Zero said:

Oh it saves it separately? Awesome! WE'RE BACK, BABY! Probably mostly just play it that way except for specific challenges and such.

Exactly! As long as that mode is intact we're good.

@PogueSquadron

Oh man, I remember we all went deep into that game when it came out. I think I was in the top 1200, I want to say Simba, Guillaume, and Anand were all in the top 500 or so?

It would be cool if WarioWare had friend leaderboards for the regular levels.

@PogueSquadron Well, at least as it stands, and Nintendo rarely seems to update this kind of thing, the only score you can track against friends right now is for the weekly challenge. Which is just a single challenge. And I imagine that score will be erased when the next weekly challenge comes along. And the weekly challenge has the weird pay (in-game currency) to win / gatcha stuff, so the scores aren't really pure so to speak. Still should be fun though.

S_T seemed to like this week's weekly challenge but I've never been a fan of the SUPER FAST modes. WarioWare is already pretty twitch, it's tough for me to get into the MORE twitch modes. Hopefully next week's challenge will be more up my alley.

Secret_Tunnel said:

It would be cool if WarioWare had friend leaderboards for the regular levels.

I'm glad to see that All has its own scores at least, that's probably how I'll play it most. Though in a weird way, because there is the more pure All for scores, I don't mind the smaller groups existing either. It's like, I can play All for the purist score experience, and then use my experiences there to decide which smaller group to use to go for the best small group scores. Kind of works out nicely that way?

Seeing how I fare against friends and the world would be nice, but I've actually gotten pretty hardcore in past WarioWare games just playing against my own scores. We'll see if that happens again.

But man, it really wouldn't take much to have full leaderboards! It feels like they probably don't want to have to "permanently" manage data, but let's be real... a handful of text records that get updated occasionally for let's say, at most, a few million users? That's a relatively small amount of data / transmission, hell, the small loan companies I worked for had way larger database that were updated more frequently. It'd be so easy to do / maintain at a cost that would be negligible to a beast like Nintendo!

We should write a bot that scans Twitter for a #WarioWareScore hashtag, then checks the tweet for a Switch screenshot, then looks in the screenshot for the person's score, and then updates a website with that score.

I should get on finishing Story Mode so I can join the arcade-style discussions but my kid doesn't want me playing WarioWare without him watching now.

So I'll just ask, who are your favorite and least-favorite characters? And are they also the easiest/hardest characters to win with, or do you prefer them for other reasons?

My favorite characters are the weird ones! 5-Volt totally breaks certain microgames, Penny is a blast to fly around and shoot with and has a nice skill curve, and the surprise final character is just goofy. 9-Volt and 18-Volt make you really rethink how you play some of the games.

Pretty much all the flying characters (Wario, Urbulon, etc.) end up being pretty similar, and they're the easiest to win with. I think the only character I dislike is Lulu. Something about her flappy bird style jump combined with an analog stick ground pound feels imprecise to me. Jimmy T is similar.

I'm actually having some trouble with 5_Volt for mini-games that you need to bump into things with force from below. It often won't let me warp onto the same space as them, but if I warp immediately below it does nothing?! I guess I could go find one of those mini-games in the place where you can play whatever mini-game you want and test some stuff out, but how is this supposed to work?!

@Secret_Tunnel It's actually kind of funny to me that you can just straight up break certain mini-games with certain characters. Like the one where you have to line up water to put out fire, with Penny you can just fly over and use your own water jets. And some it feels like the ONLY way to beat it is to kind of break it. Like the one where you have to pick the right tube to go through to get to the key, with 5-Volt you can, or rather I think have to? just skip the pipes and warp right to the key.

I just unlocked 5-Volt. I have to say, after this and Game & Wario, I think she's become my favorite WarioWare character by far. This mild-mannered housewife with a skulking, creepy shadow self is just plain nuts and I love it. Although I have had some similar issues with her in minigames as Zero has.

I noticed on the eShop page that this game has the generic "online play" as its NSO feature, but I've a feeling it means something else. I figured I'd ask anyway, what are the online features of this? Does it have actual online multiplayer?

@Mop it up Nope. It's referring to the weekly challenges / leaderboards for said challenges. WarioWare would probably be tough to do well online because of how twitch / precise it is. Not that that's the reason it isn't online.

@Zero
@TriforceBun

There's one game where you have to escape from a plastic garbage bag. The first time I played it was with 5-Volt, and she made it so trivial that I couldn't figure it out the second time!

But I also just got served up the Sports boss stage (where you climb up the cliff) with 5-Volt, and that felt wrong.

I think that is the tough part about this game is that even when you figure a mini-game out with one character, that doesn't mean you have it figured out for all of them. In that sense it probably won't be as pick up and play as the past games. I'm already kind of wondering like, if I get my non-gamer wife to play some 2 player with me, how constantly confused will she be? Will this be another Smash Bros experience where she is like I NEVER HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON?! Same with the 4 player party mode, will it only work with people who know the game well?
I think of past WarioWare games as fairly n00b friendly with the simple controls and such, but this one is about as complex as it has ever been.

I played a lot yestery and today though, and I'm really liking it! At times it definitely feels more like, inconsistent? than the best past WarioWare games. Not even saying it's not polished, just that it feels kind of questionable at times regarding how all of the characters work, and it's not always completely intuitive? Just as an example, there is the one Mario one where you have to hit the coin block, which seems to suggest that any momentum moving up from below the block should work, but I used Penny and her water jet pack and flew up into it from below and it did nothing? But then, shooting it with water seemed like it did work?

A lot of the mini-games are kind of physics-based, but it feels a bit inconsistent as to whether moving into things with momentum will work for every character, or using their projectiles, etc. Something that I will probably get a feel for over time, but at the moment it feels like there is no clear consistency as to what movement and projectiles will actually do to stuff in certain mini-games.

But the flipside of all of this is it feels like there is always new stuff to discover. Even just hitting a boss with some wacky character that is totally not an ideal one to use for it feels interesting, like a puzzle to attempt to solve...

Zero said:

In that sense it probably won't be as pick up and play as the past games. I'm already kind of wondering like, if I get my non-gamer wife to play some 2 player with me, how constantly confused will she be? Will this be another Smash Bros experience where she is like I NEVER HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON?!

This was my experience with my RPGs-and-Ace-Attorney-only-gamer wife! I think she could handle character switching OR 4-second microgames...but both??

Zero said:

Just as an example, there is the one Mario one where you have to hit the coin block, which seems to suggest that any momentum moving up from below the block should work, but I used Penny and her water jet pack and flew up into it from below and it did nothing? But then, shooting it with water seemed like it did work?

That's an interesting case, it seems like there are certain times in Nintendo games where ? blocks just require you to be gently touching them from underneath. I think Smash is like this, if you're ROB you can hover up against one block and then slide horizontally across the rest, and all of the ? blocks will get tripped by that. But then there are other games where the ? blocks only react when you STRIKE them.

Hey, someone named Peter passed my score for the first Wario Cup at the last second! Octorockin, is that you? And I fell from the Top 3% to the Top 5% too! Apparently all the WarioWare masters play on Monday night.

This second challenge is more like it, though. Pick five characters and get as far as you can. Traditional WarioWare! And the lower point multipliers for any given round, combined with potentially infinite rounds, means that leveling up your characters has less of an impact on your final standings than it did in last week's. I think. Whatever small advantage a higher base score gives you can be overcome by somebody winning a handful more microgames than you.

Ok so the base scores are interesting. How the F are Penny and Pyoro essentially average?! I find both of them really tough to use. It's confusing though because these scores also include their leveling up but I forget who all I leveled...

This post is interesting. The dude wrote it four days ago before this current challenge went live, and it looks like his math lines up pretty closely with the official base scores.

Hmm. We have our own metrics though. I have proof that I suck with Penny! Though of course there are a lot of factors here. Like Penny's unique mix might have just been more difficult on average and a lot of her playtime for me came from those stages. (Also, it's kind of weird that she was introduced solo. Her stages are just a mix of other stages, right? But is it all of them or just a selection? Not clear to me!)

...but I still do terrible with her in general too!

Stats. #WarioWareGetItTogether #WarioWare #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/MHtIDRhsIe

— My Game Videos (@MyGameVideos) September 16, 2021

@Zero
Felt like Penny got the star treatment in this game, with one of the game's only FMV (?) cutscenes devoted to her, and her having her own solo stage and theme song.

I guess the devs liked her. And it worked! I never thought much of the character before WW:GiT but I quite liked her segment in this.

I love the treatment Penny got! I didn't play much of the later games and had no clue who she was, but she's so mechanically interesting in this game that a whole level dedicated to her makes sense. The Mona Pizza/Ashley's Song style vocal track is such a fun celebration that reminded me of the older games in the series, what a fun moment.

I'm really excited to dig in more to this but we're moving this week. My only experience so far is that sometimes, the co-op nature DOES seem to help us get through some games...while other times, it seems to be a hinderance, but I guess that's part of the fun! Personally, so far, I think the character based nature of the game does make the game more varied, whereas I think it's a little easy for other Wario Ware games to feel a little repetitive.

Are there any versus modes in this game? We have so many fond memories of doing the space minigame from Mega Microgames, as well as Wobbly Bobbly and a couple others.