Do It Yourself with Nintendo's WarioWare

Yet despite these drawbacks and caveats, D.I.Y. is genuinely incredible. Players (or rather, creators) are given access to a studio in which they can assemble their own microgames from scratch. It's about one step removed from bare-ass-naked programming, dependent on building scripts and objects and relationships and event flags and even assembling your own graphics and music, but Nintendo has managed to make it feel whimsical and unintimidating despite the innate complexity of the process of game creation. The game's lengthy tutorial -- about two hours of mandatory learning, plus an equal amount of optional expert techniques to be explored in the "dojo" -- plays a big part in this, wisely using Wario as a dim-witted foil to the lector in order to avoid the sensation that the game is talking down to the you.

But just as important is Nintendo's clever interface design, which is equal parts functional and whimsical. The game development process is organized into a handful of tabs. The process begins with creating the in-game objects under the Graphics tab, then using the Assembly tab to define their behaviors and interactions. The tool system offers an ocean of icons to wade through, but many of them are contextual and only appear when needed. And while the icons are functional and effective, many of them are infused with WarioWare-style whimsy. The undo function, for instance, is represented a tiny time-traveler who proclaims "I've just undone your last action!" when tapped. Players scroll through action scripts by clicking and dragging on a tiny ninja who hangs suspended in front of a literal paper scroll that unfurls as you move him downward. The game doesn't go overboard with these little embellishments -- most icons are far more functional -- but there are just enough of them to add a little flavor to the package, and (more to the point) help make certain key functions more memorable.

The game creation tools do have some maddening limits, unfortunately. Player interaction is more or less limited to simple tapping with the stylus, and my very first project was quickly derailed by this limitation. My original intention was to make the player drag a pair of rabbit ears along an arc in order to tune a TV, but this was impossible; you simply can't incorporate dragging into your games. Unfortunately, I didn't fully realize this until after I'd already put together the artwork, so I was forced to improvise. The final result wasn't nearly as interesting as I'd intended -- now players tune the TV by tapping on the barely-visible tips of the rabbit ears to make them rise to full antenna height -- but on the other hand, it does mean that D.I.Y. offers enough flexibility to make it possible to salvage a project gone awry by applying a touch of ingenuity.

A more crucial limitation is the game's utter lack of DSi integration. Given that the game is launching simultaneously with the DSi XL -- and in fact seems like a marquee title for the system, since its editing suite is far easier to use with the larger screens -- you'd think it would be a key opportunity to make use of the system's unique features, such as its camera. But no, you can't snap photos to use in your D.I.Y. creations. And so far as I can tell, it's not even possible to import images from an SD card. You can import preexisting art from the built-in microgames, but while that's a handy shortcut it's terribly weak as far as personalization goes.

These are definitely flaws, but to Nintendo's credit, WarioWare succeeds in the most important area: sharing. D.I.Y. is basically an expanded version of Mario Paint, offering remarkably similar art and music editing interfaces, then upping the ante by adding a purpose to these abilities (namely, creating your own mini-videogames). I always liked the idea of Mario Paint, but I never saw the point of it; launched in the days before easy video capture and online sharing via YouTube, Mario Paint creations were built for an audience of one, ephemeral and quickly forgotten. Why bother? But D.I.Y. provides not only a purpose for all that goofy art and ear-piercing music, but also a centralized online repository for those creations as well. As with all user-created content, finding the gems will require sifting through a river of crap -- but still, at least you can take comfort in knowing that the hours you pour into your creations have the potential to find an audience of more than just your mom.