As Nintendo has passed from the Gamecube, through the DS, and to the Wii, they’ve gotten better at bridging the gap between developers and Nintendo’s constantly fluctuating vision of interactivity. Nobody ever really figured out how to make good use of the Gamecube-GBA connectivity, and it took a year and Canvas Curse before anybody really did anything with the DS’s touch controls. It took still less lead time before Wii waggle started catching on. The incredible shrinking lead time derives partly from increasing developer interest as Nintendo’s market presence grows, but it’s also because Nintendo has learned something that authors figured out centuries ago: show don’t tell. If there’s a series that’s as much tech demo as it is video game, it has to be Warioware, and guess what? Warioware: Snapped accompanies the newly camera-enriched DSi as a downloadable game. Read on for our impressions.

Play peekaboo with
a soulless piece of plastic!

Here’s how it works. You prop the DSi a few feet away, open the clamshell so the camera is pointing at you, and then pose so the DSi can get a read on what your face and hands look like. You have to line yourself up so that your face and hands fit into an onscreen silhouette, and although you might need to scoot closer or farther away to get a good shot, it isn’t tricky.

That finished, the GDC Snapped build let us pick from three single-player levels and one multiplayer level. As with all Warioware titles, you get some minimal instruction and then you’re dumped into a high pressure microgame where you have to figure out what’s going on in the four or five seconds before the game ends. In older Warioware games this made for an intensely dynamic gameplay experience, but you have to strike a pose before each minigame so the camera can see what you’re doing for each game. So Snapped ends up feeling a bit slower than Smooth Moves.

Well, that’s when it works, anyway. The camera isn’t always quick to identify when you’ve found the right pose, needs a fairly bland background to work, and can keep trying for up to a minute. A minute isn’t terribly long, but pit that against the five seconds of gameplay you’ll get for your trouble and it starts looking pretty onerous. The problem is exacerbated by multiplayer, where you have to cram two people into the shot, effectively doubling the odds that you’ll run into trouble. For one microgame, we never managed to strike the correct pose, and the game dumped us back to the main menu.

Snark aside, grabbing virtual
objects is pretty cool.

When it works though, the benefit of posing is that the camera casts your silhouette into the game so you can see what you’re doing as you play. By literally placing you in the scene of a microgame, Warioware: Snapped takes an unprecedented level of control over your behavior, and doesn’t squander the opportunity to make a fool of you. That’s right: in a series of games increasingly about personal humiliation, Snapped resets the bar. Said one GDC gamer, “This game will be harder to play in public than Nintendogs.”

Once you’ve finally struck your pose, you’ll be playing peekaboo with thin air, gesturing frantically at people onlookers can’t see, and snuggling up affectionately with your second player. It’s a game of pantomime you play to win pitying looks from strangers. Each level clocked in at four microgames, though the pacing made the process take 2-5 minutes overall, including a surprise slideshow at the end that really captures your grace and dignity in the moment. One of the games even appropriates your photos for a comic strip that takes your facial expressions out of context and uses them to tell a little story.

There’s not an overabundance of content to be had from Warioware: Snapped, though it offers a peek at the kinds of gameplay the DSi has to offer. We wish the face recognition could have been polished up before it hit prime time, though if you like the “public embarrassment” direction the series has taken, there’ll be something in Snapped for you.

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