Part of going through a series in its entirety is that you must face down everything. That includes the good, the very good, and the not so good. In this case, our Kirby journey takes us through five games ranging from 1993 to 1998. These are not essential. Rather, they’re okay time wasters that you should probably skip unless you have a very particular kind of nostalgia.
Some of these are on the Switch NSO thanks to the magic of backwards compatibility. The others? I obtained extremely legally.
‘Kirby’s Pinball Land’ (1993, Game Boy)
The box art to this game says “take aim with Kirby!” The irony of this statement is that no one is really able to fully control where a pinball goes. Has HAL Laboratory ever played a pinball machine before?
This is the third Kirby game ever made, the first spin-off, and Nintendo’s second pinball game (after the NES title “Pinball”). It feels historically significant, but when you play it, it’s just a novelty. Slight, short, sweet, simple, and over before you know it. The game has multiple screens to emulate how long a real pinball board is, and the Game Boy has a bit of a hard time recreating the pinball cabinet smoothly.
This was an okay time for a half hour, but beyond that, you have to be a child under the age of six and extremely bored to replay the heck out of this game. Or sycophantic about a black-and-white Kirby.
‘Kirby’s Dream Course’ (1994, SNES)
“Marble Madness” would have ruled as a Kirby game, but instead we got this. It’s mini-golf, but your stroke count is actually your lives. Run out of lives, and you can’t hit the ball. The goal is to aim precisely at the enemies on the board, hit ’em, get some power ups, and finally land in the hole to end the level. At first, it’s novel and quite a lot of fun. But as soon as you screw up, run out of lives, or forget to use a power-up ability, you sort of want to just throw the Switch out the window. Or SNES controller. Maybe you played this growing up, and also ran out of patience.
If there was a way to modernize it, make it not as punishing, this could have legs. But as it stands, this game would have made me very upset if I had got it as a Hanukkah gift because I was not very good at “Dream Course.” A tale as old as time from a critical perspective: The worse you are at a game, the more you’re inclined to hate it, and vice versa.
‘Kirby’s Avalanche’ (1995, SNES)
This is just “Puyo Puyo.” They didn’t do anything else to it. Great if you already love it, but there is nothing else to talk about. This is just a port with a Kirby skin laid on top.
‘Kirby’s Block Ball’ (1996, Game Boy)
I love any clone of “Arkanoid,” and this actually delivers something special. Quickly, you’ll find that instead of just the bottom bar sliding left to right to bounce Kirby up into the bricks, there is sometimes a top bar, or even a left and right bar, to keep Kirby bouncing on all four sides of the screen.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before in one of these games. It’s really fun to have to think non-linearly, and constantly be playing goalie for four different goals. Sprinkle in the usual dash of Kirby cuteness, powers, and bonus stages, and you have yourself my favorite spin-off game thus far. I would highly recommend you try this out if you haven’t, I went the whole way through and never got tired of its ability to impress and surprise me. Ability is the pun word in that sentence.
Also, there’s a fun boss fight at the end against King DeDeDe.
‘Kirby’s Star Stacker’ (1997, Game Boy/SNES)
I never played the “Puzzle League” series of falling block games. I very much enjoy them now, but as a kid, you can only receive so many games as gifts, and I am a Tetris man until I die. But after going through the Pokémon edition on N64, “Star Stacker” on Game Boy, and its remake for SNES, I can say, now, finally: They are good and I like them. But I don’t love them.
It’s a simple game — one that didn’t get repetitive for me until I started getting really good at it and the challenge drifted away. Unlike any “Tetris,” it didn’t speed up after a while, so I just dominated the CPU, and moved on to another opponent in the story mode.
I don’t play puzzle games for the multiplayer, I play them to zen out and reach a state of nirvana. Inner peace, for me, could be achieved, but I wasn’t going to commit the kind of time and spiritual involvement to this to reach such a plane of existence.
These are both good ones, so there’s that at least.
The next Kirby games I’ll be covering are “Super Star” and “Dream Land 3” for the SNES. The N64 era follows that, which brings exactly one game to the console, and then it quickly moves onto the GBA and GameCube era. So be sure to look out for that next week as I continue my Kirby Khronicles adventure.
Image Credit: “Kirby’s Super Star Stacker,” Jewel men10
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