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Kirby’s Dream Land (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I always forget that in this, the very first Kirby game, Kirby’s well known basic power of inhaling in baddies and copying their abilities doesn’t exist. Well, he can suck them in, but he can’t gain powers from doing so.

It’s also very easy. As in, I didn’t die. You can avoid a load of things by just flying over them or sucking them up, and there’s health pickups everywhere, so it’s only really the bosses that provide any sort of challenge. Except they don’t.

Not that any of that matters though, because despite the age, lack of difficulty, and limited nature of Kirby himself, it’s still a lot of fun to play through.

WarioWare, Inc.: Minigame Mania (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Nintendo added a load of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games to their online subscription service this week, and although I’m hyped to get to play through The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap I’m leaving that until I’m done with Fire Emblem Warriors. In the meantime, however, I thought I’d play this.

It’s… very easy, isn’t it? Have I really remembered how to play every single minigame, accurately and with skill, from 20 years ago? To the point where I think I failed only about five times in total and only one of them was on a boss? And then went through Endless Mode (on Easy, to be fair) and got to 400 before I gave up? Yes, it’s easy.

But it’s fun. And there’s more to do now, like unlock the few remaining games and VS mode games.

Adventure (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Yes, the best Atari 2600 game. Well, one of the top three, anyway. I got “Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration” for Christmas and although I’ve played a fair few of the games, most aren’t actually “completable”, what with being mostly score-attack arcade titles. Adventure, though, has an end goal – take the Chalice to the Yellow Castle.

The game has three modes. The first is a shorter game with just one dragon, fewer objects and fewer rooms. The second is the “main” version, with the full quest, three dragons, mazes, etc. The third is the second game with objects in random locations.

The random mode is sometimes a bit stupid, because it can mean that (for example) the key to get into the Black Castle is actually… inside the Black Castle. There is a bat which wanders the map randomly picking up items, sometimes swapping them with other items (and hilariously it sometimes swaps whatever you’re holding for a dragon, who then eats you), which can allow you to get hold of these “trapped” items, but it’s hit and miss and may take aaaaages.

I ran through both of the first two modes, completing them (which only takes a few minutes) then completed the third mode six times. It’s a good game, brent.

Mega-lo-Mania (MD): COMPLETED!

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It was time to play this again. I mean, sure, it’s almost always time to play this, but it was especially time to play this just now.

Choosing Madcap this time, for no real reason, I made it through to the final level where I was once more unopposed. So an instant win, again. Ah well. The real fun was the fun we had along the way, or something.

Wiz ‘n’ Liz (MD): COMPLETED!

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After a write-up in Retro Gamer magazine, I was reminded how much fun this was all those years ago, so since I already had my RetroFlag GPi out for Mega-lo-Mania purposes, it seemed rude not to have a quick go.

Which turned out to be a couple of days of play and ended up with me completing it. As you do.

Somewhere, I have a hand-written, self-worked-out list of every single fruit combination for all the magic spells you can do, but I don’t know where that is so resorted to The Internet for some interesting ones. Most important were the ones that either gave you extra lives, or gave you stars with which to buy extra lives. Because extra lives are Important.

The aim of the game is to collect wabbits. But you have a timer and this seems to get shorter, and unless you’re lucky and collect a million “time extend” pickups dropped occasionally by captured wabbits, invariably you’re going to run out, and die. Especially in later levels where the number of required wabbits increase, and they start dropping the odd time penalty pickup too. Hence the need for extra lives. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to rack up loads of them with the right fruit and stars. Phew, eh?