But yeah:
This. This game was amazing.
You play as the Yoshi's, a group of multicoloured Yoshi who safeguard Mario against the evil Kamek and his minions who are attempting to steal him. I guess the art department got bored, made nine different colour palettes for Yoshi and just ran with all of them.
Anyway, the Yoshi find Mario after he drops from the sky in a blanket. A stork carrying Baby Mario and Baby Luigi to his parents was ambushed by Kamek and Baby Mario gets dropped and Kamek makes off with Baby Luigi and somehow the stork.
Anyway, you fight tonnes of bosses embedded with powers given by Kamek including slime, a crab, a piranha, a raven.
The fights were unpredictable and hilarious. Since you'd fight a bigger version of the smaller enemies you were jumping on and squashing, you'd think you'd get a sense of "Oh, just use the same tactics, right?"
WRONG.
Raphael the Raven was a brilliantly thought out fight. It started out with you scaling a tower to fight the raven. You've got to keep going up whilst a large pit of lava suddenly rises. If you fall down you die.
So you get to the top, see the tiny enemy, Kamek rolls up and sprays magic multicoloured shit on it and you think "Ok, the room looks fairly empty. Not sure how this fight is going to play out. He's a raven, seen these before. Not dangerous. Slightly bouncy."
That's when the raven rams you, you bounce off the walls, into the sky and the Raven follows you.
SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, YOU'RE ON THE MOON. Look at that tower you came from! Forget that, you're on the moon now! The rules are different here!
I was so addled by this weirdness, it took me a while to figure out how to beat the boss despite the solution being pretty simple. (Groundpound on the pegs when Raphael walks over them.)
Another memorable fight was Prince Froggy. He gets made big...
Then he just eats you. Before you have a chance to move.
WELCOME TO FROGBELLY. HOPE YOU SURVIVE.
So Shy Guys, the hooded little enemy people, leak through his abdomen, you eat them, make eggs and fire them at his lungs until he dies of heart failure.
I was nine years old and I'd never seen a game so fun. It had everything. Collectables like red coins, flowers and stars which increased your counter in the top right hand corner. Extra levels you unlock once you've got all the unlockables
I'm 21 now and this has been released.
I wouldn't recommend this to my worst enemy. The art is awful, the enemies are either the same or worse, the bosses (SIX unoriginal and awful bosses down from FOURTEEN because the rest are just Kamek fights that make no sense.) are uninspired. The control scheme is wank, the responsiveness is piss-poor and it's just awful.
Nintendo have just lost the handle repeatedly on making a unique and compelling game. It's as interesting as pocket lint, as refreshing as drinking hot tar and as funny as someone with thalidomide poisoning.
Potentially the developers at Nintendo all have thalidomide poisoning. That would explain why they keep losing the handle of things.
And this:
MR PIPE. WHO AT NINTENDO DEVELOPED MR PIPE?
This awful bastard gives you power ups if you die too much in a level. So if you're repeating a level trying to collect shit and having a grand old time dying because you need to get all the red coins and sunflower, then he's here to urinate on your cornflakes by puffing out Flutterwings that give you infinite hover so you can fly through the entire level or Golden Flutterwings which stop you from dying.
Well fuck you, Nintendo. Are nine year olds these days too bowl headed to play an actual game and instead need to just ride this game like a bloody roller coaster at an amusement park? I'm sorry, I thought having a challenge was fun?
And then the final boss battle was just a rehashed fight of the GBA version that was watered down to the extreme with all the excitement drained out of it.
And then the ending happens and it's exactly the same as the last version.
And then Bowser pops out of nowhere "from time and space" and you fight him in a stage which is just like the one in Super Marios Bros with the shitty switch and everything.
And then Kamek uses magic powder and you fight him again, in an exact copy of the first fight.
Then the credits roll and you find out that Mr Pipe is actually Mario who has gone back in time to give out power ups and be a shithead who's ruining national IQ's, stopping kids from thinking for themselves or learning independence and generally being a dickhole.
As for the extra levels that used to be in the original? Forget them being unlocked after you've got collectibles, you just open them when you've repeated enough levels.
BECAUSE EVERYONE IS A WINNER AND YOU SHOULDN'T FEEL AS IF YOU HAVE TO WORK TO ACHIEVE SOMETHING.
MODERN VIDEO GAMES.
So in conclusion, shit game.
But it's not really for me, is it? I'm not the target demographic.
Still, I strongly feel that kids deserve a better Yoshi's Island than this one.
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