July 13, 2010

Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards

By finishing off this game, I've not only made another subtraction to my backlog; I've killed off an entire system. That's right. No more Nintendo 64 games lie unbeaten on my video game shelf. (At least, for now; the collection stands at a mere six games, and I know many more quality games lie out there, so who's to say I won't buy another N64 game at some point?) Even though the overall list still stands at 63 games and one game means so little in the scheme of things, there's just a nice feel to being all done with an entire "era" of games. I finished off all of my Super Nintendo games with Super Metroid last month and now I'm just two GameBoy games and two PlayStation games away from being done with everything from last millennium. That's huge! Know what else is huge? Out of the 227 video games I have beaten in my lifetime, this is the very first Kirby one. I mean, I know Kirby isn't quite the franchise that Zelda or Final Fantasy is, but it's still a Nintendo mainstay that has put forth ten unique titles in the past twenty years. I enjoyed my first foray into the land of Kirby. (Dreamland?) Kirby's ability-copying mechanism - the backbone of the gameplay throughout the entire series - is definitely the only thing that sets this game apart from the multitude of other sidescrolling platformers. I enjoyed trying out new abilities and combinations of abilities for the first half of the game or so, but after that it got pretty stale and I was solely trying to beat the game. Fortunately, the whole thing is little more than a three-hour affair. And more fortunately, it's a fun one. The game kind of ends in a half-assed manner unless you go out of your way to find every single titular crystal shard strewn throughout the levels, but I can forgive a weak ending when the gameplay is so simple and yet so fun.

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