Wario Land: Shake It!

Damn did this one fly by. I didn't expect this platformer to be a long one, but twenty-one levels, five boss fights, and a two-phase final boss does not an adequate game make. Of course, I can't complain about brevity when I've got so many games on my plate. I bought this game just over a year ago on an impulse. It's my first Wario Land game, although Wario Land II is still waiting in the backlog. This game feels a lot like a throwback to the days of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. The graphics were great and all, but gameplay was strictly two dimensional and evoked memories of classics like Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, and most of all Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes, believe it or not, big fat Wario emulated the speedy blue Sega mascot time and time again in Shake It. In fact, one boss fight felt almost exactly like a memorable boss fight in one of the Sonic games. I'm talking about the one where you're in a casino-themed level and you need to bombard Robotnik by catching some big air off of some bumpers. Oh, and Shake It's final boss - the aptly titled "Shake King" - even looked a ton like Robotnik. Bizarre. At any rate, the game was a pretty standard level-based platformer. Kill enemies and avoid hazards on the way to an ending goal or gate. The most unique part about this game, though, was that once you got to the "end" of a level, you then had to get back to the beginning of the level. Each level revolved around saving these strange small flying creatures. They reminded me of Gonzo the Muppet, only if he were a bat. Somehow I thought of Smurfs as well. Anyway, once you get to the cages in which each of these guys are held captive, an alarm sounds and suddenly you only have a specific amount of time to make your escape. Usually the game gave you new shortcuts and paths that weren't available going forward through the level. One memorable level, for example, involved running through a series of train cars to the engine. Once there, the Gonzo bat thing joins you and the train's roof is your means for getting back to the beginning. The levels were pretty straightforward and I never once died on one. The bosses were another story, but even they were very easy to get accustomed to. (As with any '90s platformer, it's all about the patterns.) My biggest complaint about the game is that every time you finished a world you had to pay a very large sum of money (coins) to get the map for the next world. Not once did I have enough money upon completing a world to buy the next world's map. So, each time, I had to go back and play beaten levels all over again. I'm not even saying they weren't fun - I intentionally chose some of my favorites to replay. It's just that, you know, this is a platformer. When one level is done, the next one should just be available. It's that easy. I don't want to compare the dozen "extra" playthroughs I did to the time it takes to grind out experience in some RPGs, but I mean, it's really the same concept at play. All in all, I'd call this game the epitome of a seven out of ten. Fun, enjoyable, and solid with scattered minor flaws, but nothing you need to play and probably nothing I'll play again. Good, but not great. The completion of this game leaves me with sixty unfinished ones. I'll take that semi-milestone and keep on chugging.