So there I was, smouldering pipe clenched implacably between gritted teeth, battering away at Wario’s final set of games until finally I beat the hilarious and brilliant boss level to win. Then I could relax a bit: of course the game isn’t really complete, but that dastardly Thrilling level is clearly designed for organisms such as Bishop in Aliens (he of the stab-the-knife-between-your-fingers trick) rather than mere humans such as myself. No doubt most people perusing this column will already have Wario Ware and know intimately its tremendous postmodern delights, but if anyone doesn’t I should just like to suggest that you put down this magazine right now and go and buy it, along with a GBA if you don’t already own one, since it’s the most wondrously grin-your-face-off game I’ve played in years.

Part of the magic of Wario Ware, naturally, is its immense variety: it is hard to get bored with a selection of hundreds of beautifully surreal three-second wonders. But in fact it was the glorious variety of Wario Ware that set me wondering about the proper role of variety in games in general. Maybe we should try to distinguish between different forms of it. You could call them extrinsic and intrinsic.

Take Jak II, a modern cartoon-styled exploration game of immense polish and huge variety: the gameplay extends from old-skool side-on platforming with a few swooping camera tricks, through modern 3D platforming, third-person shoot-’em-up, hovercar racing game and more besides. Much as I could appreciate the craftsmanship and wit that went into making the game, it left me personally rather cold. And that may be partially explained by the fact that its variety is of the extrinsic flavour, which in this context means that there is no convincing reason why all these different game styles need to have come together in one box. The plot is expected to do all the work in this respect, but relying on narrative alone to provide such an important glue is risky. I quickly became resentful, for example, that I had to negotiate the appallingly slow traffic of the beautifully rendered but frustratingly tight passageways of the hub city in order to get to the passages of platforming that constitute the heart of the game. Jak II is a game of immense extrinsic variety which lacks one strong central idea.

If, on the other hand, you have a strong central idea, and play variations on it so as to give the player something constantly evolving and new, then this might be called intrinsic variety. And this is one notable difference between Jak II and a game that clearly provided its structural model, GTA3. The strong central idea of GTA3 and Vice City is: here’s a city; it’s big and it’s living; you can do what the hell you like in it. The endless subvariations on driving and shooting missions come under the umbrella of this one ruling concept, and so the variety is intrinsic, an organic part of the videogame universe. The setting of qualified realism, meanwhile, ensures that the developers can’t write in a bizarre sci-fi plot twist just to squeeze in a 3D space-dogfighting minigame, because that would represent an intrusion of extrinsic variety.

It seems to be a modern canard of game development that audiences really want a lot of different, unrelated game styles under one roof, because somehow that constitutes refreshing variety or value for money. Hence, for instance, the sorry history of James Bond-licensed games that combine shooting, driving, boating and for all I know rollerskating to depressingly mediocre effect. But really great games are always based around a single strong idea, within which there is room for intrinsic variety. Metal Gear Solid’s Pac-Man-with-soldiers concept rules the game’s structure, allowing exemplary intrinsic variety in the different uses of gadgets and weapons. ICO’s cooperative exploration model allows intrinsic variety in its spatial puzzles, and also simply in the manifold gorgeous areas of the castle – in fact, one might even argue that the combat against the shadow monsters dilutes the game’s beauty precisely because it is a kind of extrinsic variety: is it really necessary that there should be fighting in such a game? Ocarina of Time, meanwhile, is famous in part for the dazzling variety of its minigames, but they are all rooted intrinsically in the game’s world and sprout organically from its bewitching fiction: none seems out of place or bolted on.

If, then, you have a great game concept, you don’t need another four concepts to make a great game. One suffices. And so one is instantly suspicious of a product that yokes together fundamentally different game-styles: it is almost a clue to the absence of a strong concept in the first place. Strong game ideas are expensive, creatively: not everyone has them, and the temptation to reuse the good ones explains sequelitis. If you don’t have a strong concept it is naturally tempting to try to replace quality with quantity, and that’s where the unsatisfactory paradigm of extrinsic variety rears its head.

But one strong concept, well executed, is always enough: for instance in the wonderful Viewtiful Joe, whose intrinsic variety of ever-deepening combo moves combined with its fascinating aesthetic of filmed Japanese draughtsmanship makes it one of the strongest game “personalities”, stylistically speaking, since Jet Grind Radio first appeared. Viewtiful Joe is instantly compelling, unrelenting and eye-poppingly beautiful entertainment of a sort that the diffuse and vaguely disconnected pleasures of Jak II cannot match.

Readers who still remember the beginning of this column will naturally be wondering how I propose to square this argument with my love of Wario Ware, which at first sight seems to be a riot of nothing but extrinsic variety. In truth I consider Wario Ware, as befits a ludically historicist game that plays so cleverly and knowledgably with the evolution of the videogame form, to be among other things a comment on precisely this phenomenon. Wario Ware is a game whose single strong concept is the tension between the thrill of variety and the comfort of familiarity. Every perfectly conceived challenge within plays out the drama of surprise, learning and skill acquisition that is the psychological story of how we get to grips with a game in the first place. That is the concept informing every Wario Ware minigame: its dizzying variety of execution is revealed to share this one deep purpose, and so it is joyously intrinsic variety par excellence. Now, maybe I can beat Thrilling after all…