Overview
WarioWare: Touched! is a microgame collection that utilizes the Nintendo DS touch screen and microphone. The main campaign is made up of eleven stages that are themed around WarioWare’s cast of characters and styles of gameplay. The goal of the game is to complete all stages. This TAS aims to achieve this goal as fast as possible, as well as being entertaining to watch.
Skipping Cutscenes
There are four types of cutscenes present in this game:
- Intro when entering a stage
- Outro after completing a stage
- When a new souvenir is unlocked
- When new character stages are unlocked
As soon as any of these cutscenes start playing, the game will save your progress. This means that if you reset the game the instant it saves, the game will assume that you’ve watched the cutscene already and you’re able to skip it altogether. The time it takes from the title screen to where you left off is admittedly long, but it’s shorter than every cutscene in the game. The one exception is when you unlock Wario-Man’s stage, where simply watching the cutscene happens to be shorter than going out of your way to skip it.
Framerules
Throughout the game, there will be microgames that are twice as long as the average microgame. Most of them include a quality-of-life feature where it can end prematurely depending on how fast you either win or fail the microgame. Double-length microgames consist of two framerules, one halfway through, and the other three-quarters through. As far as speedrunning goes in WarioWare, it’s important to be fast enough to reach the 1st framerule, resulting in the double-length microgame ending at the same time as a normal-length microgame.
Boss microgames, the last microgame in each stage, have a similar story to double-length microgames. But since these microgames can go on forever with an endless amount of framerules, the objective is now to reach the earliest framerule in order to finish the boss microgame as fast as possible.
Ashley’s Stage
This is the only stage that utilizes a vocal song, Ashley’s Theme. In order for the stage to sync the gameplay with the song, framerules are disabled until the song ends. There is no way to save time in this stage until the boss microgame. Despite this, the TAS attempts to be entertaining by going with the rhythm of the song for most of these microgames.
Dish It (Jimmy T.)
This is the first of several double-length microgames where it is faster to fail the microgame and sacrifice a life. Here, you are expected to keep the stick spinning until the microgame ends. Having the plate fall off of the stick is the only way to end the microgame prematurely, and even then it takes a long time for the plate to lose balance. As a result, you are only able to reach the 2nd framerule since the 1st is out of reach. This isn’t the only microgame that has this issue, and the TAS tries to avoid encountering them. Because to my knowledge, there isn’t a way to manipulate RNG and have these microgames be replaced by shorter ones.
Hair Supply (Kat & Ana)
You may be wondering why the TAS purposefully failed this microgame for seemingly no reason. This was done purely for entertainment purposes. In the microgame after this one, “Write On, Dude”, I wanted to make a Rhythm Heaven reference and draw a specific character in the rhythm of the music. I had to manipulate RNG somewhere else in the stage in order to get the specific character I needed. I found out that failing Hair Supply was all I needed.
Super Mario Bros.: Stomp Enemies (9-Volt)
There's an interesting glitch where you can have a Koopa Troopa clip through a corner of blocks. Despite this being newly discovered, I wouldn’t consider this a new speedrun strategy. The timing to perform this glitch is almost frame-perfect and there’s a much easier alternative that RTA speedrunners use instead.
Darkman425: Input file replaced with one that removes the blank input, ending with the last input needed to reach the ending sequence.
This was a fun watch. The timed microgames that didn't have ways to speed up were amusing to watch with the bits of playaround that were available, and the sections that could be sped up (the 10 second microgames and the boss stages) look well optimized. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard.
