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WarioWare: Move It! takes the series back to Smooth Moves

Take a stance on me.

A cowboy character lassos a pink chick in an egg. The cowboy looks sinisterly happy. It's WarioWare. I have no idea what's going on.
Image credit: Nintendo
Christian Donlan avatar
Feature by Christian Donlan Contributing Editor
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Somehow, it's been 20 years since the first WarioWare game, which means it's been 20 years since we all started catching toast, jumping over shark cars, and catching funny little bugs beneath glasses.

The first WarioWare is such a strange, singular game it feels like it hasn't aged at all. But for the 10th game in the series, Move it!, Nintendo is taking things back to Smooth Moves, the Wii instalment from 2007. I had a chance to play a few of the microgames at an event recently.

Move It! is one of those Wario games that ditches the immediacy of the single button input in favour of motion controls. It all comes down to stances, which are Nintendo's way of framing different ways of holding the Joy-cons. Choo-Choo stance sees you holding each one out and miming turning the wheels of a train, while elsewhere there's a sword stance, a bent-knee stance and a bunch of others.

Picking through a range of the microgames at random, the stances kept changing. But the go-anywhere, do-anything stylings of the series shine through. It remains coherent, in a funny way, by embracing complete incoherence. One minute I was cleaning the back of a turtle, the next moment I was swinging a lasso as a cowboy.

A humanoid cat character in WarioWare squats over the top of a large fish beneath it. The instructions on the screen are to squeeze. Yep. You heard that right. I suppose the Khajit have to pick up work where they can!
Some sort of crouching creature is in front of us, showing us what appears to be its butthole, while on the screen the WarioWare instructions are to draw. But what? Hmm, bad choice of words. What on earth is going on.
Image credit: Nintendo
Imagine Thomas the Tank Engine, but the face on the train is Wario's, and it also has human arms jutting out from it. That's what this image from the new WarioWare game is all about. Sleep tight!
A WarioWare Move It! screenshot showing a scene from an old Mario game, where Mario is turned into a racoon and the instructions on the screen are to shake your tail. But I don't have a tail, Nintendo! Whatever am I to do!
A WarioWare Move It! screenshot showing three sumo wrestlers. Two have their legs lifted up like dogs about to pee on a lamp post. The third sumo must copy them.
Image credit: Nintendo

Sometimes, the simplest games were the best. One of them uses the Joy-Cons as clickers for keeping track of numbers, and you simply have to count how many fish you've seen and work out how many came in each colour and shape. It's barely a game, but I always found it a treat. Elsewhere, a game that used a kind of chicken stance saw me pecking worms out of the ground.

The most interesting microgames, though, used the funny little IR sensor that comes with the Joy-Cons itself. One of these saw you trying to hold up a required number of fingers for the sensor to spot - mixed results - while the best saw you moving the controllers back and forth to focus a microscope, hopefully revealing a cartoon bacteria. This is what I love about WarioWare games - everything gets an airing.

It was a quick tour of the game, all told, but I was left with a bunch of games I wanted to try again. It's worth saying, too, that Move It! requires a lot of physical movement, and as a person with MS, I was done-in relatively quickly. I'm very interested to see what kinds of accessibility options Nintendo is offering when the final game is released.

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