Nintendo seems to have taken some marketing cues from the fast-food industry in labeling Kirby: Triple Deluxe. The latest 3DS adventure featuring everyone’s favorite floating pink ball is laden with superlatives the way a Hardee’s Six-Dollar Thickburger is drowning in condiments. You almost expect to see a subtitle proclaiming something along the lines of “Now with 100 percent more power-ups.”
‘Cause it sure feels that way once you start jumping and floating. The game’s story mode boasts a whopping 26 different boosts Kirby can slurp up to clone the powers of his enemies, ranging from the slide-and-smash power of Stone to the goofy acrobatics of Circus. It sounds fabulous and entertaining—until you realize that it renders all but a handful of boss battles easier than popping Skittles.
HAL Laboratory deserves props for finding plenty of clever and interesting ways to take advantage of 3D features to add wrinkles to each world’s levels. Most levels see Kirby using magic stars to jump back and forth between the foreground and background of the screen, Paper Mario style, to solve puzzles and unlock secrets. In one level, trains rush headlong towards you on supersize tracks, threatening to turn Kirby into a pink pancake. In several others, enemies hurl cannon and fireballs that seem to jump off the screen as they zero in on you.
As you’d expect, it’s fun as hell to Hoover up the Hypernova power-up, granting our pink pal the temporary ability to suck up objects and enemies more than ten times his size. (It feels, to be honest, like Luigi rocking the Poltergust 5000 on max power in Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon.) The problem for gamers who’ve been around the Kirby block a few times—and that’s most of us by now–is that there’s nothing you need do, no hidden area you need find, no boss battle you need beat to earn this supersized power-up. It’s just sitting there, hanging from a tree waiting for you to snare it. It’s a little like having the most powerful card in, say, Hearthstone, available in every booster pack you buy. If ultimate power is this easy to come by, it’s actually a lot harder to appreciate.
That easy-does–it vibe permeates most of the game’s story mode. You might nick Kirby on an enemy or environmental hazard, but it’s rare that you’ll find yourself dying and needing to reboot a level. Even tougher bosses (like Paintra, who obscures your view of the battlefield by splashing paint across it) only mount a minor challenge.
If you end up retracing levels, it’ll be to collect hidden sunstones you’ll need to open up new parts of the world, or to collect 8-bit keychains from Kirby’s long and storied list of past games. Keychain collection is entertaining and addictive, but again, awfully easy: Completing any stage allows you to use the abundant pile of coins you’ve collected along the way to simply buy up to five of them. You’ll have to complete challenges on other game modes to get the complete set, but it still feels like a cheap path to accumulation.
Speaking of those other modes, story mode’s only one of the three legs of this Kirby tripod—remember the whole triple deluxe thing. There’s also a Super Smash Bros-lite mode called Kirby Fighters that lets you test-drive most of the 26 power-ups against the CPU or up to three other friends in a mini arena. It takes no time at all to grasp that distance-attackers like Spear and Beam have a massive advantage over powers like Leaf and Ninja, but if you can ignore the unbalanced vibe, it’s still fun in short bursts. Just don’t expect a Smash Bros-level of level variety.
Leg three qualifies as something of a curveball: Dedede’s Drum Dash is a rhythm bounce-and-jump minigame that finds the roly-poly monarch leaping on a pathway of drums to collect coins. Ironically, here’s where hardened gamers finally meet the challenge that’s missing almost everywhere else. The speed, obstacles and difficulty curve spike like a backbeat beginning on the second level. Hope you brought your Amplitude skills.
Kirby: Triple Deluxe collects the series’ signature staples and packages them in some interesting and colorful ways. It’s just a shame the whole thing feels like it’s designed for a fourth grader rather than longtime Kirby fans.
Pros:
+ Clever uses of 3D in level and gameplay design
+ Huge array of power-ups to customize your attacks
+ Keychain collection!
Cons:
– Way, way too easy to conquer story mode
– Kirby Fighters is a nice idea, but unbalanced
– Why is the game’s best power-up handed over on a platter?
Game Info:
Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: HAL Laboratory
Release Date: 5/2/2014
Genre: Side-scrolling Platformer
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Players: 1 (Kirby Fighters supports 1-4 local multiplayer or download play)
Source: Review code provided by publisher
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During a special video presentation in Japan last night, Nintendo put the spotlight on two key titles that are in the works for 3DS and Wii. Nintendo America followed up this morning with the official press release to announce details for us westerners.
Nintendo isn’t dishing out many specifics yet, but has confirmed that New Super Mario Bros. 2, “a traditional side-scrolling adventure game featuring Mario, Luigi and loads of other favorite characters from the popular Mario series,” is hopping onto North American store shelves for Nintendo 3DS in August, and a Kirby anthology collection is due out later this year for Wii in celebration of the character’s 20th anniversary. The collection will feature “a variety of previously released, fan-favorite Kirby games,” but Nintendo hasn’t announced which specific titles that includes or even how many games will be packed onto the disc.
“A new Mario game and a big Kirby celebration will help make 2012 an especially great year for Nintendo fans,” said Scott Moffitt, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. “Whether they’re playing at home on Wii or using Nintendo 3DS to have fun on the go, players can look forward to experiencing some of our biggest franchises in exciting ways.”
I bet we’ll find out more on these titles real soon with E3 on the horizon, so stay tuned. For now, here are the first screenshots from New Super Mario Bros. 2.
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The time is almost upon us where there will be no games coming out for Nintendo’s very popular and lucrative DS family of handheld gaming systems. It has been a long ride and there have been a ton of great games, a run of nigh-unopposed awesomeness – with, granted, more than a fair share of shovelware – that is reminiscent of the glory days of the SNES. For good or ill, Club Nintendo’s going to switch over to the 3DS soon. I can’t tell the future for Nintendo, but I can say that one of the last big games for the DS, Kirby Mass Attack, is different and usually fun.
Per usual Kirby games, and really all that is first party from Nintendo, the story is not the focus. Told in a handful of cut scenes, the game’s instruction manual says it all: “Our hungry hero, after being split into 10 by the Skull Gang boss, Necrodeus, sets out on an adventure to make things right.” Not much of a premise I’ll grant you, but it does explain the main concept of the game: use the stylus to guide and manipulate a bunch of Kirbies to get them to the end of a whole lot of levels. While Kirby may be split into multiple parts, his Heart is doomed to wander the world unless he can put himself back together. This is what you will play, Kirby’s heart as represented by a star that appears wherever you put the stylus on the bottom screen. The top screen is usually used for information, but in some encounters there is action on both.
The game is played almost exclusively with the stylus. When the screen is tapped, the Heart/Star will appear and however many Kirbies you have will try to get to it. The journey starts out with the ghost of Kirby leading one mindless portion of himself through the various levels. After enough fruit is eaten, another Kirby will pop out of nowhere, and the Heart now has two soulless Kirby bodies to manipulate. The game is less sinister than that. At no point does it refer to the mass of pink men as a murder of Kirbies, but that is the basic progression: start with a Kirby and consume until you have an entire gaggle of ten squishy star guys.
Given that this is a stylus controlled game, there are a limited number of ways that the world can be interacted with. Taping the screen once will lead all the Kirbies to that point — if the little men can get there. As Kirby can only jump so far, and since being divided into so many parts apparently causes him to lose his classic ability to suck up air and fly, tapping will not be enough. If the stylus is held down on the screen, the entire mess of Kirbies can be gathered into one big clump, and a line painted on the screen is used to (very slowly) float the Kirbies to the end of this string. This method of movement does not last forever and will eventually run out as indicated by the line’s color (blue is still good, red is almost dead – end of the rope).
The game is not all moving to the right of the screen and tapping to guide the flutter of Kirbies out of harm’s way — sometimes Kirbies can strike. En masse. There are two ways to accomplish this, the most basic method being to either tap an enemy or lead the pink train over an enemy. This will cause Kirby’s many selves to engage in the world’s cutest gangland style beat down. The more Kirbies that are on any given enemy will determine how much damage they can do. Smaller foes can be defeated by one Kirby, but larger ones will shake off Kirbies like a dog shakes off rain. Which means that the adorable, ever-hungering cloud of Kirbies have to go back again and again until the enemy is defeated. For foes that are not on the ground, Kirby’s Heart — you — must fling them towards the enemy. In other games you could just hammer on the shoot button; in Kirby Mass Attack you’ll have to be quick in making flinging motions if you hope to survive to the end of the game.
All of the Kirbies appear to be doing something different when moving on screen. I don’t mean that some of them appear to be reading the Wall Street Journal while others examine a crime scene, but more that while there are only a handful of animations that Kirby can do, it usually does not seem that they are all doing the same thing at once. This helps to increase the sense that there are actually different Kirbies in the game, not just one very slow, blobby character who happens to look like a bunch of Kirbies. The levels are colorful and filled to the brim with classic Kirby franchise characters. If you’ve never played a Kirby game before, the best way to describe the look and tone of the game is to use the word “adorable.” It is cute and appealing and quite varied from one World to the next. But if you’re afraid that people on the bus are going to judge your manliness based upon the game you’re playing, don’t play this game. At least not on the bus. People not concerned with such things should get a kick out of the huggable swarm’s adventure.
Everything looks and sounds like it would be right at home on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Unfortunately, once the unique control mechanics are separated from the remainder of the design, the basic structure of the game is like any platformer on the aforementioned system. Each World has several levels that require a certain number of Kirbies to enter. If the star ridin’ pod fails to tip the balance at the beginning of each stage, they ain’t getting in. Once in a stage the gameplay is, with but a few exceptions, get to the end and try not to die. The game only ends when all of the Kirbies die. Each one can take two hits before they turn into a rising angel and have to be pulled back to earth by one of his surviving comrades. Sometimes it’s possible to have all the Kirbies get stuck in a trap which kills the whole lot, or the screen may not advance fast enough to let the entire pack avoid danger. Both situations are equally frustrating and can lead to cheap failures. There are coins for collecting that will unlock additional play modes, but other than that, it’s get to end and don’t let all your Kirbies fall, stage after stage. And if they do die, you have to start over from the beginning of the level. While the game is not fantastically difficult, some of the stages are tricky and dying means repeating the whole thing. It is frustrating that games are still being made without checkpoints these days.
All of the bosses, which cap off each world and end some stages, are varied and pretty entertaining. Defeating one will unlock the next world and cause the Kirby count to drop back to one. Which does allow for players to experience the one to ten progression again and again, but still feels like a cheap way to drop the Kirby count.
If you collect enough coins, bonus modes are unlocked. These fill the spectrum from lame to “this should be its own game.” Lame things would be modes that let you look at cut scenes and listen to music. Without giving all the great modes away, one is a pinball game that should remind long time Kirby fans of Kirby Pinball Land for the original Game Boy. Another is a shoot em’ up that really should be released as downloadable game. In this the “plane” is a flying Kirby that can pick up more Kirbies as the levels progress. The additional Kirbies follow the first one, so a full set of “ships” will form a long chain of shooting pink men. The whole screen can be filled with bullets by drawing a line on the bottom of the screen or just a small concentrated area by scribbling the stylus back and forth, causing their number to overlap. This is a substantial, multi-staged mode, complete with bullet hells and screen filling bosses. I’d pay five bucks to download it.
There isn’t anything quite like Kirby Mass Attack, so it is difficult to recommend one way or another. The closest thing that this game brings to mind is Pikmin, but even that is not an accurate comparison. If you’re a fan of Kirby games, you’ve already bought this game. And if Nintendo’s pink ball of cuteness repulses you, you’re not even going to think about it. To people on the fence, it comes down to whether you want an entirely new experience on your DS. Not many games for the system really push the boundaries of controls the way that this game does. It could not come out for any system that did not have a touch screen. There is a fair amount of replay value to collecting all the hidden coins and the game takes a long time to finish, but many players will get frustrated in their efforts to wrangle a horde of Kirbies that appear to have no sense of self preservation and will let enemies murder them and their brothers unless they’re babysat. It’s a fresh game that definitely takes a risk in the way it is controlled, but how well it pays off for you is going to be a matter of taste and how much tapping you are willing to do.
Pros:
+ Unique multi-character platforming
+ Truly worthwhile unlockables
+ Appealing, adorable look
+ Plenty of content/levels
Cons:
– No checkpoints
– Not enough variety in gameplay
– Using stylus for sole means of control means that the action can get obscured
Affiliate Links:
Buy from Amazon
Game Info:
Platform: Nintendo DS
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: HAL Laboratory, Inc.
Release Date: 9/19/2011
Genre: 2D Platformer / Side-Scrolling Real-Time Strategy
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Players: 1
Source: Review copy provided by publisher
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]]>The two games in question are Kirby: Mass Attack for the DS (yep, the old dog still has life yet!) and a currently untitled Kirby adventure for the Wii.
Kirby: Mass Attack on DS sees our loveable pink mascot friend cloned into 10 mini-me versions, with gameplay revolving around controlling this swarm of Kirbies with taps and flicks on the touch screen to outnumber enemies, reach hidden treasures and overcome obstacles that would be too much for one Kirby. This is what it looks like in motion:
As for Kirby’s next Wii outing, it isn’t a sequel to Epic Yarn, unfortunately. But its traditional polygonal appearance and side-scrolling platform action is more than enough to woo every Nintendo fan back to Dream Land for more sugary sweet fun. The game will also support drop-in/drop-out cooperative play enabling up to three additional players to team up with Kirby as Meta Knight, King Dedede and/or Waddle Dee at any time. Here is the game’s E3 reveal trailer:
Both games are shaping up to be a blast, and both will arrive on store shelves in time for Christmas. Kirby: Mass Attack‘s ship date is set for September 19th, while Kirby Wii is simply targeted for Fall 2011.
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