That weird face-bag with rosy cheeks and ears in the middle is Scarfy, my favorite enemy from the Kirby series. In the Kirby platformers, if you try to inhale Scarfy, he gets really pissed off at you and chases after you for a while. If he hits you, he explodes and hurts you. The trick is to blow something at him— a puff of air, a star, a block, whatever— and then he’ll harmlessly explode while you stay at a distance.
In Kirby’s Block Ball, an Arkanoid clone for the Game Boy, Scarfy just turns into a bomb powerup if you kill him, which is not at all unique and kinda disappointing.
I had to look up Scarfy’s name to make sure I had it right because I wanted to call him “Barfy.” I think my name is better.
In Kirby’s Dream Land 2, using one of your abilities while riding one of your 3 animal mounts changes the nature of the ability. When riding Kine the sunfish, using the Spark ability lets you shoot light bulbs out of your mouth by pressing and releasing the B button— but pressing and holding the B button will hold the light bulb in place and continuously shock Kine. Gruesome.
RIP Lolo and Lala, Kirby programmer HAL Laboratories’ characters created for a series of puzzle games in 1989 and then murdered by Kirby in Kirby’s Dream Land in 1992. It seems a little twisted to make a game’s protagonist kill off a different series’ protagonists without any real indication as to why they’re a threat to you, but I did it and I only felt a little remorse.
Weekend of Kirby: Kirby’s Dream Land
I’m on call this weekend and recovering from a long week at work, so I’m staying at home and playing as many Kirby games as I can. It occurred to me that I wasn’t as familiar with the Kirby library of games as I wanted to be, and various blogs and forums have recently reminded me of some of the great ones I HAVE played— Kirby’s Adventure for the NES, Kirby’s Canvas Curse on the DS, and the bizarre Kirby’s Dream Course for the SNES. So with all of this in mind, I’m going to play as many Kirby games as I can this weekend and write up any thoughts I have on each of them.
Kirby’s Dream Land is where I decided to start. It’s the first Kirby game, released in 1992 for the Game Boy, although I never had the Game Boy game for some reason. It came out just months before Super Mario Land 2, which I think is widely hailed as the first Game Boy platformer that can be compared to its console brethren. Kirby comes close, though; the animations are charming and the amount of variety and art in the game is really nice, the controls are really fluid, and the music is fantastic.
I think the only thing that I would ding the game for is its difficulty and length— I just played through the whole thing in ~35 minutes and only died twice. The fifth and final stage is essentially a boss rush, with very short versions of the four preceding stages followed by slightly more difficult versions of the four bosses you previously fought. The bosses are interesting but lack depth; even the final boss King Dedede doesn’t change his strategy as you hurt him, so once you learn the three or four things he does it’s just a tedious matter of following his pattern enough times to chip away at his health.
For a 20-year-old game that ran on an extremely basic handheld device, though, this game is kind of a marvel. It’s no wonder that Kirby went on to star in so many other Game Boy games (and branch out onto the NES and SNES quickly after: Kirby’s Adventure for the NES came out less than a year later!)… the animation and music in Kirby’s Dream Land is just too damn charming.
—Casey
Draggin’ Quest
I don’t typically like real-time strategy games— I usually don’t have fun with them because they just stress me out, trying to keep track of what all kinds of different things are doing at the same time. With that in mind, I’m not really sure why I bought Battleheart for iOS. It was pretty up-front about the kind of game it was. I think I was mostly drawn to the art and the promise of finding and equipping loot, possibly my favorite thing to do in a video game.
Luckily, Battleheart keeps it pretty simple. You’ll never have more than 4 characters to control on the screen at a time, which is good— you can limit your party members to basic RPG character roles like tank, healer, or DPS, which means that you have a clear idea of which character to go to when you want to perform a particular task. You also can see everything going on at once, so you don’t need to rely on sounds or other auxiliary notification systems telling you that a unit is waiting for a command or in danger elsewhere. The art and animations are simple and fun, reminding me of old Flash animations on Newgrounds from back when I was in high school. There is very little artifice in the game; just enough to propel you forward and play stage after stage. Each battle tends to take ~3-5 minutes, depending on how well-prepared you are for what you’re currently facing. All of this put together makes for something that’s quick to pick up and play. I started out on iPhone and liked it, but switched to the iPad after only a few battles when it became clear that having the larger screen would make it easier to manage characters’ placement.
I only have two complaints with the game right now. The first is that you run out of different accessory items fairly quickly in the game. Once I had 8 items (2 for each character) improving various stats in place, I did very little trading of items around to improve my party. I mostly just saw copies of the same item, which I would sell for gold. I quickly ran out of things to spend my gold on besides just pumping up the stats of items I already had, which is not particularly exciting. (The good news is that it sounds like the developers have received this feedback from other people and they’re going to add more items and more characters to the next update.) My other problem is that I frequently end up with a lot of characters lumped together in the same small area, sometimes also with enemies blocking the way, and it can be hard to focus on the character I’m actually trying to target, whether I’m trying to tap a character to make them move or use a special attack or if I’m trying to make a particular character a target of a healing spell (which is especially crucial). I’m not sure how this can be fixed, unfortunately, but I’d love to see the developer try to find a way.
For someone like me who’s competent with gaming but not normally a huge fan of real-time strategy, I think this is a great game to play to get a taste of a genre you may otherwise feel that you need to avoid. The depth might not be enough for die-hard strategy gamers, although I think the price ($3) is extremely well worth the content provided compared to a PC title that costs $20-50. Overall I applaud the presentation and look forward to see how the title develops over time.
—Casey
