Wario's Woods

About Wario's Woods

Wario's Woods (1994) is Nintendo's puzzle game in which Toad climbs among falling monsters and bombs to clear them, the last licensed NES game in North America and the only one rated by the ESRB.

Wario's Woods in Depth

Wario and his monsters have taken over the Peaceful Woods, and Toad sets out to return it to the sprites who lived there. To clear each round, the player matches monsters with bombs of the same colour, dropped from the top by a sprite: three or more objects in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row, at least one of them a bomb, form a match, but three monsters alone do not. A Thwomp disguised as the ceiling can come down several rows, leaving less room. Each new round starts with more monsters, and some types can only be destroyed in particular ways, such as two matches in quick succession or a diagonal match.

Unlike Tetris or Puzzle League, the player does not move the pieces directly but controls Toad, who walks on top of the fallen objects, picks up single objects or whole stacks and puts them down elsewhere, kicks objects across the field and climbs the sides of stacks. He cannot reach everything, and if the field fills to the top it traps him and the game ends. A versus mode lets two players compete, with consecutive matches piling enemies into the opponent's field.

Making Wario's Woods

Nintendo R&D1 and Intelligent Systems developed the game for the NES and Super NES, released in 1994 at the end of the NES's life, and its ESRB rating was given almost three months before its American release. Reviews were mixed. GamePro called the SNES version "a ho-hum puzzler" with difficult controls, Nintendo Power praised its fun two-player mode but found it harder to control than Tetris 2, and Next Generation thought its learning curve "too steep" for an action puzzle game. Later, AllGame's Christian Huey called the NES controls "both surprisingly complex and completely intuitive", while Scott Alan Marriott felt the SNES version did not match the addictiveness of Tetris or Dr. Mario. The NES version was one of the first Wii Virtual Console releases in 2006, and reviewers then praised its depth while wishing Nintendo had chosen the fuller Super NES version.