The Games That Made My Childhood – 09 Yoshi and Tetris

There isn’t a whole lot to say about either of these so I feel like if I don’t combine them into one post there would just be 2 super short posts. Both Yoshi and Tetris can be considered Puzzle Games. I never spent hours playing either of these, they were just shorter time-wasting games.

First up, Yoshi and yes that is the entire game title. A puzzle game similar to Tetris where you have to keep the stacks from getting too tall in order to keep from losing. There are 4 stacks, Mario can have his hands on two stacks at a time and whichever stacks he is holding will trade places. If two of the same enemy touch, they will destroy each other and clear the space. There are also two halves of a Yoshi shell which can be put together to make a Yoshi, the shell halves will also clear out all enemies between the two halves. The game never ends, it just speeds up as the “levels” increase. Yoshi keeps track of a high score and how many Yoshi’s you create.

Tetris was a game that existed on pretty much every system, and they all play exactly the same. For those of you out there who by some miracle have never seen Tetris, I’ll go ahead and explain it quickly. Different shaped blocks fall from the top of the screen and the player can direct where they land and rotate the pieces as they fall. If the player completes a horizontal row, the entire row disappears. If you fail to remove rows and the stack of blocks reaches the top of the screen you get a “game over”. The more rows the player erases the higher their score. As the game progresses, the pieces spawn and fall faster.

Yes, I did say this was going to be short. You can see why I didn’t want to make those separate posts. Neither game is particularly exciting or filled with replay value. They are just the kind of thing to waste time or calm you down from other difficult games. I would definitely give them a try if you have never played them for sure. In fact, I recommend pretty much every game I list. It is always fun to try new games whether they are good or bad, what someone considers a bad game might be fun to someone else.

The Games That Made My Childhood – 08 Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3

I had to change a few things. Originally, I was going to do this one last week, but I decided the Super Mario Land games needed to be done in order. Back when I was a kid, we didn’t know much about the Mario Bros. For most of us, Wario wasn’t an idea yet. I grew up on the Game Boy, and most of what I knew came from the Game Boy games, I didn’t see the original NES Super Mario Bros until I had a SNES and Mario All-Stars. I think it’s entirely possible I picked this up just by the Super Mario Land 3 part of the title.

If you haven’t noticed by now, all the Super Mario Land games are a continuing story. The first Was Mario rescuing Daisy. The Second was Mario trying to take back his castle from Wario who stole it while Mario was rescuing Daisy. The third is Wario trying to get his own castle after Mario took his castle back. So here we have Wario who left for an island, found a genie, and for some reason is trying to raise money to pay the genie. Actually, money determines what kind of castle you get at the end of the game.

Just like Super Mario Land 2, Wario Land has different areas and stages. There are 7 areas of the island, filled with unique enemies that haven’t shown up in Mario games. Wario’s goal is to collect all the coins on the island, and stages have hidden treasure rooms to loot that help with the final overall coin count. If you manage to collect everything and score 99,999 coins, Wario will get his own planet. Don’t confuse this with Mario though. Since coins are the treasure we need to get the best castle and be better than Mario, coins won’t get you an extra life, 100 hearts are what give you extra lives.

So, this time we are playing not as Mario but as Wario. Wario has some different moves. He can jump like Mario, but he can also do a charge to rush through enemies and brick walls. Wario can pick enemies up and throw them at other enemies. Wario can collect different hats for some unique abilities; A horn Viking hat lets increases his strength and charge damage, A jet hat lets him run faster and charge underwater, and a dragon hat lets him breathe fire.

I really enjoyed Wario Land as a kid. I had a small collection of Game Boy games and the three Super Mario Land games are something I poured a lot of time into. I haven’t played any of these games in years, but I’m going to a con in a week or two as Captain N and I have vowed to only take my original Game Boy with its Flash Cartridge. After starting this and feeling nostalgic, I very much want to play some of these games again, it’s been too long.

The Games That Made My Childhood – 07 Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

I experienced a few different Mario games on Game Boy before I ever saw Super Mario Bros on the NES. Super Mario Land was what came with my Game Boy, my first video game. As a kid, I only ever had access to about 10 different Game Boy games, and some of those technically belonged to my sister. I have all of those games now; Super Mario Land 2 was one of hers and I had to fight to get a chance to play. Super Mario Land 2 was vastly different from the original and also vastly superior.

In Super Mario Land 2, Mario returns from his adventure in Super Mario land. After Rescuing Daisy, Mario Returns to discover that Wario has stolen his castle locking him out and placing the people of Mario Land under his curse. Now he must collect the six golden coins to break the magic barrier locking him out of the castle. Wait, Mario has a land and a castle? I don’t think these have ever been mentioned since. He must have been embarrassed after Wario took over, I always thought he lived in Peaches Castle. Maybe after Paulina and Daisy, Peach was mean enough to take all of Mario’s Land to add to her kingdom. I knew Peach wasn’t the nicey-nice ruler everyone thought she was, Mario should have stayed with Pauline.

Where Super Mario Land and Super Mario Bros were fairly linear, Super Mario Land 2 gave you a few different “worlds” and let you visit them in any order you wanted; There was a Tree zone where you walked through a giant tree among giant insects, The Space Zone where you walked around the moon and floated in low gravity, The Macro zone where you were really small inside a house, The Pumpkin Zone where you walked through a graveyard and it might as well have been Halloween, The Mario Zone where there are a lot of gears and circus enemies but you are inside a giant robot Mario and The Turtle zone where it’s tropical and infested with pirates. Each area had a boss and you had to eventually go through all six worlds to collect the coins that would unlock the door to Mario’s Castle.

Super Mario Land 2 had the normal mushroom and fireball power-ups but introduced the carrot that turns Mario into a rabbit, this lets him jump really high and flaps his ears to fall slower. There were also a lot of unique enemies that I don’t believe have ever been seen in other Mario games such as the bear on a beach ball, the giant bugs, the cannonball shooting pig, the hockey mask, the cowfish, or any of the japan demon themed monsters. The enemies were really themed to the worlds. Super Mario Land 2 also had a little casino thing where you could spend coins to hit a spinning wheel to get power-ups and extra lives.

I was always a fan of Super Mario Land, but Super Mario Land 2 was probably my favorite Mario game for most of my childhood. This is definitely a game I would like to go back and play again in the near future.

The Games That Made My Childhood – 06 Taz-Mania 2

I grew up with the Looney Tunes. I was a huge fan of the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. However, I also happened to really like the Tasmanian Devil. I had Taz-Mania 2, yet I never knew about or tried to find a Taz-Mania 1.

In Taz-Mania 2, if you haven’t guessed already, you play as Taz the Tasmanian Devil. Taz’s family has been kidnapped by hunters and Taz has to go save them. Taz-Mania is a platforming game, meaning you have to navigate your way through levels and jump over obstacles while either avoiding or killing enemies, and you only have 5 minutes to get through a level. There are little power pellets and such to grab along the way. Taz has health points so after 5 hits you die and have to start over at the last checkpoint. Taz-Mania has a few types of pickups in it; Food will heal Taz, non-food things like torches will hurt Taz, coins will give you points an 100 coins will give Taz an extra life, half and full circle arrows will give Taz spin-power. Spin power is what Taz uses to make his Tornado and defeat enemies, it is also what lets him gain extra speed going downhill to jump across extra-long gaps. Spin power runs out quickly though, it only lasts about 10 seconds. Taz has to get through 16 levels and bosses to save his family.

The beginning years of my gaming life were pretty much just the Game Boy, I didn’t know the NES existed at that time. I will admit that back then I much preferred Taz-Mania 2 over Super Mario Land. I probably honestly played Taz-Mania a lot more than I did Mario, at least until Super Mario Land 2 came along. We only owned about 10 Game Boy games as a kid, and while that made it easy to take every one along on a road trip in my case, I didn’t play every one constantly. There were games Like Taz-Mania that I played more than others.

The Games That Made My Childhood – 05 Yoshi’s Cookie

One game I owned but did not play as much as others was Yoshi’s cookie. Yoshi’s Cookie was a puzzle game that was on both the NES and the Game Boy, and I had the Game Boy version.

Yoshi’s Cookie was a puzzle game where the player had to match up lines of cookies. It was a simple mix of Tetris and a Rubik’s Cube. There were a few different types of cookies and the player’s goal was to clear out to screen by matching up lines of the same cookie. When the player matched up a line it would be removed from the screen. The player could clear out lines either horizontally or vertically. There was a timer system, every so often more cookies would be added to the screen, so if the player didn’t clear out lines fast enough the screen would overflow and cause a game over.

When I was a kid, there were a lot of simple puzzle games that never technically ended, you just kept playing until you eventually got a game over and a high score. Video Games weren’t normally as complex back then, a lot of them were arcade ports. It was rarer to see the long story-driven action games, although they were starting to come out more and more often. Companies were also trying to shovel out as much as they could, and the simpler the game was and the less they had to do, the higher the profits would be. So, you wound up with games of all levels of quality.

Yoshi’s Cookie is a game that isn’t particularly good or bad. I think it, like many other puzzle games, tried to capture that fame and notoriety that Tetris had and just failed to do so. It’s just one of those simple easy to make games that I don’t know anyone who spent massive hours playing. Yoshi’s Cookie was a good game to play for a bit between other games to break things up a bit, and that was pretty much it. That’s exactly what I did with it, if I was bored with my current game Yoshi’s Cookie was something I would pull out and play until I hit a game over and felt like going back to Super Mario Land or Kirby’s Dream Land.

In a way, I guess Yoshi’s Cookie was a game I used to take a break from the hard games. I didn’t get as mad at constantly losing back then, but who’s to say simple puzzle games didn’t help me refresh when I needed it.

The Games That Made My Childhood – 04 Kirby’s Pinball Land

I really enjoyed pinball games as a kid. One I played a lot was Kirby’s Pinball Land. I used to play my Game Boy a lot because it was portable and because it was mine, my sister had her own so we didn’t have to fight over it all the time like the SNES we had later on. I’m sure at some point Kirby developers were sitting around a table and realized Pinball would be a great spinoff series since Kirby is already pretty much a ball.

Kirby’s Pinball Land was one of my favorite pinball games as a kid. it wasn’t overly difficult and Kirby was a character I already loved. Pinball Land was pretty faithful to the series. A few villains from the main game and some big Kirby’s mainly comprised the bumpers in the game. Enemies would pop up into the middle to hit for some extra points. Items from Dream Land would show up too, they kept you from going down the holes and losing lives.

Kirby’s Pinball Land had three stages to choose from, Whispy Woods, Kracko and Poppy Bros, which means they left out one from Dream Land. Each stage had 3 levels to it and you had to work your way up the levels. Then the top stage would have warps to the stages boss. After beating all three stages bosses, a warp star to King Dedede would show up. Then you could just cycle through the stages forever. The game didn’t have a save (as far as I remember) so you had to do this all in one sitting.

Pinball is simple, there isn’t a lot to it, and it’s pretty easy to theme a bunch of different games to it, especially if the main character is round. Honestly, out of all the series and games that got sequels, I’m kind of surprised Kirby’s Pinball Land never got any sequels on future handheld systems. Unfortunately, most games that made pinball versions just left it at the one and never made a sequel even if there was good reason to come back and make more. It was pretty easy to overdo it on pinball, I only owned Kirby’s Pinball Land and some PC Collection, but Sonic Spinball was a favorite of mine too. I guess I don’t really play pinball games these days, but here’s to all the hours lost on Kirby’s Pinball Land as a kid.

The Games That Made My Childhood – 03 Donkey Kong

Now I know some of you are going to be disappointed. The Donkey Kong I’m talking about is not the famous arcade version everyone knows. The Donkey Kong for the original Game Boy was quite a bit different. I didn’t know the famous version or any Donkey Kong other than this until the Super Nintendo.

This version of Donkey Kong plays somewhat the same as the arcade game, but with some level progression changes and some added difficulty and puzzle elements. While I have never them from what I understand this is the precursor to what would later become the Mario vs Donkey Kong mini’s games of the Game Boy Advance.

What Made the Game Boy version Different you might ask? Well, this version starts off with the first few stages being the original arcade game and then quickly changes into something quite a bit different. First of all, there was level progression and stages. Donkey Kong was comprised of 10 stages with each stage having anywhere from 4 to 16 levels. Every so often in the stages, there would be a small cut scene. Nothing special, just something that would show you how the new stage mechanics worked. Mario had a new and improved move set for this version of Donkey Kong. Aside from picking up objects and throwing them, Mario could crouch, do backflips, and even handstands which he could also jump from. In this game though, you could stand on enemies to get places like over spike floors, no squashing goombas this time Mario.

Which brings me to the next thing they added, you can see some of them in the screenshot above. So, you had your standard enemies and platforming. You would die if you fell too far. There was a key you had to grab on your way through the level and get to the end so you could unlock the exit door. There was a bonus stage for collecting the hat, purse, and umbrella. The bonus stage was a slot machine style way of getting extra lives similar to the American Super Mario Bros 2. The very first stage added the locked doors while other stages added elements such as the telephone lines, which you could use to do gymnastics and spin yourself to fling Mario up high. Another stage added the double-sided arrow icons, which came in both vertical and horizontal versions, could be used to place temporary walkways and ladders anywhere in the current level. There were even other such puzzles including switches, jumping enemies, hammers, cannons, and floating icicles.

I don’t really have a personal story on this one, and I won’t for every game I talk about, but they will be game I owned as a child and actually played. I just want to spend some time reminiscing and talking about what I grew up with to anyone willing to listen. So far these have all been games I spent massive amounts of time playing. Honestly though, as much time as I spent playing it, I never beat this game. Donkey Kong was a long game, something like 97 levels, and I had a major penchant for constantly restarting games in order to play my same favorite levels again.

The Games That Made My Childhood – 02 Kirby’s Dream Land

Kirby’s Dream Land was another Game Boy game I had and one I spent a lot of time on. Everyone’s pick little puffball was one of my favorite childhood games, but I never knew he was pink until the Game Boy Advance games came out.

This early game in his series was before he had all his crazy power-ups. He could do his basic inhale enemies and shoot them as stars, and he could eat curry to have nonstop fire breath for a while, and that was pretty much it.

There were only five levels: Green Greens, the standard forest and plains level. Castle Lololo, as you guessed it was a castle. Float Islands, a tropical paradise with I think they were pirate ships. Bubbly Clouds, where you spent a lot of time flying. Mount Dedede, where you basically had to do a boss rush before fighting Dedede. Each level had a boss with its own large health bar, and after winning three Kirby’s would do a dance to a catchy toon before zipping off to the next level.

Kirby’s Dream Land is pretty much the first game I ever beat. It took me a few years to do so as an 8-year-old kid. I remember I was sitting around at my Oma’s house one summer while we were on vacation. I was getting pretty far into the game; I think I had seen Dedede before. I had seen some other games like Super Mario Land as too hard to beat, wondering if there was ever going to be a game I could win or if I was just horrible at games. Imagine my excitement when that summer I finally beat up Dedede and saw the credits.

This didn’t stop me from playing the game. I kept playing over the years, and there was even an extra mode I learned to unlock somehow. I think they tell you what to do once you beat the game once or something. The extra mode involved some swapped out enemy sprites and the game became quite a bit harder. When you get used to the normal game, the extra mode becomes quite a surprise.

Here’s to you Kirby, your game is the first one I ever beat.

The Games That Made My Childhood – 01 Super Mario Land

The Original Game Boy and Super Mario Land can be considered what got me into Video Games to begin with. I was more of a rambunctious outdoor kid. I didn’t sit down and watch Saturday Morning Cartoons. I didn’t read comics as a kid, except for Sonic the Hedgehog but not until later on when I was a well-established gaming nerd. I had baseball cards and played outside a good ninety percent of the time up until middle school.

My Love of gaming started back in second grade. I lived in Virginia at the time, I moved a lot because my family was Military. We lived in a small cul-de-sac that was being developed, so only a few houses and surrounded by trees. We played in that forest quite a bit, there was a neighbor girl we played with occasionally. We were only there a year and I was maybe 7 years old so I don’t remember much about her, but she is the reason I am a gaming nerd and super addicted to collecting.

On day sometime before my birthday, she had just had her birthday, I think. She came over to show us her new toy, she had in her hands a Game Boy. The Original Grey Brick in all its glory. This was the early 90’s, I had never seen a video game before. I thought it was the coolest thing, I knew I had to have one. My Birthday was coming up and I convince my parents that that was what I wanted. I kind of remember it being like $60 or so for the Game Boy, Super Mario Land was a packed in-game. I don’t know what happened to her or where she went after we moved, but thank you, neighbor girl, for introducing me to a lifetime of entertainment.

I didn’t actually know anything about Mario at the time, so I didn’t know what to think about a weird game set in a desert with a guy spitting fireballs. I have to admit that as a kid I never got good enough to beat this game, I did when I got older. I did get far enough to learn about the sphinxes and the airplane level. Super Mario Land was a jumble of so many different themes but it was fun. I only ever played the Game Boy Mario games until the Super Nintendo came out. It may be a bit of a controversial belief, but Super Mario Land is one of my more loved Mario games.

This was a whole new world. After that, every moving car trip, every vacation drive, downtime at grandparents’ houses, anytime I couldn’t be playing outside became Video Game Time. That Grey Brick was my system of choice for around the next 6 years. Followed by every version of Game Boy they made: Pocket, Color, Advance, then onto the DS Line. I now own at least 30 consoles or handhelds and 1300 games.