How to get a high score.

It is an instinct as old as humanity itself: the will to compete, to test your limits against those of your competitors, to rally from the depths of crushing defeat and to persevere, in the hope of victory. . The name of this instinct is WarioWare: unite! Ranked mode, and it’s a test of skill, patience, sorting the donuts from the cake, combining small slimes into a bigger one, and giving the chicks cheese balls, all against a racing clock. While the average goomba may assume that this is a lightweight board game that throws dozens of so called goofy microgames at players and asks them to react quickly by waxing, squeezing, soaking, kneading, etc., in my heart beats the soul of a Wario-Wathlete. That’s why I embarked on a multi-day quest to join the elite of the elite and earn gold by scoring 6,200 points or more in the Wario Cup.

WarioWare: unite! is the ninth installment in Nintendo’s WarioWare series, which debuted in 2003. There are several modes in this Nintendo Switch iteration, including the much-vaunted local co-op play, which I largely ignored because I have a heart for it. ‘a champion. Why would I want to share my accomplishments with someone else when this gold could be mine alone? Unlike previous games, the wacky characters from the WarioWare universe are all playable in Do together!, with each character moving and attacking slightly differently; all microgames are the same no matter what, but the way you can win them changes slightly, depending on which of the 19 available characters you use. Wario himself is naturally one of those playable characters, sporting a hoverpack and his signature push attack.

The Wario Cup I was aiming for is the basis for the game’s online and rotating weekly challenge mode, which requires completing certain milestones in order to receive Bronze, Silver, and Gold rewards handed in for reaching certain milestones. In last week’s scoring challenge, for example, the player must select five of the 18 available characters to switch between and face off against a microgame gauntlet. These start out slow and easy and get faster and harder, and the game gives you more points depending on how quickly you complete each game. When you lose a game with a particular character, that character is no longer available and when you run out of your five characters, your run ends. Using the game’s complicated and more erratically controlled characters increases your score with each round gained, while the easier characters are, obviously, easier to use but score fewer points.

But how was I supposed to go from WarioWare zero to WarioWare hero, as a newbie to the series? Not only that, but I’ve never been the most competitive player around. Was I really going to be able to transform into the name of that flatulent counterfeit brother Mario? Well, I was about to find out. I was familiar enough with competitive online play to know that my first order of business should be to check out what’s called the meta, or metagame, which is the dominant tactics used by top players. I searched online and learned that the best performing players use the easier characters, those with long range attacks and simple hover movement. Therefore, I copied them and selected Mike (a robot who pulls up), Ashley (a witch who shoots in the direction she is facing), Dribble (a dog who drives a taxi that cannot shoot that right), Orbulon (an alien with a powerful pulling tractor beam) and Red (a baby demon who drops bombs from above) as my super team. In my first few tries, I barely hit a score of 2,000, which means I didn’t win any medals.

Soon I identified a serious stumbling block: I still didn’t know how to play all the microgames. Some of them that I had encountered in Story Mode (which must be completed to unlock the Wario Cup), but I had not unlocked all possible microgames during this jaunt and I was encountering some for the first time in ranked play. (Plus, I was really bad at some of the games I had encountered before, which certainly didn’t help.)

One of the microgames that Do together! has to offer; this one is inspired by Super mario world.
Nintendo

Realizing that victory is won or lost in the training zone, I noted which games were particularly problematic for me and left the Cup to practice these games in Play-o-pedia mode. I practiced squeezing the tube of toothpaste and found that unlike in real life, the trick wasn’t to come up from the bottom. I practiced giving a puppy a glass of water and improved the movement needed to keep their tongue balanced under the tap. I played a game where you light candles and found out that the goal was to detonate the fireworks, not avoid lighting them like I had previously assumed. Hours later, trained and ready, I returned to the Cup to realize my visions of golden glory.

At first my score improved steadily, sending me first to the bronze cup and then to the silver. I was delighted, unstoppable! I would surely soon be in contention with the top scorers (which I had added to my Nintendo Switch Online friends list from Reddit; hey guys)! I tried again and again and… again. The following soon became clear: The higher levels were really tough! They went very fast! Wario, who “designed” all of these games according to story mode, was a maniacal genius! I was stuck between 4,000 and 5,000 points, my friend list laughing at me with scores over 20,000. Why, I wondered, am I so bad at games? Is it because I am a video game journalist? (Just kidding, folks!) How many times should I cover a robot’s groin with a sheet or cradle a baby to fall asleep before this stupid game gives me the luck I had? need ? No, it sure wasn’t me, I thought; it was the game itself that was bad.

In WarioWare: unite! Ranked fashion, as in all serious sports, mental play is just as important as the ability to quickly pluck armpit hair from a marble statue. Every competitor experiences these difficult times when he wants to give up, but the difference between a gold cup champion and a medwarioCriticism is as much about perseverance as it is about talent. I needed to get my head in the game. I had to keep an eye on the ball. I also had to keep an eye out for the turtle I was trying to turn over, the robot parts falling from the top of the screen, the giant nostrils I was trying to butcher, etc. I tried resetting more often if I had a loss of luck early in the game. I tried resetting less often and taking what the game gave me. I tried to complain about how much I regretted making this gold cup one of my goals on Twitter. I tried to scream on the screen. I tried everything that was possible and then some, and again, success eluded me.

They say the darkest moment comes right before dawn, and as long as you have a broad enough interpretation of what the calendar is, that holds true, in my experience. I gritted my teeth and creaked like my life depended on this damn WarioWare game. My breakthrough happened on Sunday, September 19 at 3:09 pm: I got a score of 6,834 and entered the top 13 elite ranked players. Success! Glory! Results! Success!

Was it all worth it? May be! While I may never match the achievement of Reddit’s 20,000+ goal scorers (and I certainly won’t, as I’m done with this madness forever … at least until next week) I can be proud to know that when the going gets tough, I dug deep and got it together.

About Jason Zeitler

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