Wario's Woods is a kind of falling objects puzzle game, similar to
Dr. Mario and Xixit, and more distantly related to Tetris. It was
released in 1994, and was the very last game pak released for the
Nintendo Entertainment System. (Enthusiasts have later
reverse-engineered the NES and created original ROM images for it,
but I digress.)
Basically, the falling objects are monsters, which you have to
destroy, and bombs which you destroy them with. So far it's very
standard, boring puzzle game stuff. But there is a very major and
important twist here, which could easily spin off an entire sub-
genre (which it, surprisingly, hasn't). In Wario's Woods, you don't
control the falling objects, instead you control a little guy that
walks around inside the playing field among the fallen objects. He
can pick up entire stacks of objects and put them down somewhere
else, he can kick them along flat ground, he can push himself up
through a column of objects, and there are probably many more special
moves that I haven't discovered yet. You don't lose when the playing
field fills up, but if you get shut in with nowhere to move. This
innovative crossover with platform games, together with the
"recursiveness"1 common to all
Dr. Mario workalikes, makes for a very complex and fast-paced
gameplay.
The backstory is admittedly rather thin, but at least there is one, in
contrast to most falling objects puzzle games. Toad (the guy that
always told you the princess was in another castle, and also the
character with a mushroom head that you could choose as your PC in
Super Mario Brothers 2) is on a hiking trip in a forest which
unfortunately turns out to be Wario's Wood. Wario is not a very nice
guy (he used to bully Mario in his childhood), so he captures Toad.
To escape, Toad has to fight his way through all the trees in the
forest, by walking around in their trunks and destroy the
aforementioned monsters with the bombs that are dropped at him.
1 Meaning that destroying objects makes the objects on
top of them fall down, thus possibly destroying other objects, which in
turn make other objects fall down, to create large chain reactions.
Classic Tetris, in contrast, only keeps track of empty and filled
tiles in the playing field, thus apparently leaving pieces to "hover" over holes.