WarioWare: Do It Yourself

So how do the wheels go round? DIY breaks game design down into a handful of different disciplines: art, music, AI behaviours, and winning/losing conditions. (You'll have to wait for the expansion pack if you want to mess around with hype, PR disasters, and Alan Titchmarsh.)

The art and music are both handled with nifty little evolutions of the Mario Paint software: a drawing tool that proves more than capable of handling four-frame animations and an entirely fuss-free audio sequencer that allows you to layer down separate tracks, add percussion, and change instruments.

Meanwhile, AI, a potential sticking point, may not be as much fun to screw around with, but it's been refined until it's as simple as it ever could be. Using a very straightforward sentence-based programming interface, you choose a game object, select what you want it to do under certain conditions, assign sound effects or a win status and you're on your way. A lot of work has presumably been spent making this seem effortless, and it's paid off: your options are clear at every juncture, and it's painless to go back and change the details when you mess things up.

Such pared-down tools allow your games to evolve as you build them, while having a handful of different approaches available at any time means you can quickly grow more ambitious with your designs. And although all the microgames are limited to control by stylus taps alone – the d-pad, face buttons, and microphone are all off limits, perhaps explaining why the bundled selection isn't exactly stellar – you'll be surprised by how much you can do with a single means of input.

Wario standards like The One About the Eye-Droppers, The One With The Nose-Picking and The One About Sawing Stuff are all possible with a little creative thinking and, as such, DIY offers a real insight into the peculiarly thrifty magic of real design. Even if you do feel a little hemmed-in, the moment you finish your first title - putting it into a cartridge and choosing the label - you may find yourself experiencing a kind of quiet pride. For me, it was the high water mark of my career, but, granted, I once managed to misplace a Twix while I was actually eating it, so perhaps that's not saying very much.

Sadly, sharing your work is a compromised faff, with Nintendo's noble crusade against ludically-inclined predators meaning that you'll need to rely on Friend Codes - and, consequently, friends - for most of your showing-off. Inside Michael Bublé, Blind Sergeant: Takedown of the Mind, and Things I've Found in Tins are all games you aren't going to be enjoying any time soon, in other words: not because I wouldn't dearly love to demo them for you, but because I can't put them anywhere that you could get to them. (Because of this, I should probably just add: 4/10, 5/10, and 2/10 respectively, but they're all much better in co-op.)

In the place of what DIY really deserves - a LittleBigPlanet-style content hub - you can at least download free offerings from design luminaries such as Yoshio Sakamoto and Masahiro Sakurai however. And, if you really want the masses to see your game, you can enter it in one of the regular themed competitions, in the hope that it will end up squirted down the Wi-Fi pipe for everyone to enjoy.