Wario Ware: Twisted! review

Like the Chocolate Strawberry Creams in a box ofQuality Street, Nintendo leaves you with a bitter aftertaste, but you can't help but keep coming back.

If we had any resolve whatsoever, we'd stubbornly and righteously boycott Wario Ware: Twisted! for Nintendo lazily bringing it to these shores 15 months - 15 months! - after Japan.

But, of course, it's such a brilliantly barmy barnstormer of a game that we're already in love with The Big N all over again. Grrr!

The opening screen warns you to twist the GBA to play, rather than your whole body. Is this a joke? We hope not, because it sets the scene perfectly for another bewilderingly mad microgame mash-up. This instalment is Twisted - literally, of course.

A spinny gyro sensor inside the cart senses when you tilt GBA (or SP, or DS) left or right, so the minigames are mostly about spinning things or moving them around. And like all Wario Wares, it only takes a few minutes of three-seconds-at-a-time insanity to laugh like a chimp on a seesaw, by which point, you're hooked.

Banish all those painful memories of Yoshi's Universal Gravitation - the spinny magic in Wario Ware: Twisted! works brilliantly well. There's a sort-of rumbling clicky physical feedback that accompanies every twist, so you can actually feel each degree of turnitude.

That takes the randomness out of trying to find the exact angle to pot a golf ball into a hole, or swing Wario away from a crocodile's mouth. And even the slightest twitch is detected - the minigame where you keep eggs intact by holding totally still is tough work.