A review deck without a "touched" joke in it.
User Rating: 8.8 | WarioWare: Touched! DS
I have never played a WarioWare game until this one. My first impressions were curious ones; I didn’t know what to think of the game. Super speedy “microgames” blended in with a strange storyline made me baffled and enticed at the same time. I leaned more on the greener side of the fence and refreshed my thirst by going insane playing these incredibly fast games on and on. WarioWare: Touched is the latest addition to the growing WarioWare saga, currently the 4th installment. It's a game about quick thinking and quick reflexes, and it will challenge you until your mad. With somewhere over 200 "microgames" (each lasts only up to 3 seconds), dozens of little “toys", and a handful of actual mini games, this game will keep you busy long after the main story mode is complete. o here's how the game fundamentally plays: You choose a character, each with a set of about 20 games of a certain category (rubbing, pulling, cutting, and so on…). Suddenly you're overrun with 3-second snippets of games, each giving you an instant to figure out what's going on and then actually do it. Make a flaw, and you lose a life. Emerge victorious, and be thrown into the next mini game. Once you lose your 4 lives, it's game over. If you can survive long enough you'll get to take on a longer, more difficult “Boss Game". If you pass that, the game speeds up and you get to continue through the next string of tougher games! It's a bizarre blast of illogical, frenzied fun, and just about as much fun to sit and watch, as it is to play. Mini games range from the foolishly simple (Tap the drum until the sleeping man wakes up!) to the devilishly tough (Turn the locker dial!), from humdrum (Draw a circle around the buttons!) to the insanely uncanny (Tap the kitty and watch them dance in a shower of heart-shaped confetti!). Most of the fun comes in having no idea what to expect, as you finish cutting a slab of meat in half only to be thrust into challenge to throw a ninja star at a teleporting ninja. Some games are over-complicated/under-explained, forcing you to fail in your first run and check them out in the album until you figure out what to do. Boss games are usually more thought-out, with one forcing you drive an RC-car away from a massive boy, and another taking you on an adventure into someone's nasal cavity. It also helps that the Boss Stages don’t have time limits. Practice makes perfect though, and once you know how to handle every mini game, you can have a blast taking on some of the more challenging "Hardcore Mixes". The games also take huge advantage of the DS's capabilities: Every game is handled using either the stylus or the microphone, so no D-Pad or button usage is needed at all. You'll use the stylus to tap, rub, poke, draw, pull, rotate, and push your way to success. The microphone is used for a number of mini games causing you to blow. I only wished more mini games used the dual screens, as many of them simply display your instructions on the top screen. It's rather difficult to judge a game like WarioWare on it's graphics, since it clearly prides itself more on fast thinking than you taking a second to admire the views. The games display a huge range of visual styles, with some games featuring photorealistic pictures, others with doodles, other with cartoons, and a handful actually using the DS's 3D-capabilities. The game's character cut-scenes are very nicely animated though, and the spinning map on the dual screens is pretty neat. The sound is rather decent, but clearly not a primary factor. You can unlock the special Mona's Pizza Place song by using an original WarioWare cartridge, but otherwise it's mostly the music of whatever character you're playing. Some microgames actually have catchy music, but you will not have time to pay attention. Deep in the game is a DJ mini game where you can scratch to the sounds of Hogan's Ally or the Mario Paint song too. The story mode is short, and can easily be beat in a day, but the game does have dozens of toys to be unlocked by beating the high scores of the mini games and characters. Each individual game can also be replayed until it's score is broken, which adds some replay, and since the game is so quick, you can easily just pick-up-and-play whenever you have the time. The one problem I had is that I wish it had some multiplayer. Original WarioWare had the strangely addictive 2-play-on-one-GBA games, and the GC version featured some very fun twists on the usual microgame formula. If wireless were used, the replay value would easily be increased. So how does Touched! rank in the end? Well, it's easily most of the most inventive games I've played in a while, it's comical, it's fun to watch someone else play, and it will last you for a nice long time after you've beat it. Some multiplayer could have helped, along with maybe a set of classic-style games using the buttons. But overall, Touched! makes great use of the DS capabilities, and especially at this early stage in the DS's history, should be in every DS owner's collection. From thegreenplug.com 
