Holy cats, the years of bone-crushing misery are finally over. As promised, I went home and played on the Gameboy, or rather, played a Gameboy game through the TV set, which is pretty sweet if you're like me and enjoy the little perky pixelated games but do not enjoy squinting at a tiny, murky screen and pawing at wee buttons with meaty fingers because you're old and falling apart. And the game I played? A little piece of heaven called WarioWare, Inc. Mega Microgame$. Oh shiitake mushroom.

You remember when the 21st century rolled around and about ten kajillion webloggers wondered where the jetpacks and robot maids were? "We were promised flying cars!!!" That was gold, baby. Well, WarioWare makes me feel like I'm in the future. OS X was kind of like that — when I started using it I felt like it was some fake interface created for a movie. Like in Disclosure or something where every time an email arrives it's this five-minute animation of the envelope flying in and opening itself up and unfolding and all? WarioWare seems like a fake game that'd be played in a near-future sort of movie where the cool skater kids are no longer satisfied by regular videogames ("That's so brickface!" they'd shout, using bad slang invented by the team of screenwriters) but instead have to play every single videogame in the history of the world ... all at once!

Because that's what this game's all about. You fire it up and it starts throwing games at you, one after the other. You have five seconds — five, I say! — to figure out what to do and then do it. If you manage it, you're on to the next one. And the next, and the next, and then it starts getting faster. The music's frenetic, the colors epilepsy-inducing, the graphics Atari-ish.

I've only played maybe a third of it, but already I've karate-chopped bricks, caught a piece of toast, applied eyedrops, shot gunslingers, put on a pretty outfit, avoided giant stomping feet, played tiny bits of Mario and Donkey Kong and Zelda, golfed, boxed, BMX'd, picked a nose, cooked an egg, and like fifty other things. And when you win sets of games you help a Vespa girl's pet monkey throw bananas at the cops and a taxi deliver a merman to the sea, etc. In other words: SHIT YEAH. I am now going to go quit my job. Sniff you jerks later.

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