amphibious_ReViews

There isn't much to the pink puffball's first outing. Don't get me wrong, the game is beautifully designed with a unique system of movement and combat, a cute cast of characters, and impressive graphics for the humble Game Boy . It's just that the whole adventure is shorter than Super Mario Land , and Kirby himself is completely lacking the copy ability that made him so famous.  In this little five-stage romp, you play as Kirby on his quest to get back all of the food that King Dedede stole from Dream Land, although that plot isn't really clear until after you beat the game. Rather than being long, continuous pathways, each stage on your journey to the penguin's castle is broken into rooms connected by doors. They each end in a unique boss fight, with all of the fights repeated in a gauntlet style before the game's final confrontation. While all of the locales looked nice and offered something minimally different in the way of platforming, the magic of Kir

If you're looking for a bite-sized game that puts your skills to the test but doesn't punish you for failure, then you're in luck. VVVVVV is a hard-as-nails platformer with no lives system and generous checkpoints. In fact, it almost completely ignores how many times you screw up. Because of this, its platforming challenges feel like obstacles to overcome rather than frustrations to be dealt with, making VVVVVV a rewarding experience from start to finish. You play as Captain Viridian, the leader of a small space-faring crew, who must find and rescue five members of his team (whose names also start with "V") after their teleporter malfunctioned during a multi-dimensional emergency. The alternate dimension you find yourself in is full of ledges, walls, and platforms, but Viridian is completely incapable of jumping. Instead, he must completely invert gravity in order to maneuver, but even that has a catch. Gravity can only be flipped if Viridian is planted on the g

Tricking new players into thinking it's just a port of the classic arcade game , Donkey Kong turns out to be an impressive puzzle platformer, perfectly suited for the Gameboy . Pitting Mario against his original rival in the hopes of saving his first girlfriend, Donkey Kong offers a challenge so satisfying that it actually spawned an entire spin-off series of Mario games. However, the formula is already so refined here that I have little doubt you'll be fully satisfied after this game alone. Throughout your experience, you'll encounter three types of levels. The most common has you finding a key and carrying it back to a locked door in order to pursue Donkey Kong and Pauline. Beating a few of those will lead up to an encounter with the ape, where just reaching the same platform as Pauline is enough to scare him away and end the stage. However, at the end of each world, he's gutsy enough to try and fight, requiring you to throw his projectiles back at him until he&#

Reusing game engines has proven to be pretty popular in the Zelda series. It offers developers a chance to craft more experimental and risky games, as the initial investment on the engine was covered by the previous, more traditional release. As a huge fan of A Link Between Worlds , I was ecstatic to learn it was getting a pseudo-follow-up. My excitement only grew when Nintendo sent me an early-access demo, and I somehow had no concerns that this was another multiplayer-focused game, despite my preference for solo play. Since the previous multiplayer Zelda games had pretty functional single-player modes, I anticipated that I could expect the same here. Unfortunately, that wasn't an entirely accurate assumption. Like its predecessors , Tri Force Heroes is level-based in order to accommodate its multiplayer focus. All of the stages are designed like dungeons, so they hold up really well for puzzle-solving challenges, but they lack a lot of the same charm you can find in Four Swor

To be completely frank, fighting games aren't really my thing, so my interest in Yie Ar Kung Fu was almost purely for its historical value. Although not the first game in its genre, it was the progenitor of the health bar that would soon become a staple in series like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat . The feature is pretty simplistic in its debut here, broken into eight equal segments that detract one by one with a hit of any kind, but as an early title, I wasn't expecting something super advanced. That mindset was good to have going into this, as the rest of the game matches the health bar in complexity. In Yie Ar Kung Fu , you can jump, crouch, and walk as you would expect from a fighting game, but your actual combat potential is pretty limited. You can punch and kick, but the segmented health bars mean the only difference between the two is where they hit. There's no risk-reward balance for heavy and light attacks, there are no combos, and there are no other playable

I tried to play the original NES Metroid multiple times. Each attempt would start with optimism and end with disappointment and frustration. I wanted so badly to appreciate it the way I had with Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda , but I just couldn't get past its archaic controls and cryptic structure. Metroid: Zero Mission helped to fill that gap by modernizing every aspect of the original that had previously frustrated me, while still offering the same world and story that I wanted to experience in the first place. That, along with the fantastic new content, made this game as hard to put down as the original was to pick up. Zero Mission has you taking the role of the bounty Hunter Samus Aran as she attempts to defeat the space pirates that have taken over the planet Zebes. When you first start the game, Samus is pitifully weak, with only a short-range beam in the way of firepower and an equally short jump as the sum of her maneuverability. Her relative incompetence se

After Mario 's public execution on March 31st, 2021, someone had to fill the void he left behind. With Super Mario Bros. 35 rendered unplayable, Pac-Man stepped in with his own Switch -exclusive battle royale title to save the day. While the plumber's absence is still painful, having another competetive multiplayer title based on a legendary game helped to soften the blow. As the third free battle royale game for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, PAC-MAN 99 also brings back a little optimism to the future potential of the service. Like the previous two NSO battle royale games, the familiar gameplay of the original is left in-tact here, with just a few additions to accommodate the competetive nature of the title. The same targeting system is brought back from the other two games, letting you decide who to "attack" in the hopes of being the last player standing. In this game, attacking is done by eating ghosts, and every ghost you eat after consuming a power pel

In an effort to learn more about the character I had otherwise only encountered through Super Smash Bros. , I picked up a copy of Bayonetta 2 . I was a little weary to play this game, as I hadn't played the original, and I didn't know how important it was going to be in the sequel. Long story short, it was absolutely necessary, and I had to read a plot summary online just to understand half of what was going on in this game. That did hurt my enjoyment a bit, but I'm the idiot who played the sequel first, so I won't fault the game for it. However, there were still some aspects of this title that I had to force myself past in order to get to the parts that were actually worth playing. The basic premise of Bayonetta 2 is simple. You play as Bayonetta , an Umbra Witch who can kick butt in battle on her own, but is unbelievably strong thanks to her ability to summon assistance from the underworld. All you really have to do in the game is travel through some fairly linear le

As a game made to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Rusty Lake  and with a name separated from the Cube Escape branding, one would expect a pretty grand new experience from this game. Instead, Samsara Room feels like a Cube Escape game released five years ago. Sure, there are some quality of life improvements over the first games in the series, but the relative simplicity of the rooms and the absence of any minigame-style puzzles leaves this game feeling unexpectedly basic. After the impressive depth of story and gameplay found in the previous five entries in the series, I was surprised by how much of a step back this game was. However, overlooking that disappointment for a bit, I do remember loving the older Cube Escape games more for their eerie world than their puzzles, and Samsara Room is just as enjoyable as those older titles for generally the same reasons. It's also not very fair of me to complain about a completely free game. What it does, it does well. This is especi

While this may be the game that started Paper Mario 's growing detachment from its RPG roots, it was my personal introduction to the series, so my experience was completely unhindered by any longing for a return to tradition. Instead, what I saw was a clever twist on the classic platformer formula with a heavy emphasis on world-building and storytelling. With this game, Nintendo was able to craft an adventure that feels inspired by the titular plumber's backlog, but that is more than willing to create something new and unique through its world and characters. Super Paper Mario flips the established Mario RPG formula on its head, acting as a full-fledged platformer with RPG elements, rather than an RPG complemented by light platforming. However, it still has the more fleshed-out story that one can expect from an RPG, making this one of the most emotionally engaging platformers that Mario has ever starred in. The main gimmick also plays delightfully on the "paper" a

When A Link Between Worlds came onto the scene, its biggest claim to fame was the fact that it revisited the Hyrule of A Link to the Past . However, I have yet to play through that game, so my experience with its iteration of Hyrule was brand new when I played A Link Between Worlds . This led me to focus a lot more on how this game breaks conventions, crafting a revitalized approach to the Zelda formula while still feeling familiar and approachable. A Link Between Worlds ' story is a pretty standard Zelda affair. Everything is peachy in the start, giving you a chance to learn the world and the mechanics, but then the villain shows up and does villain things, and you are the only one who can stop him. While the game advertises the ability to flatten yourself against a wall as its neon gimmick, that isn't what sets this title apart. Where most other Zelda games require you to challenge the dungeons in a predetermined order, using the items you find to progress further in the

Combining the gameplay of Namco 's Galaga with the perspective of Atar i's Tempest , Gyruss ends up feeling like a perfect evolution of both. Since most of my early-childhood arcade experience was actually through various iterations of Namco Museum , games like this didn't just pass me by, they virtually didn't exist. If this game wasn't on the list of 1001 Games to Play Before You Die , I probably wouldn't have ever played it, and that's a huge shame. With the Galaga series being some of my favorite arcade titles, Gyruss fits snuggly as a favorite as well. You've probably guessed already, but if you're familiar with Galaga , you'll likely be pretty comfortable with Gyruss . Practically everything is recreated here, from the way enemies fly on screen in formation, giving you a chance to take out a few before they fall in line with the rest of their crew, to the bonus stages that give you a chance to earn some extra points without threatening

Originally released in the West with a massive redesign as  Tetris Attack , Panel de Pon was destined to be ignored by me for quite a while. Drop-block puzzle games that weren't actually Tetris didn't really interest me for a long time. It wasn't until I played the Puyo Puyo Tetris demo with my wife that I realized playing Puyo Puyo  (or other similar titles) could be fun too. I still wouldn't actually play Panel de Pon for years after that, but it's thanks to Puyo Puyo that I opted to give this game a chance in the first place. Plus, I can be a sucker for games that only released in Japan. Panel de Pon is pretty straightforward. The board follows the typical rules of a match-3 game, clearing any blocks that match in color and form a contiguous line of three or more, with the game ending if any blocks make it to the top of the screen. As expected, the required block matches don't tend to happen naturally. You are provided with a cursor that is two tiles wid