Nintendo’s newest WarioWare is a weirdo smartphone app

任天堂最新的《瓦力欧制造》风格作品竟是一款古怪的手机应用

A decade ago, Nintendo made a big splash into the world of mobile gaming with a new Super Mario platformer directed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. But even though the game proved popular, it wasn’t the success the company had hoped for. Over the ensuing years Nintendo has slowly retreated from smartphone gaming, with the exception of a handful of apps and some legacy games. Which is what made it so surprising this week when Nintendo launched Pictonico. It’s a bizarre and playful mobile game that channels the best of WarioWare, but I have zero idea how it fits into Nintendo’s current strategy.

十年前，任天堂凭借一款由宫本茂亲自操刀的《超级马力欧》平台游戏，在移动游戏领域掀起了巨大波澜。尽管该游戏广受欢迎，但并未达到公司预期的成功高度。在此后的几年里，除了少数几款应用和一些经典移植游戏外，任天堂逐渐从智能手机游戏市场撤退。正因如此，本周任天堂推出《Pictonico》才显得如此令人惊讶。这是一款既古怪又充满趣味的手机游戏，它捕捉到了《瓦力欧制造》（WarioWare）系列的精髓，但我完全看不出它如何契合任天堂当前的战略。

Much like WarioWare, Pictonico (which, I admit, I’m not entirely sure how to pronounce) is a collection of microgames that last just a few seconds each. In each round, you play 10 of these in quick succession, and usually you have just enough time to figure out what you actually need to do before moving on to the next thing. You’re given a simple command like, say, “chomp,” and then you have to do something like grab hold of a mouth and make it chew some food. The games are all very silly in often hilarious ways, so you’ll be plucking hair, licking lollipops, and peeling bananas as quickly as you can.

就像《瓦力欧制造》一样，《Pictonico》（我承认，我不太确定该怎么读这个名字）是一系列时长仅几秒钟的微型游戏合集。在每一轮中，你需要快速连续游玩 10 个小游戏，通常你只有刚好足够的时间弄清楚该做什么，然后就得进入下一个环节。系统会给你一个简单的指令，比如“咀嚼”，然后你必须完成诸如抓住一张嘴并让它吃掉食物之类的动作。这些游戏都非常搞怪，且往往令人捧腹大笑，你会忙着拔头发、舔棒棒糖、剥香蕉，动作越快越好。

The twist in Pictonico is that the games all use photos on your camera roll to customize the experience. The game pulls faces from photos and slips them into the microgames, so I found myself making my wife chomp down on kebab with a disturbingly large mouth, or rubbing a lamp to see a buff genie version of my 10-year-old pop out.

《Pictonico》的独特之处在于，所有游戏都会调用你相册里的照片来定制游戏体验。游戏会从照片中提取人脸并将其植入微型游戏中。于是，我发现自己正让妻子用一张大得离谱的嘴去啃烤肉串，或者擦拭神灯，看着我 10 岁孩子变身的肌肉猛男精灵跳出来。

The game lets you choose which photos you want to appear in the game so things don’t get uncomfortably weird, and it does occasionally pull things that aren’t human faces. At one point I had to match up an image that had been broken up into three parts, and it was a photo I had taken during my time reporting on the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto. Pictonico is a free download on both iOS and Android, but that only gets you access to a demo version; to play the full thing, which includes 80 different minigames, you have to buy two content packs priced at $7.69 and $5.99 each.

游戏允许你选择哪些照片出现在游戏中，以免出现令人尴尬的怪异情况，而且它偶尔也会抓取非人脸的图像。有一次，我需要拼凑一张被拆分成三部分的图片，那正是我在京都任天堂博物馆报道时拍摄的照片。《Pictonico》在 iOS 和 Android 平台上均可免费下载，但这仅限于演示版本；若要体验包含 80 个不同小游戏的完整版，则需要购买两个内容包，价格分别为 7.69 美元和 5.99 美元。

Despite its strange name and lack of familiar characters, Pictonico is an extremely Nintendo production. Not only does it play like WarioWare, but its offbeat humor reminds me a lot of the Tomodachi Life games. (It also feels spiritually connected to the now-defunct Miitomo, Nintendo’s first ever mobile app.) Which is all to say that it’s fun, charming, and almost ideally designed for its particular platform. But it’s also one of those moments — like Labo and Alarmo before it — where I just have to throw up my hands and admit that it can be impossible to predict what this company will do. In many of the biggest and most important ways Nintendo plays it safe. But then it releases something like Pictonico and you’re reminded that it’s at its very best when it stays weird.

尽管名字古怪且缺乏熟悉的角色，但《Pictonico》依然是一款极具“任天堂味”的作品。它不仅玩起来像《瓦力欧制造》，其离经叛道的幽默感也让我想起了《朋友聚会》（Tomodachi Life）系列。（它在精神上也与现已停运的《Miitomo》——任天堂的首款移动应用——有着某种联系。）总而言之，它既有趣又迷人，且针对其特定平台的设计几乎堪称完美。但这也属于那种时刻——就像之前的 Labo 和 Alarmo 一样——让我不得不摊开双手承认：你永远无法预测这家公司下一步会做什么。在许多重大且关键的领域，任天堂总是选择稳扎稳打；但随后它又会发布像《Pictonico》这样的作品，提醒你：当它保持“古怪”时，才是它最棒的时候。