My 10 Favourite Things About Kirby Super Star

One of my most favoritest games, and indeed the Super Nintendo game I’ve gone back to the most often (with Super Mario World coming in close second), is Kirby Super Star. If you aren’t from North America, you may know it as “Kirby’s Fun Pak” or maybe even “Hoshi no Kirby Super Deluxe”, but it’s always been Kirby Super Star to me.

Released in 1996, I absorbed as much of the game as possible through Nintendo Power, and made damn sure that my parents knew that I had to own this game. It was featured in the August ’96 issue (#87), and I’m pretty sure that was the most excruciating month of my parents’ lives, because I was nothing short of obsessed with the game and the idea of getting it for my birthday. Unfortunately, being nine years old, I probably didn’t understand the concept of release dates, and it actually released almost two weeks after my birthday. I don’t recall exactly how or when I finally obtained it, but I’ll assume that I saved all the birthday money I got that year for it.

Anyway, I have a frothing love for this game that will never be quelled, and even though I have the updated DS port, Kirby Super Star Ultra, I’ve only ever played through it once and always go back to the SNES original to get my fix. Why? I don’t know. The remake is absolutely better, and even more jam-packed with Kirby goodness, but the original has a strange, nostalgic appeal that I simply cannot deny.

The greatest tragedy of this website here is that in the 10+ years I’ve been running it, I’ve never played proper tribute to the game. So that’s what I intend to do. I could simply go the modern route and do a video Let’s Play of it, but I’m kind of tired of doing those at the moment. Also I’ve lent my PS2 controller to a friend and would have to play with the keyboard. And you don’t want to hear me bangin’ on the keys throughout a whole video series, now do you? (I’ll probably do it one day but that day is not today.)

Continue reading My 10 Favourite Things About Kirby Super Star

This is giving in

Hey I totally haven’t even thought to mention that I’m now on the Twitter. Yep. I still think it’s pretty stupid, but I’ve officially joined the legion of twits.

Please follow me @TheRyanDS

It’s mostly a way to push articles and anything I upload to YouTube, but I do occasionally tweet some unique stuff. Nothing really worth seeing, but just stupid thoughts that I feel an unusual need to share. I suppose that’s pretty much the point though, so I guess I’m right at home there.

One slice is not enough! – Picross e

Picross e is Nintendo doing a very good job of teasing me and the scores of other picross fans out there.

Released on the 3DS eShop (explaining the lowercase “e” in the title) just over a week ago, Picross e is easy bait for us picross fans. It’s only $6, and having a digital Picross game on my 3DS is like a most wonderful dream come true. It’s even more appealing than DSiWare’s Brain Age Express: Sudoku.

There are two things I need to get out of the way before I talk about the game proper, and the first of those is that I am an absolute picross maniac. This is very important for you to know, so that you can balance this review against my unstoppable bias. I love picross, and have spent many,many hours playing the various Nintendo-produced picross video games into the ground  It is my first true love, and the one truism you can apply to me is that I will always buy the new picross game.

The second thing you should probably know is what exactly a picross is. Picross is a puzzle game where you’ve got a grid of squares with a bunch of numbers around the edge, and your goal is to chisel out the correct squares to make a picture. The numbers are indicative of how many target squares are in each row and column, but don’t say exactly where they are. So you have to use the powers of logic to deduce which squares you need to chisel. I’ve probably explained this somewhere on this website before, but it’s probably best to make sure; picross isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it should be.

Continue reading One slice is not enough! – Picross e

Be excellent to each other

I received this in my work email inbox on Wednesday afternoon, and I’ve never wished anything harder than that I was the one responsible for it. Alas, I only dream of being able to come up with anything so radical as this.

I was inspired to draw this thing though.

Don’t ask me how I went from Bill & Ted to Sixteen Candles. My mind works in mysterious ways.

Paragraph formatting and such

It’s that time again! That time when I just talk about what’s going on here behind the scenes.

The most important thing I want to note is that I’ve decided to make my upcoming works more visible. To that end, I’ve added the titles of four upcoming articles to the articles list. For one, you have some idea what’s coming up, and when you should be checking back (though every day is still a solid plan). Secondly, and more importantly, it’s a small way to push me to finish things that have been in the works for a while. I’ve had the New Surprise Bag Article about 90% done since February now, and it’s something I should really get around to.

The next thing I want to note is that I’ve filled in a few more of the blacked-out spots on the article list. I think we might finally be at the point where there are more articles that you can actually read than ones that are dummied out. And that’s a big milestone! It’s taken way too long to get even this far, and I’m hoping that I’ll have the entire archive up and readable by the end of the summer.

None of the articles I updated today are especially good, but you might want to check a couple of them out. Rocky Snow Ice Pops is actually really terrible. But the Mate1.com article is up here now, and to this day I still get e-mails from people who’ve read it and felt like they need to tell me how great it is and what a big scam Mate1 is. And I appreciate every one of those e-mails! But now people can just comment on the post itself so that’ll be sad. I like e-mails from strangers who think the things I write are funny.

Lastly, I just went through a few of the already-WordPress’d articles and made sure that the title banners were there. Some of them weren’t! Like the one for Steambot Chronicles. And I worked pretty hard on most of those things, so they deserve to live on.

I guess that’s about it then. Stay tuned for some more posts of nothing but embedded YouTube videos!

Animal Crossing is absorbing my life

Seriously, I think I may be on the verge of considering Animal Crossing: New Leaf to be an actual obsession. There was a reason I got out all those years ago, and only now that I’ve been sucked in again do I remember why.

The thing about Animal Crossing, is that it’s not really interesting. At least, not looking at it from an outsider’s perspective. There isn’t a defined goal, and there isn’t really much in the way of actual gameplay to speak of. But damned if I don’t spend most of my time away from my town of Farron thinking about what I’m going to do next time I’m there.

True story: New Leaf has led me to kill my 3DS’ battery every day since I bought the damn thing. My other video games are getting very jealous.

Most of my time is spent fishing. Why? For money, mostly. But also to fill out my fishopedia. And also so that I can fill out the museum’s fish exhibit. Also because it’s pretty relaxing, and far more rewarding than real fishing. Sure, I could switch to chasing butterflies around all day for all the same reasons, but I prefer fishing.

There’s also the element of the animal neighbours. What little imagination I have tends to puff up these characters into much more than the game programming allows them to be, and I’ve developed very complicated relationships with most of them. Realistically, I just talk to them until they give me a job or offer to sell me their old furniture, but what goes on in my head is far more complex than that.

It’s a little worrying, but maybe not as bad as when I used to play Unreal Tournament with bots and give them all personalities and backstories and pretend the ones on my team were my friends.

What’s even worse is that now, Animal Crossing has online multiplayer. And also I belong to an online community that provides me with a huge list of people to play with. Maybe it’s not the most interactive game out there, but I’ve been having a great time simply taking the train to other towns and exploring. Meeting new animals, seeing what kinds of landmarks people are building, that kind of stuff.

There is also an island that allows you to play multiplayer mini-games, which is pretty good fun, but I find that they’re more fun to play with people in the same room. Online multiplayer seems like a better outlet for fishing together while chatting about what kinds of shoes you’d like to have.

That’s about all the thoughts I can wrangle for now. I just had a fountain built, and I’m pretty excited to start up another public works project. Maybe a campsite next? Or perhaps a humble bench? I don’t know! Back to Animal Crossing!

Begin again, from the beginning

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And so I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of Animal Crossing: New Leaf. This will be the first time I’ve played an Animal Crossing game since the first; I burned out on it so hard that I had absolutely no desire to partake in the DS or Wii sequels. So a lot of the changes that fans have gotten accustomed to over the years are kind of a system shock to me.

The most important thing you need to take away from this, though, is that I’ve begun the first draft of the sequel to The Hunt for the Banded Dragonfly. At first I was all like “That’s something I want to do, but I can’t get good screenshots on the 3DS” and then one of my animal neighbours told me about the in-game screenshot-taking feature. So I guess I really don’t have a choice. We’ll just have to see if I can come up with a halfway decent story to tell.