Now that I’ve seen other Kirby games I know that there’s one serious absence. The Kirby everyone knows and loves (if you want to love Kirby, never, never ever play Squeak Squad) inhales enemies and takes their powers. In Kirby’s Dream Land, he doesn’t do that. Why? I don’t know. Every other Kirby game, before and since, has included this. This one game is an oddity in this way, and I can’t guess why. The game is reproduced in Kirby Super Star, but with power-changing included. Was this a correction of a mistake?

I don’t remember how long it took but my fingers have been trained to the point where I can pick up the game and play it through flawlessly in the shortest amount of time. This game is in my fingers.

About once a month I wake up with a Kirby’s Dreamland song stuck in my head. They’re so catchy and upbeat, it’s little wonder my subconscious keeps revisiting them. This game is in my ears.

This game is… Actually, forget you guys, I’m gonna go play it.

P.S. Well, the Kirby Super Star Ultra version anyways.

I always chose Peach in Doki Doki Pa – I mean – Super Mario Bros. 2 because her flying ability trumped Mario’s blandness, Luigi’s wobbliness and Toad’s… whatever it was Toad had.

Well, in a moment of misguided feminism, Nintendo produced a game with Peach as the lead. In the same swift motion they made what immediately seems like a massive case of foot-in-mouth-forever and made the main feature of the game the princess’s extreme mood swings.

I think this is hilarious.

Yes. Her fiery rage burns bridges. Her torrential tears make plants grow. Her… calmness… restores health and her happiness propels her drowsily up into the air. She can switch from relaxed to furious to happy to depressed in a space of seconds. Surely this must be a mistake. Is this really targetted towards female gamers and non-gamers? How does something like this not get banned?

I dunno. I do know that the whole package makes quite an entertaining playthrough. The game is a meandering and nostalgic trip through a world populated by all your favorite memories from every past Mario sidescroller while still being a distinct and contemporary game with new goals and challenges.

This game is packed with all kinds of content. The completist in me is pleased with everything there is to unlock. Hold on, I’m just now buying Endless Vibe. It’s a bit late in the game for it to serve any purpose, but I’m still getting it. There. I have now experienced every single portion and aspect of this game, and I regret nothing.

If you played and remember fondly, as do I, titles like Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, 3, Yoshi’s Story and/or Super Mario World, play Super Princess Peach. It was made with you in mind. And girls with crazy mood swinds.

P.S. Yeah? So? Sure, I enjoyed Cooking Mama as well. What of it?

I got to the last boss and just… stopped. I figured I’d just take a break and concentrate on something else for a while, but a brief inspection shows that I have no desire to complete the game. Everything up to that point was disappointing or just annoying.

The battle system is first person. Why? I don’t know. There’s a static sprite of a monster and some goofy-looking patterns waving around in the background. On top of this bland mess lies the menu system, which is passable. One interesting note is the ‘autofight’ option which throws every character into a frenzy, attacking seemingly at random and curing every status ailment, however trivial. No items are used (there goes any chance Jeff could be useful), and no skills beyond life and heal (and there goes Paula). With Ness alone this might be useful. As for Poo, I don’t know how to use him. He’s too weak to attack, and he’s got too small an amount of MP to go more than a few battles without filling his inventory with MP restorers, and there are precious few decent MP restorers, too.

I would put a ‘read more’ button here, but I can’t find it. I might edit it in later. I found it!

This leads to the next point: the inventory. What a nightmare. Each character can only carry a certain amount of things, equipment included. Each inventory is separate from the others, and a character must ‘give’ each item to the character who needs it. That’s a pain. What’s more of a pain is choosing which items to take. Oh, items don’t stack. Five small pizzas means five more slots filled, and five fewer horns of life or cups of life noodles. That’s no good.

The MP restorers? The best, the truffle, restores… what, 40 MP? And it’s finite. You can’t just go to the truffle store and fill up your inventory. Once you’ve got all the truffles, that’s it. No more truffles. The next best thing, magic tarts restores half that, but at least there is an infinite amount of them. Still, referring back to the issue of inventory management, one more item that restores 20 (not even enough for one good skill) points is one fewer item that revives, heals, and cures all status ailments. There’s no balance.

Here is a special mention. The funky fungus status ailment is the most awful, dirty, foul, despicable obscenity I’ve ever experienced in any game. It is the OPPOSITE OF FUN. It does NOT BELONG in a GAME.

Hrm. Fortunately this game came before game designers were pressured to boost the sales of guides like Nintendo Power, so the logic required isn’t too bizarre or unearthly. I mean, there are a bunch of odd things like sleeping to continue the plot, and many times the player is expected to backtrack, with no direction, to a point in the past. There are tip shacks in which reside men who will, for a fee, tell you to go back and talk to that guy you spoke with once and forgot. It’s plot!

Let’s take a look at the plot. Alien from future… right… tells normal earthling boy… yeah… to save the world. Not spectacular. Boy proceeds to save the world. Huh. That’s not exactly thrilling. Well, I did have fun playing the Jeff and Poo lead-ins, that was a nice change in perspective. Still, eh. I’m not the sort of person to use the term ‘underwhelming’, so I’ll instead say ‘uninspired’.

I don’t have an opinion on the music, because I played with the sound turned off.

P.S. I’ll close with a question to all you Earthbound cultists. Why would you be playing Earthbound when you could be playing Chrono Trigger? Or heck, Tailspin on the Turbo GraphX?

Nope. I’ve seen it. It’s the one in which Marge goes crazy. Oh, by the way, thanks for looking after my stuff, Marge. Anyways. Ok. I need to focus a bit more on this article. D’aww. Credits roll. Uh, dang.

So Nethack. It was this really swell game a long time ago, and it’s still got quite a cult following. The mechanics are largely based on AD&D (THAC0 is just… weird. AC drops to zero… and… just keeps going down? Huh? That’s silly.)

Nethack works on a step system… Oh hey, I haven’t seen this one. Alright, it’s over. Earthbound’s calling to me… Ahh, it can wait. Step system. Every action has a certain rate, timed by the player character’s actions. Grid bugs move at 1:1, floating eyes act only once every five or six rounds, and leprechauns move a few times for every move made by the player. I hate those things. What the heck is that thing on their front door? Is it like… a rat head knocker or something? Or a vulture? Huh.

The graphics have never been so extravagant, and all you ascii die-hards will, begrudgingly or otherwise, have to agree. A J! Is it a duck? Stairs down? Or a Yendorian Express Card? My money’s on bugbear. Well ok, it’s not that bad, but it is pretty bad. There have been recent exfoliation attempts like Falconseye, but the best solution at present seems to be bitmap tiling. It won’t hold up against Pitfall, but it’s at least decipherable.

The plot never really caught me. Your god, X, wants you to go down a hundred floors of some dungeon and get an amulet made by some wizard who, for some reason, had the power to craft an item so powerful the gods were jealous. So go, go die of starvation or food poisoning until you discover just the right blend of corpse dishes, and expect a class-based sidequest on floor fifteen. Once you get the amulet in your hands, run like hell in a Metroid-esque (note: nethack predates Metroid) escape sequence.

You know, I’ve never beat this game. I’m still in the incredulous stage, where with no proof I don’t actually believe anyone __ITALICISE HERE__CAN__/ITALICISE HERE__ do it. I dunno. You can say it’s like Dwarf Fortress where the goal is to get wiped out in an interesting variety of ways, but it lacks a certain drive, a motivation that the gaming industry has since developed. Alright, alright, I’d finally gotten to the bottom of Mine Town, grabbed my Luck Stone, gotten some intrinsics, wands of wishing and cancellation and a vampire bat came along and bit me. Would you like your posessions identified? y/n. Thanks. Oh, and the game is very careful about save files – there is zero save file manipulation.

I mean, I’m sure you can hack some hex into giving yourself whatever you want (you lousy cheater), but I think you could at least be able to save the game. There are just too many stupid-deaths. Whups, that amulet was cursed and of strangulation. Whups, you stepped on a fire trap and your potions exploded, killing you. Whups, your own ghost from a previous bones file destroyed you. Thanks, past self. Whups, you stumbled into a floating eye and subsequently spent several days paralyzed while a newt nibbled your life total to zero. Whups, you forgot to turn off autopickup and tripped down the stairs to a fatal end. Whups, that ring, while uncursed, turned out to be a ring of conflict and your own horse trampled you to death. Whups, whups. Conducive playability this is not. We (relatively) young’uns may be spoiled by oversaving, but I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.

As much bad as I have to say about this game, I’m still talking about it. It’s an epic classic and it is showing no sign of fading away. It has had the most impact on, and in fact is the pioneer and flagbearer, of an entire class of genres. I’ll keep meeting people who are crazy about the game. I will continue to return to it every year or so. Heck, who knows, I might even ascend some day.

P.S. I’ve got this game on my DS. Yes, that is cool.

As is common in the earlier decade of my life, I have no idea how this game came into my possession. Maybe it was procured in The Great Garage Sale. That is more than likely.

So the main character is some lovable character with whom I had no experience. He was tall, his green jacket had green stripes, he had green teeth and crazy green hair. He shot some sort of spiky balls out of his hands, said spiky balls being the main and only method of dealing damage.

Not that it was a fighting game. The first section of the game took place in Beetlejuice’s house (as interested by an odd-looking green girl) after some sort of ghost apocalypse had occurred. There are a bunch of green doors. Inside each is a puzzle, the most common of which is ‘shoot this thing’ or ‘shoot this thing into the other thing’.

Once that’s done a ladder descends from the attic, which is entirely a puzzle while containing several other puzzles. You’ve got to light a sheet on fire a bunch of times by shooting it in the right directs, and there’s one of those furry things from McDonalds play areas in the early ninties. Or a Tangela. Anyways you shoot it to death and move on… to the cemetary!

The cemetary is a long, boring puzzle where you push statues onto pedestals that just might be three screens away. More puzzles happen, and a door appears into…

Mine carts! Mine carts are great, especially when the game physics are shaky (at best) and the controls are lame! It felt like what I’d later discover to be DDR, or, randomly mashing the directional pad and hoping everything turned out ok. Not likely. But if it did, you reach the next zone which is filled with deadly spikes and the player is somehow expected to know that the top half of Mr. Beetlejuice doesn’t actually take up any space. After a hellish confusion of bizarrely patterned, rapidly vanishing platforms you reach… you reach…

More minecarts! At this point I usually turned the power off and went outside.

You know why?

Would you like to know why?

Here’s the kicker of the whole game, itself in an era of gamesaving cartridges or, at the very least, password states.

Here it is…

There’s no save feature. I don’t want to talk about this game anymore.

p.s. I still can’t beat that game.

My hand moves slightly, my fingers trailing over several plastic rectangles. I know their weight and texture by memory; I know their taste and smell; I know how it feels to slide a cartridge into the slot until it locks solidly into place.

More often than any other, the game I chose was Super Mario World. How could I describe my love of this game to one who did not spend his early years without a Super Nintendo? I could not. Any attempt would seem like explaining a painting to a blind man.

Or music to a deaf man. The Super Nintendo controller a finely tuned instrument, I guided Mario through a deliberate dance, to achieve goals and react smoothly to unforseen (less and less every time) danger. I became familiar with every arrangement of enemy and obstacle. I can still trace every step along the shortest route to the final goal, and enjoy doing so.

This memory – the koopas, the cape, the dragon coins and Yoshi, the Star and Special zones, the switch palaces – is a part of my childhood and will be part of my legacy.

p.s. I still hate Tubular. It’s such a pain.

Each level has a set amount and placement of enemy bases and each of those has a set density, but other than that every level is randomized. As levels progress the bases get more complex and different weaponry.

Each base consists of one core and any number of nodes, all connected by invincible piping. The nodes are randomized in a square, and the pipes usefully protect the core from attack. Nodes and cores fire projectiles to further deter eager pilots from reaching the core. For the most part this strategy works, but there’s the occasional time the base is randomized just so that the player can guide the ship straight down into the core. Once the core is destroyed, of course, the whole base explodes.

Other than that, the map loops N/S and W/E, extra ships are awarded at every set amount of points, you can pick up where you left off, and you can shoot diagonally. That’s it. No powerups, no bombs, no donation incentives, no achievements. There are five keys. You can make out pixels without squinting. And I loved it.
Why? What magic is there that draws me to these older games before newer, flashier ones? I don’t deny that new games can be fun, but I’ll always return to older games that were never blockbusters.

Very few times have I seen a modern game attempt to grasp old gametypes, and very few of those have I seen succeed. The PDA Game packaged with Alien Hominid is most certainly one of the successful ones, but that’s a story for another day.

P.S. You can play this game for free, but you may be hard-pressed to find a Windows port. I dunno. I haven’t looked.

Well, it certainly wasn’t the cover. That’s garish, and had I had my present sensibility I’d have avoided the game entirely.

The gameplay was slow but smooth. Speed wasn’t really an issue and the enemies were mostly just an annoyance.

Actually, it seems to me it wasn’t all that complex, anyways. The idea was to wander around in a factory picking up randomly distributed boxes. Each box held a part that could go towards building a vehicle to win a race at the end of a level. This included spray paint and decals so you could make sure everyone knows just how extreme you were. It was fun because… um.

Anyways, from a gaming standpoint it was an easy-paced platform game with the goal to collect boxes while avoiding enemies. From an educational standpoint the player learned that red does not add speed, and that pointed things move more quickly than blunt things. Uh. Also it. Hm.

Once again I am surprised by what I’ve found under the rocks of my memory. Why did I like this game?

That’s right, back in my day we played games we didn’t like and we liked it!

P.S. Banana!

P.S. Here’s the picture of some crazy-looking band I came across whilst looking for the cover of the game:

You kids and your music.