Warioware : Smooth Moves
Post nostalgia #6
Change of life, praise be the Wii
Type of Game
Chaos in its purest form, mayhem in its most ecstatic version, laughter in its most nervous variant.
Release date on our machines
January 2007, in the midst of the mega hype surrounding the revolution launched by the Wii.
Developer
Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd., otherwise known as Nintendo under another name, which does not take responsibility for releasing games as crazy as this one.
Publisher
Nintendo Co., Ltd., but they own up to it, because the game is just brilliant. Sure it is.
WarioWare: Smooth Moves: available on... well, on Wii and WiiU, that's all. What do you mean, you don't even know what it is?
I discovered this game through its predecessor, WarioWare Inc. on GameCube. When I arrived at my friend Nigel Dégringolade's place in Caen on a Saturday, I quickly realised that instead of going out to a huge house to party with fifty strangers, the three of us would be staying in a small flat. Just us lads, with nothing planned. At first, I thought I was going to regret taking the train. But when the guy turned on his console, the boring pyjama party turned into a crazy all-nighter. Nigel had two games: Mario Kart Double Dash and WarioWare. We played both for about the same amount of time and laughed our heads off hundreds of times. But while Mario Kart Double Dash blew my mind with its two-seater cars, WarioWare took me to a whole new WTF dimension I'd never explored before.
Hell of a night
Chaotic Funny
This series of mini-challenges, each one more ridiculous and frantic than the last, just drove me crazy. We started competing like crazy, gradually sinking into a grotesque and euphoric spiral. The alcohol helped, but not that much. When I left the next day at noon, I was certain I had had one of the most amazing evenings of my life. However, I left WarioWare aside for a few months, until I learned that its sequel, Smooth Moves, was available on Wii. The year it was released, everyone wanted to try out the Wii, except for a few reactionaries who were allergic to Nintendo. I was lucky enough to own one. Well, it belonged to the whole family, but the last console I really owned all by myself must have been the Game Gear. Wow. But anyway, I must have spent about three times more time with the Wiimote in my hand than everyone else in the flat put together, so today I can say it was my Wii. More or less.
In any case, for a few months, I acquired the status of the guy who had something intriguing enough in his house that people wanted to come and see it. A whole group of friends suddenly seemed very interested in getting their hands on this video game UFO. I gladly accepted, because I wanted to entertain them properly; especially because there was a girl in the group that I really liked. So, just like that evening in Caen, we had a blast. We ended up establishing a kind of weekend ritual, where we had to play a session of Smooth Moves before considering anything else for the rest of the evening. Unfortunately, it often ended with the girl leaving with her boyfriend, and even the absurd challenges of WarioWare couldn't alleviate the disappointment that came over me.
The concept remains almost identical to WarioWare on GamCube, namely that you play dozens of silly, poorly designed mini-games in quick succession. The lack of a consistent graphic style and the lack of continuity in the progression of challenges are all deliberate and intentional. You'd think it was the fevered delirium of ultra-high-flying independent developers, but no, it comes from one of the biggest video game studios in the world. Well done for taking the risk, mates. I don't know who came up with the concept and managed to get it accepted, but it took some nerve. ‘So yes, um, it would be a game where you have to stick your fingers in a huge nose modelled on the PlayStation 1, jump rope with a kid coloured in with felt-tip pens, wave an unidentified stick with a smelly sock attached to it to scare people away...’
‘But we approve, John-Kevin! We approve a thousand times over! Go and design your poo emoji stacking contest using a fairground fishing rod!’ There are dozens of these totally crazy things, each one worse than the last. But because it's done on purpose, it becomes really funny! And the big new feature in Smooth Moves, compared to the previous version, is the use of the Wiimote. In fact, you couldn't ask for anything more suitable than WarioWare, which requires you to grab the controller in increasingly awkward positions! It gets really athletic in the most difficult stages, with nearly twenty different holds and ridiculous names like ‘The Thumb Wrestler’ or ‘The Elephant’. And so what? Well, we laugh even harder, hahahahahaAAAH! But it's too late to crack up, because we've either lost consciousness or simply lost our minds.
Highly appropriate musicality
A quick word about the soundtrack? Very quick, because I don't remember it at all. Between the half-second trials and people screaming constantly, you can't hear much. Well, in the end, the songs contributed to the general mayhem like everything else, no surprise there. But there was a lot of work behind it, if only to write so many compositions in so many different styles. It took three people to achieve this: Naoko Mitome (who has a few Fire Emblem games to her credit), Masanobu Matsunaga (the old WarioWare games and the newer ones, Paper Mario, and Fire Emblem too), and Yasuhisa Baba (same CV, give or take a few details). Honestly, well done for managing to translate such intense chaos into musical notes. I just hope your salary didn't end up being swallowed up by therapy sessions afterwards.
Appreciable outcome
I stopped ruining my health playing this game for several reasons. Officially, the concept eventually wore thin with the people I invited over to my house. And I tried playing WarioWare on my own, but it wasn't nearly as much fun. It also became a thousand times too difficult, between the Super Saiyan reflexes you need to determine how to hold the Wiimote and the precision of the lightning-fast movements required... too complicated, way too complicated! Yet there is content, if you want to achieve 100% completion. But as with many other titles before it, the hair-pulling/dopamine production ratio meant I could no longer live peacefully.
When you can't tell what's running down your face (sweat or tears, or even blood in extreme cases), it's probably time to move on. I could also cite a more unofficial reason. I finally managed to go out with the young woman mentioned at the beginning of the article. So now there was no need to invite all these people to my place to have fun playing Smooth Moves. Our interests had changed a bit, you see. Right now, I'm trying hard not to let the less refined part of my mind engage in puns and innuendo that are, um... not very smooth at all. Let's just say that even though I never managed to finish the game, I won a much more important victory in life. It didn't last forever, mind you, because she dumped me after a few years. Maybe we should have played WarioWare a little longer.
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