Strip the flashy graphics, DTS surround sound and heavy production costs from most of today’s best-selling video games. Strip them right down to their bare-bones essentials and what are you left with? A truly interesting game will manage to maintain its element of “fun” without these things. Nintendo understand this and this is why, pound for pound, they’re producing the most fun of the next-generation giants.
Wario Ware Inc. is a perfect demonstration of this understanding. There are no flashy graphics. The few glimpses of 3D come in the form of static menu screens or non-interactive FMV. What they have produced is stripped-down, bare-bones fun in the form of 200 mini-games. Since most of the first video games were also stripped-down, bare-bones fun, Nintendo have decided to emulate this for their graphical style. Many of the mini-games achieve a visual aesthetic similar to classic Atari games. With a knowing grin, Nintendo acknowledge this, having you play all of these games through an on-screen GameBoy Advance.
In keeping with the faux-GBA interface, this is perfect opportunity gaming. Waiting for a kettle to boil? No problem. Turn on your GameCube and bash about for a couple of minutes - if you can put it down, that is. As well as being opportunity gaming, it’s also a perfect example of just-one-more-go gaming. You fly through the mini-games at such a furious rate that it’s hard to put down. And as your gaming pride kicks in at being beaten by something so simple as glorified “wack-a-mole”, it becomes even more difficult to say no at the “play again” screen.
At this point, I usually step out for a cup of coffee or something to keep me twitching like a ten-year old who ate too much sugar (the essential state of being for many of the mini-games) and come back in to find them playing my game.