WarioWare: Smooth Moves

Smooth Moves is a worthwhile entry in the WarioWare series, and like its predecessors is a game about using quick reflexes and information processing skills to play tiny microgames in quick succession, identifying what must be done to win and then executing within 5-10 seconds. The formula is rock-solid and pretty airtight, and the creativity on display here is pretty amazing, but the extensive use of unreliable motion controls puts a slight damper on the experience overall.

Being a very early title for the Wii, a big emphasis was put on the utilization of the Wiimote to create gameplay that was not possible on other systems. The result of that is around a dozen different "stances" for the controller that the player must learn for different sets of microgames. For example, you might hold the Wiimote like a pencil to draw something, or like a broomhandle to sweep something. The stance required for the next microgame is flashed on the screen right before it starts, which may seem to blunt the series' unpredictability, but many of the stances that seem obvious or limited are switched up in very clever ways. In conjunction with the vast ocean of possibilities for a motion control scheme, you'll be pushed into pretty chaotic territory even knowing which stance to use, which is great.

The crucial issue with the game is unfortunately something that pervaded most all of the earliest Wii titles: inconsistency with certain setups and motions that can lead to a feeling of struggling through certain microgames. A handful of the games just never controlled well for me or my friends and were considered to be "automatic losses," which really sucks. Additionally, the cutesy and concise instructions for the game tend to fail the player more often in Smooth Moves, as the actual motion meant to be done is not obvious, even given the stance. An example that comes to mind is a game in the "Remote" stance, just neutrally pointing the Wiimote at the sensor bar, where you control a hole in the ground and need to ensnare some people running around a room. The actual motion to move the hole is not clear by the instruction to "Trap!" - am I meant to point it like a flashlight, or move the remote toward and away from the screen to simulate physically being in the room, or tilt the remote right and left to "steer" it? Worse still is the fact that these motions are easily conflated with one another, so you may not understand how a game truly works even after completing it correctly. This sort of obscurity is not present in the much tighter handheld entries and it dulls the experience whenever it occurs.

While these problems in conjunction severely cap the experience overall in terms of a consistent gameplay experience, I do want to express again how interesting of a game this is design-wise, with functions of the Wii remote never seen since. The psychology of the microgames was grounded in quasi-reality, giving the player an easy way to understand the new controller by relating their movements to things that they already do and have done. Naming the stances after real-life use cases for those bodily motions was also a stroke of genius that immediately contextualizes the stance and its possibilities. In addition to some genuinely funny writing and some laugh-out-loud ridiculous games, the overall experience is hard to fault in its ambition. For that, I still consider it to be worth playing and experiencing for yourself.