Monday 28 November 2011

Kirby no Omochabako - Hoshi Kuzushi (SNES)

Remember at the end of the Dyna Brothers review, where I said I was worried that I was doing to many positive reviews? Well, this should help buck the trend a little!
This game is terrible. It's an Arkanoid-like, starring Kirby as the ball, and has the player controlling two hamsters carrying a sheet to bounce him upwards with. The fact that this setup is kind of cute is probably the most positive thing that can be said about this game.
It mostly plays like any other generic Arkanoid-like, with the gimmick that you have a constantly depleting "stars" counter, and if kirby hits the ground while it's above zero, he'll bounce once, giving you a chance to catch him rather than losing a life straight away, and you'll also lose 10 stars. The blocks are star shaped, and for every one that's destroyed, a little star falls down which boosts your star counter slightly.
The problem is that it's just incredibly slow and boring.
The first problem is that there are no power-ups at all, unless you count the stars. The second problem is that Kirby's movement speed never increases. The third and fourth problems are that the blocks are really tiny and there are tons of them in each stage.
All of these add up into a game in which you spend long, tedious minutes staring at Kirby slowly bouncing around the screen, waiting for him to hit the two tiny stars at either side of it.
I should also mention that this was an early downloaded title, distributed via the Satellaview system, using some kind of arcane sorcery. This fact might lead you to think that I'm being unnessecarily hard on the game, but I'm not. Kaizo Chojin Shubibinman Zero and The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets were also Satellaview titles, but they were both awesome, fully fleshed out games.

1 comment:

  1. Damn! That looks boring even for early NES games standards. And this one came out in 1996 for SNES. Kirby's Block Ball for Game Boy was also an Arkanoid style game and yet it's so great and fresh. Couldn't they make a game like that for SNES?

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