WarioWare: Twisted!

WarioWare: Twisted is a 2004/2005 Game Boy Advanced game developed by Nintendo SPD and Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo. This is the second game of the WarioWare series. The cartridge utilizes a gyro sensor and players must spin and twist in order to play the games. This is also the last WarioWare game on the GBA.

Plot
One day, Wario was playing on his Game Boy Advance playing a space game. After losing, he got frustrated with the game and throws the system at a wall causing it to bounce back and hit him on the head. After his temporary rage, he notices his GBA broke down. He then goes to Dr. Crygor's lab to see if he can fix it. As he got there, Dr. Crygor places the GBA in a new invention called the Gravitation which can spit out dozens of buttonless objects similar to the GBA appearance-wise. It demonstrates that the device must be physically moved in order to play. Mona and 9-Volt arrive and toy with these new units, enjoying themselves. Wario, taking note of their reaction, decides to take advantage of these motion-sensing abilities as a selling point, and recruits his friends to design microgames based on this concept.

Why You Should Give It A Whirl!

 * 1) Unlike other games of the series, the bulk of the gameplay uses the tilt sensor of the GBA which was pretty innovative for its time. This also gave WarioWare a new breath of fresh air.
 * 2) Wario's stage is very excellent for beginners. The time limit may be gone, but it's there to give players some time to get used to the controls since this is not like any WarioWare. Once Wario's stage is done, you can go on to the next stage and that's where the time limit comes back. You got to be prepared anyways if you want to learn to master the spin.
 * 3) Kat & Ana's stage is unique from the rest of the cast. The thing is that you only need to press the A button for the microgames Kat & Ana have in store. It's kind of a nice break from tilting your GBA don't you think. However, don't be fooled because those microgames can still be challenging in a good way.
 * 4) Dribble & Spitz's stage has one part of the scenario where the player has to pick a background sound from the radio and the selected sound will be played during the intermission stages. In fact, one of the sounds you can choose happens to be a baseball game of all things while the rest are just songs.
 * 5) The controls feel good and wonderful. No kidding, just tilt your GBA and see what you get.
 * 6) 223 microgames to play from!
 * 7) Just like what you would expect from a WarioWare title, each character comes with a different basic plot and theme regarding microgames. The themes are more in line with your spinning skills such as Mona's having mini spins, Jimmy having larger spins due to the nature of his games, Dribble and Spitz's stage being based on steering kinda like a car only different, Dr. Crygor's microgames being able to manipulate gravity, Orbulon giving more time for the microgames to last, and 9-Volt giving various Nintendo NES games a new twist.
 * 8) Introduced 2 new characters who would be mainstays of the series later on. They happen to be 18-Volt who makes his debut in 9-Volt's story not to mention that he was already having a major role. Another character would be 5-Volt who starts off as a minor character but later installments give her more time to shine.
 * 9) *Even though they're not mainstays, Jimmy's family gets introduced with Mama T. and Papa T. being the ones who host a medley of microgames. Heck, this is also the first time we get to see Wario's alter-ego called Wario-Man!
 * 10) WarioWatch and WarioWatch 2 are introduced here. It's kinda like the ones Jimmy's Folks do but it has a collection of six microgames of Wario and it comes with a timer so you got to be fast in this stage. WarioWatch 2 is unlocked if you were to replay vanilla WarioWatch via 50 points.
 * 11) Souvenirs are items that happen to be collectibles. They are divided into Records (various music tracks from the main game and microgames), Instruments (musical devices that can be used to play notes or songs), Figurines (dolls and action figures that can each be uniquely manipulated), Games (short minigames that are often based around other microgames), Doodads (utility gadgets that can be used as actual tools), Toys (amusing items that have limited interactivity in comparison to the Games), and Other (miscellaneous items that do not belong in any other category). The number of souvenirs you can get is 139 of them with the Japanese version having the Mushroom and the Mochitsuki Set souvenirs being exclusive to Japan only.
 * 12) The Mona Pizza Song and the Wario de Mambo songs are really crisp to listen to. Not to mention catchy. Also, regarding the Wario de Mambo song, it's really funny.
 * 13) During each character scene most of the time, you get a small segment where you interact with the story. For instance, Mona's part of her plot involves you adding toppings on the pizza while Jimmy's lets you shine the spotlight between Jimmy and his family. You can give Orbulon a massage while you can make 9-Volt spin a vinyl record.
 * 14) The graphics are just as colorful as the first game of the series complete with good use of color, effects, and sprites. Even the microgames have a lot of good charm in them. Heck, there's even a brief 3D transition between certain stages like look at the Phone animation and the Gravitation animation in Jimmy's and Crygor's stages.
 * 15) Before you go to the main menu, you get a small notice on how to tilt to GBA the right way and the wrong way. The right way depicts two hands with a GBA tilting the handheld gaming device while the wrong way depicts a stick figure spinning himself. Good for those who are new to spinning the GBA!
 * 16) Fronk gets to host his own set of microgames. Unlike the other characters, they can appear at any point on the stage. They must be completed faster compared to other microgames and are signaled to the player with a unique sound.
 * 17) One of the few GBA games to have a rumble feature.
 * 18) As expected from WarioWare, it has great comedy as well like Wario raging when he lost in a GBA game, the antics of both Wario and a mouse, Kat & Ana getting chased by bees in a comical fashion (don't worry they didn't get stung), 18-Volt playing loud music which disrupts the class (though he did get called out), Dr. Crygor dancing, and the Wario-Man scenes. And who could not forget some of the microgames!

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Though brief and simple, the small tutorial on how to spin the GBA can be quite aggravating to those who know what to do.
 * 2) Sometimes the microgames can be frustrating due to you having to spin the GBA. This is very notable in Dr. Crygor's minigames due to the games dealing with gravity manipulation.
 * 3) Though this may be a nice break from spinning, Kat & Ana's microgames can be a bit out of place for some because the game is about spinning your GBA while the microgames of the afformed characters don't use the spin mechanic which may feel a bit misleading since the titled is called WarioWare: Twisted
 * 4) Just like the first game, the voice quality isn't too bad but rather repetitive at times. Also, certain characters have robotic (like 9-Volt's) or monotonous (like Jimmy's) voices
 * 5) Some sound effects from Wario Land 4 were reused in this game.
 * 6) Plot hole: When Dr. Crygor created a new handheld system that had no buttons and only tilting, then how come some of the microgames Wario's employees made happen to use the A button for some microgames like Kat & Ana's games and Dribble & Spitz's games.
 * 7) The cover art is quite misleading. In the box art, Wario is seen holding to a GBA SP while the game depicted the characters using an original GBA instead. However, this is most likely because the game can still work on the GBA SP.

Reception
The game got favorable reviews. Metacritic gave the game an 88/100 which indicated positive reception. G4 gave the game 5 stars and Nintendo Life gave the game 9 stars. Even Nintendo World Report gave the game 9/10.

Trivia

 * There is an easter egg on the title screen where you get to change the name of the Twisted part of the title screen.
 * On top of the Mona Pizza building, the Japanese version removes a picture of a spoof of the Mona Lisa with Mona herself being in her place on the roof. The same can be said about the pizza boxes.
 * In the Japanese version, 9-Volt's stage centers around him and 18-Volt playing on a Family Computer (a Japan-exclusive console), while in the English version, a Nintendo Entertainment System is used. As the stage proper takes place inside the console, the colors are appropriately changed, and the four elf-like creatures that represent the player's lives are also changed to Wario lookalikes, although oddly R.O.B. retains its Japanese colors in all versions.
 * The Wario de Mambo song is slightly different from the English and Japanese versions which are noticed by the announcer from the beginning.
 * Practical Joker originally featured poop on the Joker card, which is a pun on baba being able to refer to either a joker or fecal matter, depending on how it is written. The English release changes it to a regular joker.
 * the counter in Ice Queen locks to 00 in the Japanese version of the player exceeds 100 spins; this is fixed in the English release.
 * Bubblegum Blues features a boy with a bubble of gum coming out of his mouth and gum splatter is left on the boy's face once the bubble is popped; originally, it was a snot bubble coming from the boy's nose and nothing is left behind after the bubble popped.
 * In the Japanese version, Slap Jack! was based around the story of Sun Wukong; Sun Wukong made a bet with the Buddha that he could escape from the Buddha's palm and promptly fails, leading to him being imprisoned for five hundred years. The microgame, in turn, features Sun Wukong riding on a cloud (one of his abilities) while the Buddha attempts to swat him away with his palm. The English version retools this to fit the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, with Jack in place of Sun Wukong and the giant in place of the Buddha.
 * Crazy Straw and Mooo-ve It! feature a character drinking in a city at night, which is changed to a rural area in the day. Some of the drinks are also changed in color.
 * The third difficulty of Key Ring features a wrestler in a sleeping bag surprised to see someone about to enter the window, which was originally the wrestler surprised to see someone inside the bag with him.
 * Handyman had an egg, a rat, and a rice ball originally. The rice ball is removed in the English version
 * Trash Day features rocks in the English version where there was once poop in the Japanese version.
 * Safecracker features a golden pile of poop during the third difficulty in the Japanese version while the English version features a pile of gold coins and a money bag. Similarly, Inch, Worm! changes the prize in the third difficulty from some dung to a bag of money. In WarioWare Gold, the poop was left unchanged in all versions.
 * Some of the move sequences in Wario Mambo for levels 2 and 3 in the Japanese version differ from the English version.
 * The Written Oracle was changed into a Fortune Cookie, with a color-coded stick exiting from the fortune being replaced with a color-coded paper, though the fortunes' colors and what they represent remained the same.
 * The Carrot Grater and the Big Carrot Grater were modified from corresponding turnips.
 * The statue of Ksitigarbha, known in Japanese as Jizō, was turned into a Garden Gnome for the English release.
 * In the Guinness World Records 2010 Gamer's Edition, WarioWare: Twisted! was listed as having the most minigames in a single video game, which was 223.
 * The game won the grand prize in the 8th Japan Media Arts Festival's entertainment division for its aesthetic appeal and its innovative controls.

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