Nintendo's wacky new mobile game takes inspiration from WarioWare

Nintendo just announced an upcoming mobile game that should please fans of stuff like WarioWare. Pictonico! is a free-to-download title that'll be available for both iOS and Android on May 28. It looks absolutely ridiculous and definitely an example of Nintendo at its weirdest.

The basic hook is that players take photos of family and friends and the game turns those pictures into wacky minigames that resemble the microgames from the WarioWare franchise. There are 80 of these games, and they all seem to mangle portrait photographs. There's one game that has players stretching a person's mouth to eat cartoon food and another that turns the subject into a baby with an extremely long tongue.

This looks like a strictly multiplayer affair, unless you like snapping photos of strangers for use in bizarre minigames. We don't even know if there's a solo mode, though there does look to be a score attack mode, some kind of bizarre fortune telling mode and a series of stages to work through.

This game is free-to-download, but it looks like people will have to pony up some cash for the full experience. The freemium download doesn't include all 80 of the aforementioned minigames. We don't have a price yet for the full game, though the preorder pages are already open. And for whatever it's worth, the company says the photos taken in game will not be sent anywhere and will remain on players' devices.

Pictonico! is not Nintendo's first foray into photo-based mayhem. The company released WarioWare: Snapped! for the DS all the way back in 2009. This game leveraged the console's camera to also place photos in minigames.