If there are differences between the games, it’s often just a matter of artistic style, from the painterly to the pixelated, like Instagram filters offering slightly different takes of the same photo-and just ask any indie developer how far aesthetic design gets a game. “Love Struck,” for example, requires you to use the touchscreen to trace a path from a bow to a heart, whereas “Hookin’ Up” asks you to…trace a path from a man to a woman. In the end, the glut of content only works to showcase how identical so many of the microgames are to one another. Quantity has never been an acceptable substitute for quality, so the fact that there are over 300 microgames here is only impressive at first glance. Instead, even the best of the lot, a series of Nintendo-themed microgames, can only appeal to one’s nostalgia, conjuring up five-second bursts of classics like Donkey Kong Country and Yoshi’s Island or evoking the displays of the Virtual Boy and the original Game Boy. An inventive use of the 3DS’s stereoscopic display might have helped to elevate or unify these random and derivative games.

It borrows everything from Twisted!’s use of the Game Boy Advance’s gyroscopic sensor and Touched!’s use of the DS’s touchscreen and microphone. Though WarioWare Gold, the eighth entry in the WarioWare series, brings new microgames to the table, it lacks any new mechanics. This is WarioWare at its absolute best, a collection of the best features and some of the microgames of previous entries, but the experience of playing the game is still hit and miss. That ironically damns the sharp design of WarioWare Gold, which, in so cleanly separating microgames by control (Twist, Mash, Touch, and later an Ultra mode that combines all three) and theme (Fantasy, Sports, etc.), exposes the almost existential emptiness of the franchise.

The WarioWare series has always relied on obfuscation and absurdity to justify the intentionally shallow gameplay of its microgames.

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