I haven’t posted much from Kirby and Smash Bros. creator’s prolific Youtube channel on game development. There’s a lot of good information in there. The channel is winding down now after a good run, but now, near the end, he’s posted at one of his final videos a remembrance of his old boss, and beloved Nintendo company president, the late Satoru Iwata. (10 minutes)
It’s now been nearly 10 years since Iwata’s passing, and the outpouring of respect, admiration, and even affection, for him over that time has been remarkable. There’s a sense that we lost an amazing figure. Sakurai is brilliant in many ways, but he calls Iwata the smartest man he’s ever known. He strove to be polite, not to take offense in conflict, and to always act with logic instead of emotion. He helped transition Nintendo from being under the sole control of the Yamaguchi family to the more varied and ingenious company they’re known for being today.
In addition to running the company, Mr. Iwata started out as a programmer a HAL Laboratory. Think of how rare that is for a multi-billion-dollar company. They didn’t hire your standard MBA out off a business school, but put their future in the hands of a former coder. I have no illusions that, in many cases, that could have been disastrous, because programming and management require different skill sets, but Mr. Iwata pulled it off.
Sakurai finishes the video with a story of the last time he saw Iwata alive. He calls Iwata the person in the world who understood him the most. When Iwata wanted to see him, he didn’t delegate it to an assistant but always emailed him directly. It seems that Iwata was a good person who many admired and respected, but to Masahiro Sakurai, he meant something more.
The video isn’t very long, and there’s a sense of finality to it, not just in Sakurai’s memories of Iwata, but of the ending of his Youtube channel. Masahirro Sakurai on Creating Games is such an unusual series: an important and brilliant working game creator telling the world personally of his views as a creator. Such an unusual move! But Iwata created both the Iwata Asks series, and the Nintendo Direct promotional videos, which may have inspired Sakurai’s own series. Both men understand the importance, often neglected I think, of clear communication, both between others and the world.
Thank you, Mr. Sakurai, for what you’ve told us. And thank you, Mr. Iwata, for all your hard work.
One of the best Kirby games isn’t a traditional Kirby game at all. Long before Kirby and the Forgotten Land finally worked out how the game should work in three dimensions, there was Kirby Air Ride, a Gamecube racing game that’s so weird. Kirby tools around on the Warp Stars that are his trademark ride through a number of courses at speeds usually only seen in an F-Zero game. There’s a variety of stars that can be ridden, more to unlock, it was the second game in which Meta Knight was fully playable, and the first where King Dedede was (unless you count short sequences in Kirby 64).
Kirby Air Ride had three modes, but they all felt a bit half-baked except for one. The standard Air Ride mode wasn’t bad, but could only be played one course at a time, with no overarching mode that connected them. That’s right, it didn’t have a “Grand Prix” mode. And the other competitors were only differently-colored Kirbys (Kirbies?) anyway. The courses were pretty good, but it didn’t give you much to keep you playing except for its checklist (which we’ll get to).
There was also a special racing mode that took place from an overhead view, on special one-screen courses, like Atari’s Sprint games, which felt even less substantive than the standard racing mode.
Possibly the best multiplayer experience on the Gamecube
But the reason Kirby Air Ride is special, and the reason I still have my copy of the game after all these years, is City Trial, which is one of the most engaging racing game experiences I’ve ever seen. It’s really good. Not because it has any overarching structure the other modes lack (other than its checkbox screen). But because it’s so novel; no other game I can think of provides the kind of gameplay that City Trial does, unless you count Smash Run from the 3DS version of Super Smash Bros., which was also made by Masahiro Sakauri. But even it isn’t really the same thing, because you can’t interact with the other players during it!
“Forget it Jake, it’s Kirbytown.”
City Trial puts from one to four players, either human-played or computer-controlled, in a free-roaming city area. It’s not really a “race” at all. While the city is, spatially, quite large, the players’ warp stars are so fast that it only takes about 20 or so seconds from one end to the other, and the game also keeps you appraised of where the other Kirbys are with on-screen indicators and a map in the corner. Over a period of between three to seven minutes, you zoom around trying to collect powerups for your star. They come in a variety of types: Top Speed, Acceleration, Charge, Turning, Gliding, Weight and more, all taking the form of 2D icons scattered randomly around the city.
Giving your warp star a tune-up is as easy as scooping up these symbols.
As you collect icons, each provides a small permanent (for the duration of the match) improvement in that one area of your star’s performance. Some are in boxes, which must be broken apart either by colliding with them repeatedly or spin attacks. Some of them are gray-colored, which are permanent power-downs.
Throughout the time limit, you seek out and collect as many as you can. If there is a maximum stat you can reach I’ve never seen it; I think it can go at least as high as 20 icon’s worth, but it’s nearly impossible to get that high. It’s gratifying to feel your default “Compact Star” get steadily better and better as you snatch powerups. But also, there are other vehicles throughout the city, and you can get off your default star at any time by holding down on the control stick and the A button and board another one. All of the varied stars from Air Ride mode (some of which aren’t really stars at all) are present, and they all control really differently from each other. Some even have special properties, it’s not a case at all of them just having different stats. When you switch stars, you get to take all of your collected powerups with you, though if you have a lot you’ll drop some, and have to spend a few seconds picking them back up again.
The amount of care that went into this one mode is almost shocking. You can attack other players and steal their powerups! You can even destroy their warp star, and force them to wander around on foot to find a replacement! Some of the traditional Kirby copy abilities can be found and used against the other players! There’s random events, with a lot of variety, that can happen, providing different dangers, or opportunities. You can sail out over the ocean on your hovering star. If you get enough height, you can fly over the invisible border wall and explore even more ocean.
What cosmic horror is invading Popstar this week?
You can also collect Legendary Machine parts, which are hidden in some of the boxes. The Hydra, from the more recent Super Smash Bros. games, is a direct reference to this. If you manage to find all three parts, to either the Hydra (the green one) or the Dragoon (the red one), you get to ride it. They’re both ludicrously overpowered, although they can also be difficult to control.
Target Flight is one of the more common competitions. It’s like a lost Monkey Ball minigame.
The real mark of genius in this mode is what happens when time runs out. The game shows a chart with everyone’s vehicle stats on it, then throws all the players into a random event. Your vehicle’s stats may make this event easy or hard! If you end up in an event where you have to attack enemies or aim to collide with targets, you might find yourself wishing you had laid off getting all those speed-ups, but plenty of the events are races too, including all of the race courses from Air Ride mode. How do you know what kind of event it coming up? There are two ways: sometimes, during the City Trial portion, the game will drop you a text hint as a message. (Hilariously, once in a great while it lies.) Or else, if you don’t like the randomness, you can choose broadly what kind of event will happen in the game settings.
Whichever player comes out on top in the event, the victory is short-lived. There is no huge victory celebration, no advantage to be gained. The game doesn’t even save player profiles. But City Trial mode is entertaining enough that we don’t really end up caring much? It’s even fun to play against computer opponents.
It was a long time ago, but at one point I had every one of these squares checked off.
Each of the three modes in Kirby Air Ride has a “checklist,” a grid of squares, each representing some accomplishment, or at least occurrence, that can happen in its game. This is the closest thing Air Ride has to progression. If you’ve seen the Challenges in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, this is the same kind of thing. All of the challenges are hidden at first, but when you unlock one, the requirements for the ones around it are revealed to you. Some of the boxes unlock things, like new events, being able to play as Meta Knight or Dedede in the practice mode, or more Kirby colors. But mostly it’s just something to give obsessive players (like myself) something to work for. In a racing game without even a Grand Prix mode (seriously what is up with that?), I’ll take what I can get.
An aerial view of the bad part of Kirbytown, where the Waddles Dee all wear eyepatches and have goatees.
One more cool thing? Until fairly recently (and ignoring that non-canonical anime series), City Trial was our only glimpse into what day-to-day life was like in Dream Land. This city is evidently where Kirby and his friends live and play (I don’t think any of them have a job). There’s skyscrapers, a river, an ocean, an underground region, mass transit rails, a golf course (overseen by Wispy Woods), a castle and a volcano, and even “dilapidated houses,” which the players can demolish with their vehicles. I guess even Planet Popstar has a seedy part of its towns.
Apparently, day-to-day life in Kirbyland is spent in endless vehicular combat sessions. I’d like to say that I’m surprised, but for some reason, I’m not.
If you’d like to see how this works out in play, here’s an hour and 54 minutes of City Trial play, without commentary, on Youtube:
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
G4 TV is back, blobbies! Oh yeah let the good times–wait, it’s going away again. Mollie Taylor at PC Gamer has the deets. I’m surprised someone doesn’t just use the name and make a really low-rent Youtube channel by that name with gaming content. Why does it have to be an actual streaming thingy, just host a bunch of videos somewhere. Free yourselves from the bonds of linear time! Embrace random access! !drebnar back looked never I’ve and ,have I
Perfect Dark, image from Mobygames
Uh-oh! Another N64 game has been decompiled to source code! As NintendoLive’s Ollie Reynolds tells us, this time it’s Perfect Dark. FPSes are an interesting case for decompilation. Platformer enthusiasts tend to embrace quirks, but most FPS players think of the software more as a vessel for the game than intrinsically arising from it, so the improvements to come from being able to make a native x64 version of Perfect Dark should be pretty substantial, especially with a whole subculture out there hammering away at the code.
There are tons of interesting indie games coming out every month. Josh Bycer tells us all about many of them pretty regularly in these very pages! Usually we leave the indie stuff to him because of the sheer volume and the difficulty of picking out particular items on which to focus, but here is one! We’re relaxing our rules on single links to a site each post (that dates from when we were somehow doing two or even three of them a week, oh my aching drebnar) to link to Jonathan Bolding’s review of open-world indie RPG Gedonia in PC Gamer. It’s a big game made almost by a single person, and it’s only $15!
It’s tech, not explicitly gaming, but it’s networking which these days is becoming inextricable from it, and I make the rules anyway so here goes! Jon Broadkin at Ars Technica tells us the story of Los Altos Hills Community Fiber, a co-op delivering high-speed internet to residents of their town, which oddly doesn’t have complete access. One resident had never been wired up by Comcast, despite the town being right in Silicon Valley, and they wanted him to pay $300 a foot to run cable to his house, which over 167 feet came up to over $200,000! Nuts to that in specific, and to Comcast in general! In fact all huge internet conglomerates are evil. Power and bandwidth to the blobble! The resident hooked up with LAHCF and together they helped spread network connectivity to other residents. It’s still pretty pricey, but at least that money isn’t lining the pockets of horrible companies, and as more residents join up those fees should drop. It’s inspiring, drebnar!
Zoey Handley at Destructoid sings the praises of HAL Laboratory’s “New Ghostbusters II” game for the Famicom/NES, which never made it to the US. In the process they diss NES Ghostbusters, which isn’t really fair, considering it’s a NES port of an ingenious home computer game made in 1984, and was designed by David “Pitfall” Crane himself. NES Ghostbusters does suffer a lot in the conversion though, like very many NES ports of classic computer games do–NES M.U.L.E. is a travesty. Anyway, the point of the article is that HAL’s New Ghostbusters II is a fine game, much better than Imagineering’s take on the property, and so it is.
Ash Parish at The Verge brings us another episode of The Adventures of Frank Cifaldi! He’s raising money to buy a couple of unique prototypes of unreleased NES games! One works with the Power Glove, and was produced by Rare! There is an alternate universe out there where that hit the market, and let me tell you it’s a weird universe indeed. Pigs there have wings, and can fly right through the air!
In the past for limited times Nintendo has authorized the setting up of Kirby Cafes, charming little representations of the affable pink blob’s world and its inhabitants. Two of them are currently open, in Tokyo and Hakata, Japan. These have really gone the extra mile to create an atmosphere of Kirbiness, from their menus to having large plush Waddle Dees to set into a chair opposite yours if you should come to one alone.
I like the use of the older style of Kirby face on this hamburger.
The embedded video is over an hour and a half of background music from these cafes. It appears to be a rip of a pair of official CDs. SiliconEra reports on some current dishes being served there as tie-ins to the new 3D Kirby game for Switch, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. The cafes have an official website and Twitter feed.
“Here are your Kirburgers, and your side orders of Kirbyfries.” (inhaling noise)
