What to make of Wario in 2018? From one perspective, he's been all but absent for a while, shuffled into Mario Kart and Mario Tennis, but with no new instalments of the WarioWare series since Game & Wario in 2013. Look at it a bit differently though - tilt your head and squint - and he's everywhere. WarioWare is everywhere! The idea of nutty quick-fire games that you prod, shake and swipe through has spread from being a niche thing - I remember hearing about the first WarioWare game back on the GBA and genuinely not knowing what to make of it - to being the kind of stuff that keeps App stores running smoothly.
So, what to make of WarioWare Gold? It's sort of a compilation, drawing its microgames from all previous entries in the series, which means you touch, swipe, mash buttons, tilt the 3DS and blow into its microphone to get things done. But it also throws in a bunch of entirely new microgames to slot in alongside the old stuff. And the art's been redone, I think, or at least it's never looked quite as sharp-edged and bright as this. And there's a new campaign! With a new art style yet again, and fully-voiced characters, which could, conceivably, be the only thing that's been missing from your life until now.
In truth, it's been long enough that Gold feels surprisingly fresh anyway. The new games fit so neatly in alongside the old ones that I would struggle to tell them apart. The ninja who slots himself between falling arrows - that's old, right? The lady dealing with snot, the robot punching away a giant bulb of garlic in low orbit. But the hunt through the 3D dungeon maze? That's new? The one about threading your thin dancers in around fat dancers? That's new? The retro-game collections that now draw from Mario Sunshine, from Animal Crossing? Those feel new? Beyond the obvious additions, there is no saying, really, where compilation ends and fresh imagination takes over, and that's as it should be. WarioWare is so breathless in its five-second challenges, so eager to wing them at you before you have time to duck, that I've never really felt I had the measure of any one game in its totality. I never felt that I saw everything that WarioWare had to offer.
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