WarioWare: Touched! is about as audacious as a video game can get, although not in the way the typical audacious video game is audacious. It is not bloody or profane, and it does not contain soldiers or terrorists or automatic weapons fire. Mostly it features friendly cartoon characters dancing together in a G-rated café. The audaciousness comes out in the tiny little video games those friendly cartoon characters are always playing, which we also get to play, and which are packed gleefully full of yucky jokes about bodily functions.

Like the two WarioWare titles that came before it, Touched! is a huge collection of tiny little video games, none of which takes more than a few seconds from start to finish. "Microgames," the manual calls them.

Microgames are dumb and unsubtle. Each one begins with a word or two of instruction scrawled across the screen: something like "Pass!" or "Pet!" or "Sneeze!". Then, using your stylus on the Nintendo DS touch screen, you have about three seconds to throw a basketball to a teammate, or to pet a friendly Labrador retriever on the head, or to guide a feather up the itchy nostril of a disembodied nose. If your ball finds its mark, your teammate scores. If you pet the doggie the way it likes, you collect points. If the nose gives up a blast, you win. Not five seconds after it begins, the microgame ends, and another jumps up to take its place.

The pacing is frenetic. You encounter snails hanging out on the leaves of a fruit tree, and you must pop out all their eyes.

You meet two men of ambiguous sexuality, who are both wearing tank-tops, and who are sharing a single piece of Big Red. When one of them raises his arms, you must tickle him underneath, causing him to giggle and release his end of the stretched-out gum.

You see a roll of toilet paper mounted alongside a WC. You must spin it until it is empty, causing the phrase "Save The Trees" to appear on the wall.

The underlying premise behind all this is that these are games produced by WarioWare Inc., a software development company under the control of Wario, who is a bit like Mario the plumber, only fatter and greedier. Back in the first WarioWare, Wario learned that cheap, tossed-off games with low production values are inexpensive to produce, but can be sold at a healthy markup. It was a clear path to riches, so he seized it. In the second WarioWare, he seized it some more.

Touched! is Wario's third trip back to the buffet, and the joke works better than ever. Partly this is the raw shamelessness of it all. "These microgames," the game tells us, "are crap. Crap crap crap! If they make Wario rich, it is only because the game-buying public is made up of drooling morons." Then we the game-buying public fork over our cash for one WarioWare collection after another. Then Wario's masters at Nintendo laugh all the way to the bank.

We get the last laugh, though, because the microgames are not crap at all. They are brilliant, brilliant fun, so simple that they can be learned and mastered in moments, but so engaging that you will still be plugging them into your DS long after the rest of your collection has passed its sell-by date.

Everything about WarioWare is a refutation of the business models and practices of the rest of the industry. It contains no stories, and no compelling characters, and no bump-mapping, and no particle effects, and no 3D graphics, and sometimes barely any 2D graphics. It is larded with immature barfy poo-poo jokes. Its music is silly and annoying. It has no idea what its target demographic is. May it sell and sell and sell some more.

One microgame features a small garden fountain that looks like a urinating boy. You must tilt it so its stream puts out a grass fire. Was there ever a better opportunity for a spin-off game?