A History of Kirby, Emulated
Jul. 7th, 2020 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAfter our family adventures playing Kirby Star Allies on the Switch, ARR got onto a bit of a Kirby kick. Okay, a lot of a Kirby kick. He watched every episode of Kirby Right Back At Ya, and then I had to buy Canadian bootleg DVDs so he could watch the missing episodes. (It’s not currently available for sale or streaming anywhere.)
He and I also played parts of Kirby Super Star (SNES) and Kirby’s Dream Land 3 (SNES) via the Kirby Dream Collection disc I have for the Wii; and he watched me play some of Kirby: The Crystal Shards (N64) on the same setup. I may try to get him to revisit the two SNES games (as both are two-player games) either on the Switch Online versions or SNES emulator, because the Wii versions of both felt a little clunky.
That brings us to Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland, the GBA port of Kirby’s Adventure (NES). I had played an hour or so of it on my 9X-S handheld last summer—it’s a bit smoother than the original with much better graphics. There’s a lot of variety in copy abilities and everything is level-based, so it’s in manageable chunks. Also, 100% completion unlocks some bonus stages, but is unnecessary to properly beat the game. ARR played all of this fix or six times through on VisualBoyAdvance with an infinite life cheat code on. (And it actually ties into the cartoon show more than I would have thought, but they came out around the same time, so that makes some sense.)
I also tried to get ARR interested in Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (GB), but it’s both harder (even with infinite life) and much less visually “exciting” because it’s using the Game Boy 4-color scheme. (It also only has eight distinct copy abilities, but each of them manifests differently with each different animal friend, so there’s really 32 different powers with some style overlaps.) The secrets in each stage are much more critical in this game, because you can only unlock the final boss and true ending by collecting the six rainbow drops, which is not an easy task. I ended up playing this in full on my RG350 handheld in the Gambette emulator, which is a very pleasant way to replay Game Boy games even if it doesn’t properly battery save.
And finally, there’s Kirby and the Amazing Mirror (GBA), the Kirby metroidvania, which allows you to explore a large, interconnected world and navigate into secret areas by using the right copy abilities. I played a bunch of this last summer on the 9X-S as well, but didn’t get very far. (You need to do the first segment and unlock a few areas in a fairly set order before you have real freedom to explore the map. Contrast to the post-game, where you get the Master Sword that can solve almost any puzzle, and can go back for 100% completion.) When ARR wanted a new game, we found an invincibility cheat code that let him ignore most damage and also not lose abilities when hit, which made the game much easier for him—and he played it through four or five times as well. I then went back to it myself on the RG350 (without the cheat codes; the RG350 doesn’t support them) and was amused at how quickly I could gather the mirror shards versus how long it took to find all the area maps and how many tries it took to beat the final boss.
Now I’m debating whether to try to set up ARR with Kirby Squeak Squad on the DS (which I think I might have an Action Replay for, somewhere around here?) or set up SNES emulation for him. But for action-platformer games to get hooked on, this isn’t a bad start.
He and I also played parts of Kirby Super Star (SNES) and Kirby’s Dream Land 3 (SNES) via the Kirby Dream Collection disc I have for the Wii; and he watched me play some of Kirby: The Crystal Shards (N64) on the same setup. I may try to get him to revisit the two SNES games (as both are two-player games) either on the Switch Online versions or SNES emulator, because the Wii versions of both felt a little clunky.
That brings us to Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland, the GBA port of Kirby’s Adventure (NES). I had played an hour or so of it on my 9X-S handheld last summer—it’s a bit smoother than the original with much better graphics. There’s a lot of variety in copy abilities and everything is level-based, so it’s in manageable chunks. Also, 100% completion unlocks some bonus stages, but is unnecessary to properly beat the game. ARR played all of this fix or six times through on VisualBoyAdvance with an infinite life cheat code on. (And it actually ties into the cartoon show more than I would have thought, but they came out around the same time, so that makes some sense.)
I also tried to get ARR interested in Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (GB), but it’s both harder (even with infinite life) and much less visually “exciting” because it’s using the Game Boy 4-color scheme. (It also only has eight distinct copy abilities, but each of them manifests differently with each different animal friend, so there’s really 32 different powers with some style overlaps.) The secrets in each stage are much more critical in this game, because you can only unlock the final boss and true ending by collecting the six rainbow drops, which is not an easy task. I ended up playing this in full on my RG350 handheld in the Gambette emulator, which is a very pleasant way to replay Game Boy games even if it doesn’t properly battery save.
And finally, there’s Kirby and the Amazing Mirror (GBA), the Kirby metroidvania, which allows you to explore a large, interconnected world and navigate into secret areas by using the right copy abilities. I played a bunch of this last summer on the 9X-S as well, but didn’t get very far. (You need to do the first segment and unlock a few areas in a fairly set order before you have real freedom to explore the map. Contrast to the post-game, where you get the Master Sword that can solve almost any puzzle, and can go back for 100% completion.) When ARR wanted a new game, we found an invincibility cheat code that let him ignore most damage and also not lose abilities when hit, which made the game much easier for him—and he played it through four or five times as well. I then went back to it myself on the RG350 (without the cheat codes; the RG350 doesn’t support them) and was amused at how quickly I could gather the mirror shards versus how long it took to find all the area maps and how many tries it took to beat the final boss.
Now I’m debating whether to try to set up ARR with Kirby Squeak Squad on the DS (which I think I might have an Action Replay for, somewhere around here?) or set up SNES emulation for him. But for action-platformer games to get hooked on, this isn’t a bad start.
