If you are a sensible person you have a deep and abiding love for those TV commercials for Five Alive.

You know the ones. The ones with the puppet who leaps off the puppeteer's hand after a sip of Five Alive. The ones with the disembodied brain that levitates when the researcher holds the carton of Five Alive near its jar. The ones with the cheesy guy who slaps Five Alive on his face after shaving. The ones with the dude who thinks a carton of Five Alive into existence, and who then whinnies like a horse as his toupée stands at attention.

They are inescapable, these TV commercials, and you love them. You love that they have a shorter attention span than you. You love that tooty-toot flute music they play at the end. You wish you could take them home with you.

Here is some good news: Now you can take them home with you, or at least you nearly can. WarioWare Inc. is a video game not a TV commercial, true, but it clearly breathes the same air and sniffs the same inhalants as those nutty people at Leo Burnett, Five Alive's ad agency of choice.

WarioWare Inc. has a shorter attention span than any game in history. It tosses a blippy challenge at you (guiding a picky finger into an itchy nose, for example), then it gives you three or four seconds to figure it out, and then it tosses another, and another and another and another. Over a span of 30 seconds you will find yourself challenged in six or seven silly little mini-games. You will soon learn how to keep a trampoline under a pathologically-reckless jumper. You will learn how to grab a drink slid across a polished bar. You will learn how to pinch a little buglike squiggle between... well, between two lines that might be chopsticks but probably aren't.

It is insane, this collection of mini-games, and its pacing is beyond frenetic. One word of instruction leaps out at you -- "Shoot!" "Bounce!" "Pinch!" -- and then the action starts, and half a breath later it ends, and without pause another word of instruction bursts onto the screen to start it all over again. If you are one of those people who wishes MuchMusic would slow down the editing, you are also one of those people who will hate WarioWare.

Why the name? As you may already know, Wario is the lovable black sheep of the Nintendo family. He is short and fat and moustachioed like Mario, but he is fatter and more thoroughly moustachioed, and instead of a good heart he has craven greed and poor manners. When something amuses him he cackles like Vincent Price.

One day, Wario noticed that there was big money to be made in video games. He decided he wanted a piece of the action. He founded WarioWare Inc., a development and publishing company that would make him rich rich rich. He cackled. Then he outsourced the development of the actual games themselves to a collection of slackers who could only be bothered to come up with short blinky exercises in hitting the "A" button. At one point, a rhinitic heroine threatens to drip snot onto her dress; you must tap "A" to make her snort it back up into her nose.

Let us recap the plot: Half-interested greedhead puts out a shoddy collection of unfinished ass and calls it "cutting-edge gaming," then sits back to watch the dollars roar in. Hey, we say to ourselves, That's not a new idea at all! That's the business model shared by 75 per cent of the firms with booths at E3!

As satire, WarioWare Inc. is brilliant. The kicker is that it is also one of the best games of the year.