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 Diving for coins |  Spiny thwomps? |  Climbing a ladder |
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 Spear-wielding enemies |  More swimming! |  Forest of Illusion? |
After being exiled from Mario Island, usurper Wario goes on an expedition to steal a golden statue of Princess Peach from the Brown Sugar Pirates, intending to hold it for ransom. Tracing them to their hideout on Kitchen Island, Wario sets out to steal as much treasure as he can en route to his final booty.
For a number of reasons, I never gave Wario Land much of a thought back in the day. I guess it was because I got my Game Boy in August 1996 and my Nintendo 64 in April 1997. It was also because my Mario obsession did not extend to Wario. I was already settling for Mario when I preferred Luigi, I wasn't going to settle for Wario instead of Mario. A couple kids in my CLC class (when I was a kid needing supervision, as opposed to 2019-2020, when I was the supervision) absolutely swore by Wario Land, calling it their favourite game in the world. One day while we were swapping Game Boy cartridges, I gave Carter Star Wars and he gave me Wario Land... eh, it didn't do anything for me. I put it back onto the table and carried on with Game & Watch Gallery 2. The first time I genuinely gave this game an earnest go was back in 2015 when I was deep into my emulation kick. I played it for about an hour some random night when I probably should have been sleeping. When I decided to stop playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf, I started playing Game Boy games more often. Quite honestly, GameYob's NDS version is way more stable than the CIA version on old 3DS; the thing I kept getting hung up on was how inaccurate the sound emulation was on the version of this emulator that had been recommended to me. Once I switched versions, it opened up a whole new world, and it felt like I was a kid playing her Game Boy again. I'd been playing Super Mario Land 1 and 2 pretty consistently since I switched, but I decided to finally take Carter's recommendation and play Wario Land. Is it my favourite game? No, but it's pretty good.
9/10, would recommend. The only gripes I have with the game are the sort of confusing control scheme, which will definitely trip you up if you're coming over from Super Mario Land 2; also, swooping enemies are better able to track your position, relative to Super Mario Land 2, where you could always predict attack vectors; finally, Wario's death animation is way too long. It's not as bad as Donkey Kong Jr. on NES, Inspector Gadget on Super NES, or GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64, but it's slower than either of the Mario Land games. Sure, I could find 1000 tiny little annoying things, but they don't matter.
