WarioWare: Smooth Moves

WarioWare: Smooth Moves is the purest possible answer to the question of what happens when someone takes a motion controller and chops it up into hundreds of five-second ideas. The game consists of microgames that last only a few moments and offer a single terse instruction: catch, dodge, twist, blow, pull. The player has no time to think, only to react, and the pace accelerates with every success until the instructions start to blur together. The framing story is typical for the series, meaning utterly absurd, and serves mainly as glue between the blocks of microgames.

The main idea of the Wii version is the so-called grip forms. Before each group of microgames, the game shows how the player should hold the Wiimote: like a handle, like an umbrella, like a dumbbell, by the nose, on the head, or laid flat on a table. This turns a tiny change of grip into an entirely different movement language, and the game becomes entertaining for spectators too, since half the fun happens off-screen. The multiplayer section works as passing a single controller around the table and ranks among the surest ways to get a crowd moving that otherwise doesn't play video games.

Technically it's a deliberately mismatched collage: one microgame looks like a digitized photograph, another like rough pixel art, another like a felt-tip drawing. This chaos is intentional and gives the game an unmistakable visual signature that hasn't aged in the years since. The music is just as fragmented, full of short motifs, jingles, and voice clips. At the time, the game was received as one of the first titles to genuinely experiment with Wii controls instead of merely grafting them onto a classic design. Today it remains an ideal quarter-hour game and, at the same time, the best demonstration of what waving a controller around was actually good for. Anyone looking for a long campaign will leave disappointed, since the main line can be finished fairly quickly; the real longevity lies in trying to last as long as possible through the accelerating marathon, and in how reliably the game makes anyone watching burst out laughing.