WarioWare: Snapped! Review

The WarioWare series has been a great alternative series for Nintendo. It's let the company offer something that's a little outside the norm, a little weird, and a little Japanese. It's also been great at using whatever technology the hardware it's running on has to offer. The DS WarioWare made great use of the touch screen. On the Wii it was one of the first terrific uses of the Wii's motion-sensing controller. Now, with the launch of DSiWare and the Nintendo DSi, the handheld has a camera. So WarioWare: Snapped! is right here alongside it to give you something to do with that camera.

That said, Snapped! isn't really a full game. At 500 points ($5), this is more of a quick tech demo than a full retail product with the full cast of WarioWare characters. It offers four sets of five games each, and the games are all a lot easier than what you normally get from the franchise. And like every other camera game out there, it requires you to calibrate before you can play. The game is played by setting the DSi down on a table and aiming the internal camera at your face. The setup seems very picky about lighting, so you'll have to find a reasonably bright place to play. Once it's detected your face and hands, you can move on to the actual games.

Before each game, the system quickly recalibrates and tells you what pose you'll need to use to play the next challenge. For some games, this just uses your head. For others, you'll use both your hands as well. The games are really basic, like tilting your head to dump a watering can over, or moving close to the camera to simulate a kiss. After five games, you're done... and it shows you the results.

The results are pretty good. The game secretly records you playing and then play back a sped-up roll of you playing the game and generally wiggling and freaking out. It's funny to see and fun to show off to friends. Unfortunately, the game doesn't store your performances, so once you quit, you'll have to play again to get new clips. With four different tracks of games (one of which is designed to be played with two people) and one game played during the credits, you'll see everything there is to see really quickly. Since the games themselves aren't really tough once you get everything properly calibrated, you probably won't come back to it very often for gameplay reasons.

WarioWare: Snapped! does make for a great tech demo, though. It's pretty crazy that you can do all this on a handheld, and it's goofy enough that you'll want to show it to your friends. If you're the type of person who likes these kinds of flagship, techy experiences, or if you're enough of a fiend for WarioWare material that you'll take it where you can get it, it's worth the 500 points.