The Shaky Disappointment

"Give me a reason to love you" as Portishead once sang.* I'm starting my post with a song lyric in the hope that you'll be too busy laughing at my pretentiousness to notice the colossal volte-face I'm about to do on Wario Land. It's almost as bad as when I upgraded my opinion of Halo 3 from "disappointing" to "incredible" in the course of a single play session.

Once the entertainment value of the excellent animation and Wario charm has melted away, the game stinks of "will this do?". There's no sense of each level having a concept, or of the development team thinking "why is this fun?" at any stage. Put some platforms together, add waggle, add achievements (which I still find really weird in a Nintendo game), five worlds, job done. Out the door. And I thought Mario Galaxy was slightly underwhelming. Christ. Come back, all is forgiven.

Only the bosses display any real invention, and even they're a bit annoying. Oh, and there's the odd nice use of waggle, although I found my wrist really hurt after a quick session. So I went and played Wario Land to relax lol etc. Crap I've done that one before. Even the animation and Warioness isn't as good as in Smash Bros.

Despite all this I might have kept on playing if it wasn't for the game making me go back and collect more coins before letting me in to the third world. What the hell kind of game design is that? Is this a Nintendo game or what? Seriously, if a game is going to make me do that, it had better have some actual interesting levels to ease the pain. All you get to break up the monotony is some absolutely horrible submarine sections. Screw you guys, I'm going home. I can't even be bothered to find a quote from the manual to fill in that gap in the last post.

4/10.

*This article is part of a series inspired by Portishead lyrics. Next week, "Tempted in our minds / tormented inside life / wounded, I'm afraid / inside my head, falling through changes" in relation to Picross DS.

Wario Land Shake Dimension: The Definitive Review

Boxart
Wario looks happy, but so would you if you were on a big island full of treasure. 8/10

Manual
Narrated by Wario himself. Includes such gems as "I can't be bothered to go and get the manual, so wait until I edit something in here later". 9/10

Disc Art
Wario shakes a thing. Very yellow. 8/10

Stickers
It has stickers. 10/10

Waggle
Waggle the remote to do ground pounds and shake things and aim things. My wrist hurts from shaking things too much (so I played the game for a bit to relax lols). Wario has two separate ground pound moves. Amazing. 8/10

Graphics
It looks great and the animation is lovely, like a really good cartoon. It's not quite as funny to watch as Wario in Smash Bros though. 8/10

Gameplay
It's quite good but a bit MOR/easy listening, if it was music (which it isn't). Maybe it will get better later. I've only played the first world. 7/10

Music
It's quite good but a bit MOR/easy listening, no that's the other one. I can't remember much about the music so it's probably not that great. 6/10

Wario
Wario. 10/10

Because otherwise the overall score would be 8.2 recurring out of ten
and that is a completely silly score that makes a mockery of the entire scoring out of ten process.
6/10

Overall: 8/10