WarioWare Twisted! is so outstanding, so staggeringly great, so all-encompassingly triumphant, that calling it a mere video game is a gross and serious error. It is one of the best entertainments of the year, and indeed of our time. You will like it super a lot.

By now, chances are good that you have heard of the WarioWare product line. All its games are based on the same conceit: Wario, Mario's grumpy doppelganger, is CEO of a new and thriving video game empire called WarioWare, Inc. The company's success is based on two guiding principles:

1. Contempt for its consumers, and;
2. Sloth.

The games WarioWare, Inc. produces are insulting and embarrassing and utterly without production values. They last for five seconds, except for the ones that last four. They are full of bum-bum wee-wee booger jokes. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

If you are a regular reader in this space, right now you are probably expecting to hear what a glorious work of satire it all is and isn't it great to see a video game knocking the video game industry down a few notches. OK, there, but that's enough.

The thing about Twisted is not that it is a sharply observed commentary on a hollow and decadent business, although it certainly is that. It is that Twisted feels better in the hands than any video game has in years, or maybe ever. Its play experience is somehow purer than others'. It feels authentic and unmediated. It is more like pinball and less like Pong. It's physical. It's tactile. It's real.

You are shaking your head and wondering what that means.

Um. First, there is the cartridge that plugs into the Game Boy. It's larger than the standard size, and it contains a gyroscopic sensor. In lay terms, this means that your Game Boy can tell when you are moving the unit in your hands. If you rotate it a fraction of a degree, it knows. If you spin it wildly on the tabletop, it knows. If you tilt it just a little, it knows. It is wonderfully, sweetly precise.

What does this mean for actual play? It means that the Game Boy itself can be your steering wheel, and that you need never again click left and right on a primitive little cross-shaped pad. The gyro-sensor takes all the established practices of video game interface design and throws them away. They are irrelevant and ugly and they appeal only to sweaty nerds, and we don't need them anymore.

Too much enthusiasm, you are saying. No. Twisted really is revolutionary and it really is astonishing, and it really is the thing that will turn all the indifferents and all the haters into players.

The cartridge also contains a little vibrating motor, which offers encouragement and feedback as you tilt and spin the Game Boy in your hands. It clicks and it rumbles and it shakes, and most importantly it gives the thing weight and inertia that match the context of what you see on the screen. The Game Boy is a shapeshifter, and it changes from a steering wheel to a flashlight to sword in little five-second bursts, and no matter what it is pretending to be right now, it feels right.

At last week's big video game trade show, Nintendo showed off a shiny plastic box and told everyone it was their next home console, and said it was code-named "Revolution," but kept the rest of the details secret. That was probably just as well, considering the froth the gamer press worked up over the prospect of more first-person shooters on the next generation Xbox and PlayStation. But if rumours are correct and the Revolution turns out to incorporate something like Twisted's gyro sensor, the last laugh will be on Sony and Microsoft. Really it will.

In case you are worrying: Do not. Despite the revolutionary interface, Twisted still contains many, many bodily functions.