| KIRBY'S
ADVENTURE |
  If any modern game on a Nintendo platform might show - maybe Mario Party or Smash Bros - Nintendo has no shortage of "mascots". You have Donkey Kong, Mario/Luigi/Toad/Princess, Samus Aran (Metroid), Link & Zelda - and then KIRBY. That's just the officail Nintendo mascots, not even digging into 3rd parties like Mega Man or the Belmonts of Castlevania fame. Kirby was named after Nintendo's lawyer John Kirby, in tribute, due to his help in various early 1990's Lawsuits.
Kirby was a small white puff-ball looking thing that had the ability - and those of you with the dirty minds are working over time - to SUUUUUUUCK the powers of his enemies and obtain them through eating them. These powers were obtained in the form of a star and there were many. The series started with Kirby's Dreamland in 1993 on the original Game Boy, and then this was made as his first release in 1994 for the Nintendo Entertainment System -- as one of the last major games, and one of the best platformers on the console. In Kirby's Adventure, King DiDiDi has some some evil thing and you have to defeat him and save the "world". The game cycle is you start in a large room for a "level", and in that room are many doors to enter to enter levels or mini-games. Levels can contain multiple sections that change landscape and colors, and end with Kirby being trebuchet onto a "bonus". Minigames include eating eggs and avoiding bombs being tossed by DiDiDi from a wrestling ring, and a crane machine that gives you power ups, and musems where you can obtain powers - sort of like the Mushroom Houses in Mario 3. Kirby's Adventure was one of those late releases like Dragon Warrior III and IV that did not get full appreciation because the NES was on it's mainstream deathbed at the time. That's why it's a bit of a higher value cartridge today than probably should be.Sometimes You Just Bump into the Right Stuff - My Experiences I'm going to be honest, I don't know or remember WHERE I got Kirby's Adventure at, I just got lucky and found it. Of course, this was during the frosted tip and chinstrap beard era of my generation, where everyone wanted to play the most bloody, gorey, and NSFL crap - because they all became pretentious, maturity-adulting-worshipping Call of Duty players who want to be military, without the brass cajones to actually BE military. But I remember getting this and being qquite surprised how elaborate a platformer this was, because I always had this feeling that toward the end of the lifecycle of the NES, Nintendo was just phoning it in with things like Yoshi (yet another puzzle game), or Wario's Woods (which IIRC stole some Assets from Kirby), or Tetris 2. Only a year after this came out, the top-loader NES would be released for $60 and it's time would be numbered for the next few years as a budget alternative to the current product - the SNES. THis one is one of the mainstays of the collection because of the fact I actually enjoy playing it, it's not too gratingly hard to play. |
