The first day with a new WarioWare is always a humbling one. Nothing makes any sense, you can barely string together 10 wins in a row. It takes dedication to achieve that WarioWare harmony where you can recognize a mini-game in those initial escalating seconds and respond with the correct button-pressing to Eat! or Deliver! or Avoid! or whatever.
Twisted is the fourth WarioWare game and the second one this calendar year. I can still vividly recall the world before WarioWare, so being up to a quartet of games (for three different systems) seems absurd. Just as Touched was a demo suite for the DS, Twisted has a gimmick of its own: a gyroscope. Most of the games are played with no button input whatsoever, just a quick tilting of the entire GBA. For example, there's a hacky-sack game where you have to tilt the GBA to the right to get the right leg to connect and kick the ball back up... ditto for the left leg. So to properly bounce the ball between legs, you're actively leaning the GBA in either direction.
As cool as it is - and there are lots of extremely creative uses of the tilting scheme, particularly when the game starts re-interpreting classic NES games into twist-fests - I'm surprised that most reviewers consider Touched the lesser game. Touched got a bad rap for feeling repetitious... that all the stylus input seemed the same. And yet Twisted operates on simply tilting... and most of the games are won just by a couple controlled jerks left or right. I don't see how one can slam Touched for samey-gameplay yet laud Twisted when it has a similar problem. I chalk that up to the general anti-DS feeling commonly seen in game review mags these days. If a DS game doesn't use every single DS-specific feature (Wi-Fi, same cart multiplayer, touch screen, microphone, sleep mode, blah blah blah) it gets kicked in the ass.
And although Twisted has the most hidden unlockables - like, over 100 or them - I still stand behind Touched as having the better input controls. I dig that stylus. Twisted's biggest failing is that some games require so much tilting that you can no longer see what you're doing.
I see the three core WarioWare games (original, Touched, Twisted) as all being more or less equivalently awesome, just with different areas of concentration. Original sticks with d-pad and A/B buttons, Touched is mostly stylus control and some mic input, Twisted is gyroscope and some minor use of the A button. All three have standout moments in design and quirkiness.
Sure makes you wonder what they'll do for the next one.
