Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble
Kirby's Tilt'n'Tumble is a motion-controlled marble-rolling adventure starting the world's most popular pink puffball. Featuring an overhead perspective instead of the series-standard side-view, Tilt'n'Tumble curls Kirby into a ball that you need to roll and bounce through each course, similar to the Monkey Ball series. Every course has its own share of hazards and gimmicks, with all eight levels (made up of four courses each) having a different theme that is reflected in its gimmicks. Each of the levels conclude with a boss fight, with most of them being the same generic boss in a different arena, with only the occasional exception. The developers really weren't messing around with the level design here though, and the typical easiness of a Kirby game is replaced by something a little less forgiving. That's actually the reason why I think the Switch is the definitive way to play this game.
Allow me to explain myself. Lining up with Kirby's usual rules, damage tends to be easy to avoid, and you can take a good amount of hits before you actually die. However, if you happen to fall off of a stage, that's it. Kaput. You're done. The problem is that when you're rolling a ball over a flat surface with no walls, that ball is going to fall off, probably a lot. Sure, it's a video game, and learning from failure is part of the process, but I don't think I would've had the patience or the skill to make it to the end of Tilt'n'Tumble legitimately. That's where the NSO emulation features come in. Taking advantage of save states and the rewind feature, I was able to see everything that I actually wanted to see in this game without the frustration of repeatedly failing in the same places and needing to start over. If I had picked this up for the Gameboy Color, I think I would've played for enough time to appreciate how cool the motion controls were in an 8-bit handheld, but I most certainly would not have beaten more than a few stages, let alone the whole game. That makes the Switch my ideal way to play Tilt'n'Tumble.
Playing on the Switch also had the side-effect of making me forget that I was playing a Gameboy Color game. A few times at least, I felt like I was playing something from the Wii, if not a Switch original. The motion controls were so well implemented into the emulator that the feel of a Wii game was there, and I can't even say that of some modern motion-controlled games. I can't speak to how it worked on the original hardware, but I needed to say how surprisingly good it felt to play, or I would've felt like the review was incomplete.
Strangely enough, I think the controls are what makes this game worth playing. Some games are great because of the games themselves, others are great because of the technology behind them. Kirby Tilt'n'Tumble is absolutely the latter, in my opinion. I wouldn't say I actually had much fun playing it, but I was fascinated by the controls, mostly because they don't feel like they belong on the Gameboy Color. The novelty of Kirby Tilt'n'Tumble alone makes it worth trying, and with the help of save states and rewinding, it might actually be worth playing all the way through. With its recent release on NSO, you should absolutely give it a look before it's lost to time again.
