WarioWare: Snapped! (Nintendo DS) Review

Rather than taking the retail release route with this latest WarioWare outing, Nintendo has chosen to bring Snapped! out as a download for the DSiWare service that opened up alongside the launch of the Nintendo DSi in Europe in the hope of showing new owners the extra potential of the system's internal camera. The game is based around the idea of Wario opening up his own theme park with four different rollercoaster rides within. This does not actually mean each of the micro-games are based on rollercoasters, though, as players will be asked to use their camera-monitored movements to carry out such tasks as blowing someone away (breathing into the microphone whilst moving closer towards the camera), cooling people down (flapping your hands back and forth), kissing various creatures (move your head around and pout when near the on-screen faces), swatting flies and catching coins (moving your hands and making a grabbing motion with each hand), as well pouring water into onto someone's hair and into a plant pot (tilting your head from side-to-side), along with several other embarrassing activities.

There are plenty of others on offer, and most of the fun is stumbling across the crazier ones. Thankfully Snapped's mini-games are just as addictive as previous outings, despite the general brevity of the title, meaning players will come back from time-to-time just for another throw of the die. Upon completing all five micro tasks on each of the four stages there is an amusing little slideshow highlighting your best moments in the form of video playback of your wacky movements, comic-book styled frames of your poses, complete with varying bits of text in speech bubbles for comedic effect, snapshots of you with extra features added (hats, glasses, fake teeth…and so on). Also, once back on the main menu screen, playing behind the game's logo on the top screen there is a continuously looping montage of ALL your recorded movements so far in that particular session, all of which are played to the tune of the game's old fashioned comical soundtrack, helping to make the sped-up video sequence all the more amusing.

Despite the impressive levels of user-created content and resulting humour from the game's special enhancements, there are some negative points that drag Snapped down considerably, and may well put some players off the game completely. The major flaw has to be that players have to be in exactly the right conditions to play it due to the nature of how the camera recognition works. WarioWare: Snapped! is by no means a title that will be messed around with on the bus or train, since the DSi needs to be rested on a stable surface with the top screen slightly tilted, the lighting conditions need to be tweaked accordingly and you also need to ensure that whatever is directly behind clearly contrasts with your skin tone. Sadly the wallpaper in my living room is apparently too similar to my skin colour, thus I needed to go elsewhere to get the camera to recognise anything. This goes a long way to totally negate the whole portable factor of the DSi as unless you find the right setting playing the game is practically an impossible feat. Furthermore, this leads to another issue where players are required to reposition themselves before the commencement of another mini-game. Whilst the DSi camera may have been able to pick up your features perfectly a few seconds prior, on many occasions it will simply refuse to acknowledge your presence at all after that. Frustratingly this can then lead to a complete timeout whereby the game presumes you have gone away from the action completely and thus forces you back to the main menu, losing any progress made so far on that stage. After this happening even a few times it can lead to the game being turned off, complete with a few expletives thrown in for good measure...

The other disappointment stems from the lack of extras included in the package. Whilst the game only costs 500 Nintendo Points, it barely offers any real reason to come back and experience it all over again. The two-player mode is extremely limited, there are no high scores to beat, no extra challenges to unlock and players cannot even save their hilarious video sequences to either the internal DSi memory, or even an external SD card to then share with friends. Everything feels like a tech-demo, which is perfectly fine if you used some of your free 1,000 Points, yet if you fork over cold, hard cash instead, you could feel a little hard done by. What Nintendo was trying to achieve was to show that the DSi's camera can be used for far more than simple photographs and if gamers jump into WarioWare: Snapped! realising that, instead of expecting a full-blown game, then great bite-sized fun shall be had...