In case you couldn't tell from our most recent episode, I've been a little obsessed with the Wario Land series -- no surprises there. I'm still working on getting 100% in Wario Land 2 (something I rarely do with any game); as I said on the podcast, WL2 displays a sort of "world map" after you finish it once, and this level select screen shows all of the branching pathways you might have missed along the way. (But not where they're located in the levels themselves.)

Since I inadvertently stuck to the main path during my first playthrough, I've spent the past few days searching for the hidden exits that lead to clusters of unplayed levels. I managed to clear nearly all of the alternate pathways, but the entrance to one absolutely eluded me -- Wario Land 2 claims that its first level has a secret exit, but after scouring this fairly straightforward stage a handful of times, I turned to the Internet to rectify my ignorance.

I can't stop stressing just how subversive and brilliant Wario Land 2 is, and its very first level contains one of the more extreme examples. The game begins with Wario in bed (which makes sense, since its main musical theme seems to be a riff on "Beautiful Dreamer"), and hitting any button will wake him up for the first objective: turning off the massive alarm clock ringing somewhere in his castle. But if you want to find this level's secret exit -- and the shortest path to the end of the game -- you simply have to do nothing.

After thirty seconds, the stage ends as any normally would, and the inattentive Wario is unceremoniously removed from his private property by Captain Syrup's gang. And this small alteration to WL2's story explains why this path makes for the shortest one in the game: instead of having to track down the crooks who pulled a B&E on his valuables, the objective changes to simply retaking his castle from an army of squatters.

Obviously, this isn't news by any definition, but I turned this unexpected concept around in my mind about a thousand times, and I might be in love. This secret may be a little too hidden -- I never would have thought to keep Wario from waking up on my own -- but I definitely appreciate how the game rewards Wario for his laziness by making the goal so much closer. It's rare a game can surprise me so much, but I guess this stands as more evidence why the Wario Land series remains so awesome and secretly revolutionary. Do I really need to give you guys any more reasons to pick these games up on the 3DS eShop? If we work together, we might even be able to confuse Nintendo into releasing more of them. (But let's not go crazy.)