WarioWare Inc.

With the WarioWare idea now thoroughly hammered into the ground, it’s hard to remember just what a maverick and special thing it was on its original GBA release. Officially called WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgames!, this was a compilation of 213 games, each lasting a handful of seconds.

What’s so joyful about this is how batshit crazy it is. It’s Nintendo let off their leash, designers able to sketch a Post-it note of an idea, and then realize it as a three-second game. Then within this, it’s so surprisingly surreal, an onscreen instruction simply stating “DODGE” and then realizing you’ve got to have Wario jump the oncoming potato on wheels.

This has been upscaled to the Switch’s large screen really nicely, keeping the original crisp and precise lines of the GBA original, with no blurry edges or smeared details. Sadly, what it hasn’t included is a way to skip past the incongruously slow cutscenes that move at a glacial pace between the flurries of three-second games. However, it remains a treat to return to this lunatic nonsense a couple of decades later.