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lentilsonlent's Kirby's Adventure (NES)
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| [February 22, 2007 11:41:37 PM]
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When I arrived in the butter castle level, I was quite impressed by the game's graphics.The shading effects feel way more organic than your standard NES game: at one point, you come across a tower made out of butter with such complex shading and animation that it looks like a 3D polygon. The graphics make Kirby's Adventure feel more like a SNES game. I love the aesthetics of food and how the game evokes the sense of taste in setting the mood for each level. Vegetable Forest to Ice Cream Island might not be major departures from each other in their design, but the names evoke completely opposite feelings.
This game is a good example of how the player’s understanding of tropes informs the gameplay experience. For example, at several points you have to fight bosses that can only be defeated by spitting projectiles, but there are no objects available for ammunition -- or so it seems. In the end, you discover that you have to inhale things such as the stars that erupt from the dust clouds when your enemy hits the ground, or the notes that pop out of the enemy’s mouth when it sings. Normally, we understand stars upon impact and musical notes from the mouth as cartoon tropes that stand in for invisible physics that cannot be visually represented so easily. However, in Kirby, the symbol is a tangible
object in itself that must be seized and used as a weapon. The game designers were no doubt aware of this mental process of trope recognition and purposely designed these boss fights to challenge the player to think outside the box. Another trope they play around with is the exploding boss. In Kirby, when you defeat a boss, it starts flashing and prepares to explode as we would expect. However, instead of exploding harmlessly to yield a power-up or some item as a reward, as is the case with many platformers (Mega Man for example), the boss just creates an explosion that hurts you, and nothing more. Kind of silly, if you ask me.
After the twentieth level or so, I felt like I had seen all there was to see and turned the game off. Nonetheless, it was fun during that time.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Feb 23rd, 2007 at 14:19:16.
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| [February 22, 2007 11:41:13 PM]
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Kirby is a fun little platform game. Coming into this game I had already played Kirby’s Dream Land on Gameboy, so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. Compared to other platform games, this one has way more rules of affordance, especially compared with the Mario games. In Mario, you are confined by gravity and must risk falling to your doom as you navigate several precarious cliffs. Not so with Kirby, who can inflate himself and fly wherever he pleases. Floating down a gap and dying is possible, but highly unlikely. Another thing about Kirby is that he always has something to keep between him and the enemy, whether it’s a projectile, a bludgeon, or the vacuum created by his mouth. In Mario, if you want to defend yourself, you usually have to hop directly on top of the sucker and risk a harmful collision. Another thing is, in Mario, you are defenseless in the water unless you happen to have a fire flower. Not so with Kirby, in fact, you’re better off in the water because you have a water-spitting ability that you can aim in three directions and use as frequently as you like, unlike on land, where spitting a projectile can only be done in two directions and requires the player to first perform a sucking action. I was actually thrown off by this whole water business, as it was not a feature in the Gameboy game. At one point, you have to spit water in an upward direction in order to advance in the game, but I had just barely discovered the water-spitting ability itself, much less the ability to spit upward. Another thing omitted from the Gameboy version that took me while to figure out is how to absorb enemy abilities. Thankfully, the makers were smart enough to include tips and instructions on a screen that appears whenever you pause the game. I then remembered that in Super Smash Bros., Kirby has the exact same power, which is performed via the exact same input on the controller. I find it interesting that someone could theoretically be completely unfamiliar rules and control schema of the Kirby games and still instinctively know what to do by virtue of their experience with the character’s mythology in pop culture.
Another thing that really ground my gears was when I got stuck at one point because I had to walk through a white doorway placed on a backdrop of the sky, which featured several clouds that the door blended right in with. I paced back and forth across this level at my own peril trying to figure out what to do. I was even driven to commit virtual suicide a few times out of frustration.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Feb 23rd, 2007 at 14:13:59.
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lentilsonlent's Kirby's Adventure (NES)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 22 February, 2007
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