way more microgames than other titles. But most importantly: the constant mix up of control schemes keeps that one fresh even after hours of playing!
there are certain games that you will 100% always beat even on the highest speed/difficulty, my favorite microgames are the ones that always keep you on your toes. GiT really helps with that since characters are constantly shuffled
@JoeyTS 25 games on the list across 5 separate consoles averages out at 20% per console. But the Switch is below average at only 12%.
So to put it another way, most of the top 25 best Wario games on the list are not on the Switch.
And that is from NL, not me. Your list will obviously differ. But this list does nothing to sell the game to anyone thinking of buying it.
😱
@Deusfaux : The GameCube game was more or less identical to the GBA debut, but for the so-called "big screen" (they didn't even bother to remake the micro-games for TV; they're merely rendered at the same resolution as the GBA version but upscaled).
Game & Wario didn't have any microgames apart from what was included in the Gamer mode, and those micro-games were mostly derivative of past games and were intended to be simple enough to play while also focusing on 5-Volt (and managing 9-Volt's fatigue).
And kind of like Gamer in Game & Wario, many of DIY's micro-games were intended to be a simple showcase of the sorts of games that could be created using the included tools. None of them were particularly remarkable, though some did inspire micro-games in Gold and Get It Together.
@zool But count out the actual scores. Smooth Moves is also 12%. Twisted and Gold are at 16%, Mega Microgames is at 20%, and Touched is at 24%. And I'd make Twisted 12% because one of the microgames is literally doing absolutely nothing. Same for Touched which has a game where you do nothing so I'd make that 20%. Only two of the games actually hit 20% so in all actuality, it's a very slight difference.
Here's your logic, WarioWare Smooth Moves is also 12%. That means 25 games across the other 5 in the series averages to around 20% per game while the Wii version is only 12%. So therefore, the Wii is below average. But using this logic, now Get it Together is among the list of games that average the percentage to 20%!
See you still are skewing the results. You actually count out Get it Together's percentage of games on this list but for the other five? You just average them out or combine them together to make the numbers seem higher than they really are. Why not give every game the same treatment instead of pretending like Get it Together is so much worse than the other games?
@JoeyTS I didn't give every game the same treatment because the Switch game is the new Kid on the block, so it should be bigger and better, but it doesn't seem that way. According to NL's list anyway.
@zool That's just unfair then because even the "best" WarioWare game according to this list only has 24% of the best games. The other 76% are on other consoles. Frankly, you just have a very pessimistic outlook when you purposefully skew results in the way that you do because when you have a list of 25 with 6 all fantastic games being represented, then even the best ones are going to pale in comparison when compared to the other 5!
@nessisonett That Master Sword one is really funny when you play it at a higher level and Link turns into an old man.
Interesting opinion about the first Rhythm Tengoku being the best in the series. Even though it is an undeniable masterpiece, I felt that it was a series were each new game was even better than the previous one.
From the WarioWare series, the first one is actually the best in my opinion, but almost all are great.
Justice for unrolling the toilet roll from WarioWare Touched
@sketchturner Yeah, really time sensitive puzzles or min games aren't really my thing. That's pretty much sums up all Wario Ware games.
@sketchturner Wario shall remember that.... but do you at least like Wario land or Wario World?
@WarioOfTheYear I love the Wario Land games a LOT! Especially the first one. That's what makes it extra painful that he has been pulled away from that and forced into these meme games.
@sketchturner alright fair take
@sketchturner The point of this series is Wario making big money from bad and stupid game. It's very meta.
So it seems warioware diy is the least memorable, I’d have to agree. I also think twisted is my favorite as well. The warioware games tend to be better suited to some sort of gimmick like motion controls or touch.
And still gold gets so little attention, even though it's secretly the best game in the series.
There's too many. Here's just a long list of a few from each game besides DIY that I like, in no particular order.
1. Gold Digger (Mega Microgame$)
2. Nighttime Allergies (Mega Microgame$)
3. Dungeon Dilemma (Mega Microgame$)
4. Wario Pinball (Mega Microgame$)
5. Grow Wario Grow (Mega Microgame$)
6. Make Way For Martian (Twisted)
7. Nose Dive (Twisted)
8. Burying The Hatchet (Twisted)
9. You Break It, You Buy It (Touched)
10. Scrambled Egg (Touched)
11. Being Nosy (Touched)
12. Biggest Fan (Smooth Moves)
13. Opening Night (Smooth Moves)
14. Three’s A Crowd (Smooth Moves)
15. No Solicitors (Gold)
16. Loot Scoot (The boss version in Gold)
17. Donkey Kong Country (Gold)
18. Splatoon 2 (Get It Together)
19. Luigi’s Mansion (Get It Together)
20. Super Mario World (Get It Together)
21. Boxed Up (Get It Together)
22. Answer Me (Get It Together)
Basically, any microgame involving noses is a winner for me.
@Croctopus One day they will put together your list to make… WarioNose 🥸👃
"High-Speed Chase" in WarioWare: Twisted. Especially if you lose, then Wario gets thrown up high and cracks the GBA screen. 😂
I don't think I have favorite microgames. Even something as simple and basic as Crazy Cars from the first game I like a lot.
Perhaps if I had to decide, I'd say Laser Eyes, simply for the idea of Wario needing eye drops and thinking "F*** no!".
Haven't played Gold and very little Get It Together! to choose microgames from those.
I appreciate you attempting to make a "top 25" list for this. That is no small feat to do! With that said, I don't agree with most of the choices, haha. Touched and Twisted are definitely the best two games in the series though, so I'm glad they got a lot of representation here!
I really hope the cutscenes are better on this game than the last one D:
I love the micro game, I can’t remember what it’s called, but the one where you drop the Wiimote so it dangles from your wrist in Smooth Moves
Anything with the Fronks in it really. That game about launching groups of Fronks in the air in Game and Wario. I just want a whole game about the Fronks.
All the Nintendo ones obviously, but other than those I also really like the final boss ones that involve Wario going on adventures!
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