WarioWare: Smooth Moves Member Review for the Wii

When it was first announced that the Wii would have motion sensitive controllers, I was quite excited. My biggest fear however was that some developers would focus only on the controls making crappy minigames that only require you to move your hand up.

That's the perfect description of WarioWare: Smooth Moves. The premise of the game is the remote. Each microgame first tells you how to hold the remote and how to move it in order to complete it. One microgame require you to pick someone's nose and to do that you need to move the remote forward. Clever, but lame as hell. Imagine a game where all you do is make subtle hand gestures and that's it. Now imagine that sometimes the controls are not responsive. Frustrating, isn't it, that the only thing you can do in this game doesn't always work.

Another big flaw is the graphics. Of course the fanboys would say: "But isn't it about gameplay and not about graphics?" And I agree that gameplay comes first (which is also why I think this game sucks), but even a console that isn't as powerful as its competitors can generate great graphics as long as the design is inspired. And here follows my next predictable argument, the graphics suck because the design sucks. The 2D sprites look good, but there is also the occasional ugly low quality 3D model that doesn't fit with the overall graphics style of the game. It's like eating spaghetti with ketchup, or french fries with dreck.

Another frustating aspect is that the price of the game (in dollars) is higher than the time you need to beat it (in minutes). $45 for 30 minutes of gameplay: thats $1.5 per minute of gameplay. This must be the most expensive game ever. Of course there's a multiplayer mode, but that sucks even harder than the single player. You get to play darts which, as you could expect, is extremely irresponsive.

A while after I played this game I bought Super Paper Mario, another game by Intelligent Systems. I started thinking: how can a company that made such a brilliant game also be the same company that made this piece of crap? I don't think I'll ever find out but I do know this: Never trust the Nintendo Seal of Quality. It doesn't mean anything anymore.