WarioWare: Twisted!

WarioWare: Twisted! is the third game in the WarioWare series. It was released for the Game Boy Advance in Japan on October 14, 2004 and in North America on May 23, 2005. Unlike other WarioWare games, it uses a tilt sensor for the bulk of its gameplay, which allows for the console to be tilted in order to create input instead of pressing buttons (though buttons are occasionally used). The game revolves around Wario and his coworkers going on self-contained adventures throughout Diamond City, with the microgames being played as the characters attempt to solve whatever problem is occurring to them.

Story
While Wario is playing Avoid-A-Roid on his Game Boy Advance, he loses and, in frustration, tosses the system, heavily damaging it. He is immediately horrified when he sees the damage but decides to ask Dr. Crygor see if he can fix it. At his lab, Dr. Crygor tosses the Game Boy Advance into his new invention, the Gravitator, which creates new handheld systems with no buttons. He explains that the system is controlled through rotation, and Wario starts to play with it. Soon, Mona and 9-Volt enter the lab and start to play with the systems, quickly enjoying it. This gives Wario the idea to market the handheld system, dreaming of making a fortune from it. Each character hosts a set of microgames and comes with an individual story dedicated to them. At the end of each story, the respective character meets with the others at Club Sugar.

Gameplay
The core gameplay of Twisted!, like the other installments in the series, revolves around completing small, simple minigames called microgames that increase in speed and difficulty as they are completed. Most only last for about four seconds, with the exceptions being Fronk (whose microgames last around two seconds) and Orbulon (whose microgames last around eight seconds). They also only provide a short instruction, usually only a couple of words or a single word, at the very beginning. Unlike the other installments where the player's score increases by one regardless if the microgame is cleared or not, the score stays the same if the player fails to clear a microgame. The microgames are sorted by the various hosts of the story's stages, which each host having a recognizable distinction between their microgames. Stages are unlocked linearly; after beating one character's stage, which involves completing a certain number of microgames before facing a "boss" microgame, another stage is unlocked, and this continues until every stage is unlocked. The game uses a gyroscopic sensor built into the cartridge that allows the player to physically move the console to control the game. While the buttons are still frequently used, most of the emphasis is placed onto the tilt sensor.

It is one of four games to use such a sensor, alongside Yoshi Topsy-Turvy, Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, and ' It is also one of only two Game Boy Advance games to use a Rumble Feature, the other being '.

Microgames


With 223 microgames, Twisted has the second most microgames out of the entire WarioWare franchise, surpassed only by WarioWare Gold. Each microgame has three levels of difficulty, with their speed increasing after the third level is complete. The microgames are sorted via character, with only their own microgames appearing in each of their stages. The exceptions to this are Fronk, who has nine microgames that can appear at any point, and the various microgame sets, who use a collection of microgames from other characters rather than unique microgames.

Souvenirs


Souvenirs are items separate from the microgames that have varying levels of interactivity. The souvenirs are divided into seven categories: 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). There are 139 different souvenirs in the American release of Twisted, though the Japanese release has two exclusive souvenirs: Mushroom and Mochitsuki Set.

Main characters
All of the main characters (i.e. every character who has a unique set of microgames and a unique stage) have jobs at WarioWare, Inc. and the microgames seen by the player have all been programmed by them.

Locations
The vast majority of the game's story takes place in Diamond City. This excludes Orbulon's stage, set in outer space.

Objects
Most of the main characters are in possession of an item unique to them. The following list only includes objects that appear during the story and not in the microgames or souvenirs.

Regional differences
As with most localizations, there are many differences between WarioWare: Twisted!'s Japanese and English releases; most of them are minor graphical or text changes, such as the "points" symbol being removed next to high score or "Speed Up" being changed to "Faster", but many notable changes were made to the story, the microgames, and the souvenirs.

Stages

 * On top of Mona's Mona Pizza, a spoof of the with Mona in her place was placed on the roof, and the pizza boxes also reflect this change.
 * 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, an 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.

Microgames

 * 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 if 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 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, 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.
 * Handy Man originally featured an egg, a cicada, and a ; the rice ball is kept out of the English release.
 * 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.

Souvenirs

 * The Mushroom, a Figurine that can be collapsed and have its head removed if the console is twisted fast enough, was removed entirely from English releases.
 * 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, known in Japanese as Jizō, was turned into a Garden Gnome for the English release.
 * The Mochitsuki Set, which involves a boy and an elder making some, was eliminated completely from English versions.

Staff
Twisted was developed as a co-production between Intelligent Systems and Nintendo SPD Group No.1. As with most of the series' games, Yoshio Sakamoto acts as a producer alongside Ryoichi Kitanishi, who first joined the series in this entry and continued as a producer for the following two installments, and Goro Abe acts as the chief director, with Osamu Yamauchi and Teruyuki Hirosawa as other directors.

Development
Development on Twisted started after it was suggested that a second WarioWare game be made for the Game Boy Advance, even though the previous GBA installment, WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!, was still selling units. The project was soon underway, with the team amassing a collection of potential microgames, but they were not able to find something that would make it unique from the rest of the series. Around this time, the team was presented with the Nintendo DS, and they thought that the stylus would be perfect for a WarioWare game, developing it as a launch title even though there was already progress being put into Twisted. Development of this game, which would become WarioWare: Touched!, briefly overlapped with that of Twisted. As the series' core staff was already busy with Twisted, Touched was primarily developed by people new to the series. Following its completion, Twisted's staff was immediately moved to Touched to ensure the game was ready for the Nintendo DS's launch.

When the team was still looking for the game's key element, one of the staff, Kazuyoshi Osawa (who went on to conceptualize and become the chief director of the Rhythm Heaven series), presented an experimental motion sensor he was working on set up to work with microgame-like demos. The rest of the team loved the idea and soon sent it to Satoru Iwata for approval. Iwata spent a long time with a record player (which became the basis for the Record souvenirs), setting the console on a swivel chair, spinning it around, and enjoying as the game's music matched the chair's rotation. Sakamoto knew that he had a success on his hands when Iwata spun around in his chair and called the demo "idiotic". The game was finished in August 2004.

Critical reception
Twisted received generally positive reception from critics. It was praised heavily for using the tilt controls in a unique and fun fashion as well as its charming and quirky visuals, though many wished for increased multiplayer options. 1UP's Jeremy Parish, in his review of Yoshi Topsy-Turvy (which also uses a tilt sensor), commented that Twisted! felt like the tilt sensor was built for it, rather than the other way around. IGN editor-in-chief Craig Harris (who gave the game a 9.5 out of 10 in his review) listed it as number 1 on IGN's "Top 25 Game Boy Advance Games of All-Time".

The game won the grand prize in the 8th Japan Media Arts Festival's entertainment division for its aesthetic appeal and its innovative controls. Director Goro Abe was nominated alongside the game and came to pick up the award at the ceremony.

Sales
In Japan, WarioWare: Twisted sold around 108,000 copies on its opening week and had lifetime sales of 463,938 according to Famitsu sales data.

European release
The game was initially announced for a European release. Despite that, WarioWare: Twisted! has never been released in Europe.

In 2005, after the game was released in Australia and America, Nintendo originally scheduled the game for release in Europe on June 24, but was delayed to September due to localisation issues in Europe. It was later pushed back to 2006 on February 24, and then to December 8. Two years later, in 2008, with still no release in the region, the Game Boy Advance was discontinued, as the page for WarioWare: Twisted! on the Nintendo of Europe website had been removed as well. In the European version of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, when it is mentioned on the Chronicle, the game is marked as "Not Released".

While its unknown why the game hasn't been released in Europe, contrary to a popular rumor that it was believed that the Game Boy Advance's gyroscope contain. Although, it uses a gyroscope instead that does not contain mercury whatsoever.

Quotes

 * "Easy games for lazy bums like me!"
 * "Give it a spin, baby, and feel the burn, because this is more than a game. It's a workout! Aw, yeah..."
 * "My invention makes me the master of GRAVITY ITSELF!!! And now, I'm sharing this power with you. You'll need to learn how to control gravity if you want to win... YOU HEARD ME!"
 * "Does this suit make me look fat? Tell me the truth. I can take it."
 * "Since I am such a bighearted fellow, I've given you not one, BUT TWO--yes, count 'em, TWO--ways to pause your game. You can replay me later."

References to other games

 * Wario Land 3: The music box from this game makes a small cameo on Wario's desk.
 * Wario Land 4: A picture of the Golden Pyramid from this game appears on a wall beside Wario's desk. Wario's voice clips and some sound effects are recycled from this game.
 * WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!: All characters' voice clips except Wario were reused from this game.

References in later games

 * WarioWare: Touched!: A music video of the Mona Pizza song can be unlocked if the player has a WarioWare Twisted! cartridge inserted into the GBA cartridge slot.
 * Donkey Konga 3 JP: Mona Pizza is part of the track list.
 * WarioWare: Smooth Moves: Various microgames are revisited in the WarioWare: Twisted! microgame.
 * Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Mona Pizza is one of the available tracks for the WarioWare, Inc. stage.
 * WarioWare: D.I.Y. Showcase: A record titled "Mona ★ Pizza" is available in 18-Volt's set.
 * Rhythm Heaven Megamix: The space background in the ending cutscene of Wario-Man's stage when Wario-Man flies into space is used for the epilogue images in.
 * WarioWare Gold: Many of the game's microgames are remade, with the Twist League focusing on the game's control style.
 * WarioWare: Get It Together!: Like in Smooth Moves, various microgames are revisited in the WarioWare: Twisted! microgame. The girl from Home Haircut appears in Matchy Matryoshka.

Trivia

 * The box art of the game shows Wario holding a Game Boy Advance SP, but in the game, the characters use the original Game Boy Advance instead.
 * 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.