Obscure Title Tuesday: Yoshi!

Fresh from the egg, just hatched. If this is the face of your child when they are literally just born-they will either be a winner or a huge arrogant prick.

Did you know? Did you know that Loveable Yoshi, who has helped you out so many times in the past, with not only your surviving Mario adventures but also your fun level, not only appeared in a game for the Nintendo Entertainment System but even appeared in his VERY OWN GAME EVEN! Did you know that just like the box art indicates, a smug looking Yoshi looks on smugly as screaming ‘Boo’ ghosts and confused goombas fall away in the distance as a newly smugly hatched Yoshi adventures forth, battling all your favorite Mario bad guys without the aid of Mario in a jumping and flying fire-breathing goomba-busting fun adventure?

That’s right you DON’T know about this game, not because this epic sweeping side scrolling Final Fantasy-esque side scroller simply sold poorly, no, you don’t know about this game because rather than being any of the things I just mentioned- It’s a shitty puzzle game.

To start with, you would think that this game is a thing for Yoshi fans to be really excited about. Yoshi is in his very own game, without the aid of Mario in any way. And the game developers at Nintendo were so confident in their product that they didn’t even put their flagship character, Mario, on the box art as decoration or as a reminder of the Yoshi-Mario relation.

Well, unfortunately for your hopes and dreams, Mario IS in this game. In fact, in this game, you control Mario. Wow. I will admit to never playing ‘Luigi’s Mansion’, but if I or any Luigi fan ever picked up a copy of ‘Luigi’s Mansion’ and the whole time the only character I could play as was Mario, I’d flip a shit. Well Yoshi fans- Your shit is thoroughly flipped now, because Nintendo hates your green Dinosaur Love.

You control Mario controlling his enemies. You control everything BUT Yoshi.

“But wait!” You say. “I am a more than average educated gamer, and I know that Yoshi’s debut was in fact for the SUPER Nintendo in the game ‘Super Mario World.’ What the Fu*k?” Yes knowledgeable gamer, while I don’t approve of your cussing, in giving Yoshi his very own special amazing title in which you don’t even control Yoshi at all, Nintendo decided to go DOWN a console from the Super Nintendo to the Nintendo Entertainment System for this Yoshi adventure. Did I say adventure? Cause I meant shitty puzzle.

You control Mario in a Tetris-esque game screen, with 2 blocks of Nintendo bad guy characters falling from the top of the screen. Unlike Tetris, you don’t control the falling blocks, you control the blocks that have already fallen, by moving Mario, with 2 outstretched hands, to switch the fallen stationary blocks to try to get them to match the ones that are falling. When 2 bad guys on top of each other match, they disappear. That’s it. There are only 4 columns total, so the game play isn’t challenging at all, even when the blocks are falling fast.

The only thing to break up the aforementioned monotony is that sometimes an up facing half-egg appears- if you put a down facing half-egg on top of it, you get points and a little baby Yoshi pops out. Awww. Also, you can pile bad guys on top of the up facing egg, so when you put the down facing egg on top of the bad guys the egg will eat all the bad guys before getting to its matching shell and hatching bigger sized Yoshis. If you risk it and go all the way to the very top most part of the screen with bad guys on top of an egg and then land with the down egg, it makes a cool sound effect and a really Fat Yoshi comes out, and it’s kind of awesome. But other than those cute baby and Fat Yoshi’s, that’s it. I imagine anyone reading this column could already master this game without even having played it once, and within 15-30 minutes (honestly depending upon how much you like baby and fat Yoshi’s) anyone would get bored with it. You would need a very young child for this game to be entertaining, for then it would be somewhat challenging to them and perhaps very young children don’t mind endless monotony in place of dashed expectations. So, basically it’s like a mix between Tetris and Dr. Mario, except unlike Tetris and Dr. Mario, this game is much shittier.

See, the background in now Green instead of Red, so that gives the game depth.

Before you start a game you can change the difficulty level and choose from 1 of 3 songs; this screen is similar to the customize-the-start-of-your-game screen from ‘Dr. Mario’, except this one has way less options. Probably because they wanted to stick it to Yoshi fans for not liking Mario more. Oh, and in the 2 player mode, the person holding and switching the blocks on the other side of the screen is Luigi. He left his mansion to be in this shitty game.

Hmmmmmmmm……OK, then again, maybe I’m ragging on this game too much…it’s an all right puzzle game, it doesn’t glitch, moving the blocks instead of the falling pieces is a unique variation of Tetris, Fat Yoshis are fun, you can recognize all the characters clearly and this game definitely sucks. I’m sorry, I can’t- I can’t not compare this to the side scrolling Mario adventure featuring Yoshi that I thought this game was gonna be when I first popped this cartridge into old NESsy. To be fair the box art does say ‘un casse-tete paniquant avec Yoshi et ses amis!’ Wait…OK, It also says ‘Pure Puzzle Panic’ but I mean……not having read that small blurb, or speak French, anyone would expect this to be a side scrolling adventure! Also I was probably too young to read at the age I got this game anyway. But I still wasn’t so young that I thought it was good or anything other then monotonous and boring! Fat Baby Yoshis be damned!! F Minus!!! Crippling Disappointment!!!!

Except for the title music and 3 song choices which are catchy, the graphics are fine, the young’uns might like it and……Fat Yoshi undamned.

1.5/5 Play Tetris or Dr. Mario or Outside or 52 Card Pick-Up Instead