Good Game Get! WarioWare D.I.Y.

One day when I was home from college with my girlfriend, we were in my bedroom and I was digging through my closet for something and I found a plastic healthcare provider bag and decided to see what was in it.

“I thought I sold it.”

There it was.

My Super Nintendo, and it was kind of in a weird condition as I remember my little cousins having it after I sold it to them years ago. That was a mistake, but it still worked and it was mystically and scientifically impossibly in my closet and I had no idea that it was still in my possession.

Also in the bag with the Super Nintendo found in the subspace time traveling closet was a copy of Mario Paint, the trackball mouse, and the ridiculous thick plastic mouse pad.

Mario Paint is still awesome after all of these years by the way, and I remember being so excited when I thought a Mario Paint was coming to the Nintendo 64, but it never did, at least here in the states, and at least not without the 64DD attachment.

The GameCube came and went without an update to the franchise, and really what could they add to Mario Paint - people have access to Photoshop and it isn’t really all that impressive to make art digitally on a screen anymore.

Nintendo isn’t wrong to not want to create a Mario Paint Wii, it probably just wouldn’t work and for better or worse the Photo Channel is something of a Mario Paint reboot.

However it’s not a successor to Mario Paint. Nothing has been up until this point.

Until WarioWare D.I.Y.

WarioWare D.I.Y. is quite simply the best sequel to Mario Paint we could ever hope for.

It is Mario Paint 2.

A touch screen and stylus, instead of a mouse pad and mouse.

You compose music, you make sprite art, you can even make comics, but most importantly the game takes it one giant step farther, and allows you to do something that every gamer has always wanted to do - make games.

While it’s the basic of the basic, and has a simple (but incredibly deep) graphical coding interface, it offers up quite a challenge for converting your ideas into seconds long micro games.

Yes. Your games will be merely seconds long, and they will take hours to create initially. You have to create absolutely everything for the game, the background, the graphics, the music, and the code. Well - actually, you don’t have to, as the game allows you to take resources from the pre-built titles. This comes in handy when needing basic elements, or perhaps just wanting to remix something.


My very first game starring my Pom, Lion-O. The goal is to touch his bowl to put food in it. Simple, but it took around three hours to put together.

The Mario Paint interface is nostalgic, the tutorials are engaging, (albeit necessarily long) and the whole package itself just feels complete and catered towards the player. The game has a ton of consumable content, but not nearly as much as its customizable content and that’s alright, because the whole point of the game is doing it yourself.

It’s Nintendo giving you this amazing control and these great tools to design games, and if you put enough effort into it, your creations can rival or surpass Nintendo’s original WarioWare ideas.


My second game is a Pokéwalker game where you press a button to make your character take three steps to win. This game was much more difficult to design and resulted in a lot of head scratching on my part, but I was able to study and utilize ideas from the pre-built games by looking at their own coding. It took around five hours to complete.

I think WarioWare D.I.Y. should be required play for anyone interested in even the slightest in game design. It may inspire you or discourage you, but it is truly a 101 lesson and tool set that may convince you to appreciate even more the perfectly executed design of some of your favorite games.

I’ve never felt more inspired to create in a video game.

Brilliance.

- Kyle