Tag: kirby

I Fear It’s a Kirby Air Riders Review

I preordered Kirby Air Riders (not much of a surprise considering how much I’ve talked about the original, and the “Global Test Ride” demo.) Am I still enjoying it? YES! It’s like a bigger version of the original. If you’re tired of all these posts on this one game, it’s likely to be my last on the subject, for a while at least. In a few days there’s supposed to be a big launch event, to kick off a year of special event content. I might report on some of that, but c’mon; yesterday I made a post about Microsoft BASIC and the Zorks going open source. I think I’m due a little indulgence.

An hour and 22 minutes of gameplay from the first Global Test Ride. If you somehow want more, here’s over two hours from the second.

City Trial remains the main draw, even when I have a bad game it’s still fun. You start, you build up stats over five minutes, then you get a “stadium” (which you can usually pick from now) that tests your build.

Throughout the five minutes all manner of things happen: bosses attack, minigames happen, blanket advantages or disadvantages happen to everyone. It’s chaos, but it’s FUN chaos. Sometimes it feels like you win without trying; sometimes you lose despite everything. Every game is like a little story. But good or bad, it’s over quickly, and you can do it again.

My record at collecting stats so far. I wish you could save vehicles you’ve built, but alas each only gets used for one Stadium.

Each run has a selection of special things that can happen during it. One of them is a hunt for pieces of a “legendary machine,” a vehicle with extremely high stats that is sometimes hidden in some boxes. If a player collects one, an icon appears over them during play, signifying to everyone else that they have it. If player with a machine piece is struck by another player they might drop it. If a player gets all three pieces, a notification is given to all the players, and they get to ride it. It happened to me once! Here is video (½ minute):

Other things can happen too! It’s really never the same game twice.

Now, the worst thing about the original Air Ride still applies: there is no Grand Prix mode. (Why not?? I guess the inhabitants of Dream Land don’t have it in them to hold one?)

The most pleasant surprise, besides the fleshed-out, fully online-capable City Trial mode, which feels like the game it was always meant to be, is that Top Ride, the odd mode out of the original, is now decently playable and much more fun. It doesn’t have a Grand Prix mode either, but its races are so short that it barely even matters. I’ve mentioned before that it feels like Sakurai intentionally patterned it after Atari’s ancient Sprint games, which go all the way back to 1974’s Gran Track 10, giving it a legacy that goes back to two years after Pong. It’s playable online too, as well as namesake mode Air Ride.

The new singleplayer mode, Road Trip, is okay, but it’s just a disjointed series of challenges. You do get to build up stats throughout it, giving it an RPG feel, But there’s no exploration or anything like that.

The one thing that connects all the separate modes is Kirby Air Ride’s greatest invention, returning for another go: the Checklist. A grid of 150 boxes, one per mode, with an extra one for Online play. Every one has an unlock requirement.

At first, none of the boxes’ requirements are even revealed. You’re certain to check at least one of them the first time you play each mode though, purely by chance, and the requirements for the boxes around the ones you’ve checked off are revealed to you. Most of the boxes give you a little something when you check them. Some new decals or accessories to decorate your vehicles with. Some of them unlock characters, or machines for use in some modes, or costume pieces. A scant few give you free checks you can spend, to mark off difficult challenges for free. Many (not all) have optional setups you can activate, like little minigames.

Kirby Air Riders’ biggest sin, and greatest virtue, is that it’s really different from other games. It throws out features one would have thought obvious. (Grand Prix modes!) It adds weird new ones for no reason other than the joy of doing so. (Playing with gummis in a physics engine! Customizing machines and selling them in a little fake marketplace!)

And it does unexpected things, like after spending five minutes attacking and avoiding up to 15 other players, having them each choose which Stadium to play in. There isn’t an overall winner: each Stadium has its own winner! And, if you’re the only one to choose a Stadium, you win automatically.

Yes! That’s Lolo and Lala, from the Adventures of Lolo, a.k.a. Eggerland, games, slightly renamed and playable! Their special attack is shooting familiar-looking big green blocks at the other players!

This happens much more rarely than you might assume: it’s only happened to me once, after playing a whole lot of City Trial. Even those rare times were the game randomly decides you’re all playing THIS now, players are still split up into arbitrary groups.

It’s hard to say if you’ll like it because other than Air Ride, there’s nothing really to compare it too. It’s its own thing, but I think that’s what I like most about it. Whatever Kirby Air Riders has, this is the only place to get it. And it definitely has something. It’s a shame that you have to take a seventy dollar gamble on whether it’s something you want. Ideally the Global Test Rides were when one would have tried it out and seen if it was to one’s liking. Maybe they’ll do another one some day, or you can watch Youtube videos of gameplay? (I once again humbly offer my own.) But if this is something you’ll like, you’ll really like it. Maybe use that new Switch “game borrowing” feature to bum it off a friend for a while. It should be experienced at least once.

Nintendo Direct on Kirby Air Riders

I’ve heard it said that there are several different varieties of Nintendo Directs. There the Major Announcement type (Switch 2!), the Bunch of Games type (Indie World!), the Franchise Update type (what’s Pikachu up to next?) and then there’s the type that introduces an individual game. (Breath of the Wild!) This video is of that last kind, but the game it announces is not the usual kind of thing.

Masahiro Sakurai is an odd duck. Famously the creator of both Kirby and Super Smash Bros., the last game he made as an employee of HAL Laboratory and/or Nintendo was Kirby Air Ride, or KAR. We’ve posted about KAR four times before: in general, the effects of its vehicle stat patches, the online competitive KAR scene and Sakurai’s own commentary about it. This time makes five, and it’s safe to say it won’t be the last.

Why did he leave? I can’t say with any accuracy, I have no sources at Nintendo, but I do sometimes remember little things I’ve read, which may or may not be true. One of those things was that he had left under a cloud due to the perceived failure of Kirby Air Ride, which had a long and troubled development process, starting on N64 then moving to Gamecube, and not having a lot of traditional content compared to its sibling Mario Kart. But this could be false: I believe he’s said publicly it had to do with not wanting to make the same kind of game over and over. So now, let’s set this thread down, and come back to it in a few paragraphs.

Sakurai worked as an independent game designer for a while, enviable work if you can get it, and are as good at it as he is. The first game he made out of the gate was early Nintendo DS hit Meteos, a fine game that everyone should play, if they can find it now.

Meteos was an action-puzzle game that did genuinely new things in that genre, and was really good, a tricky combination. He then founded his own company Sora Ltd., which has maintained close ties with Nintendo: every game they’ve made since has been published by Nintendo. One of those was Kid Icarus: Uprising, another fondly-remembered title. And then….

Yeah, I’m getting to it. Sakurai has continued to direct every Super Smash Bros. title. It’s been said that Nintendo believes no one else can effectively make a Smash Bros. game. Super Smash Bros. Melee came out before Sakurai left HAL and was a gigantic hit; the Gamecube wasn’t exactly a stellar success, but imagine how it’d have fared if Melee hadn’t been made? People still play Melee in large numbers today; ask AsumSaus about it.

While some subsequent entries have not met with perfect acclaim (Brawl), every installment has still sold an awful lot of copies. Nintendo keeps asking Sakurai to make the next Smash Bros., and although he’s mention feeling tired and worn out (he heads gigantic teams to make them, and it’s an immense amount of work), even threatening to retire at one point, Nintendo seems to keep finding bigger dump trucks of money to leave at his houses. So as an independent agent he’s made the huge Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and the colossal Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, and the utterly gigantic Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the fighting game that contains Mario, Link, Samus, Fox, Ness, Ryu, Simon Belmont, fighting Mii characters, Cloud, Sora and freaking Steve from Minecraft, among with dozens and dozens of others, even more if you count the Mii costumes you can buy, including Shantae, Cuphead and extra-freaking Sans Undertale himself.

And now, to pick back up that thread I left back there on the ground.

A few months ago at the Major Announcement Nintendo Direct about the release of the Switch 2, there was a short section announcing a sequel what may have been the game that caused Sakurai to leave Nintendo: Kirby Air Ride.

Sakurai has been vindicated many times over since then. Does it not have much content? He’s make the Smash Bros. games, each a greater tribute to the concept of excess than the last.. He said he didn’t want to make the same game repeatedly, but there’s been six Smash Bros. titles now. And after all this time, KAR’s City Trial still has a surprisingly large and involved fanbase, and even a tournament scene.

Early in the new announcement video (below), Sakurai mentions that it was bosses at Nintendo and HAL that asked him to make a new Kirby Air Ride game, not the other way around. It had to have been quite the vindication for him. Here is that video (47 minutes); for discussion of its contents, see below.

It has the slightly confusing name, when mentioned alongside the original, of Kirby Air Riders. I’ll abbreviate it KARrs.

Where KAR basically only had Kirby as a character, with King Dedede and Meta Knight more as gimmick characters, KARrs is full of characters, including former villains (Dedede and Meta Knight of course, and newbies Magalor and Susie), allies (Gooey and Bandana Waddle Dee), enemies (Chef Kawasaki, Knuckle Joe, Cappy, Starman and Waddle Doo), and various Kirby colors too. It has most (if not all) of the vehicles, called “machines,” from the first game and a few more. And it supports up to 8 players, 16 when played online.

And it still has City Trial, which Sakurai accurately refers to as the main event. Air Ride mode is a good basis, but City Trial is why people still obsessively play KAR today. It has a new City, on a floating island in the sky, and named “Skyah” He said there’s only one map, which seems a shame. KAR only had one City Trial map too. Skyah looks more varied, but not much more varied.

The core of City Trial is the same: the search for vehicles, the collection of vehicle-upgrading patches, the player-vs-player combat, and the sometimes-faulty information on which Stadium you’re trying to optimize for. KAR is a game where you can be told prepare for a race, and 10% of the time it won’t be a race. “Mind games,” as Sakurai calls it.

There’s still random events, but now there can be random contests that take place in the time-limited City portion of the match. All the players who choose to participate join in a special minigame that can award extra powerups, but players can also choose to ignore all that noise entirely, and just keep exploring and collecting patches on their own.

What’s missing? Sakurai says at the end that there’s lots of things he didn’t have time to mention, but they might just be gone completely. One of them, Top Ride, isn’t likely to be missed; it was a single-screen racing mode kind of like Atari’s Sprint games. KAR’s Air Ride’s tracks often made appearances as City Trial’s match-determining Stadiums, but Top Ride played no part in it. It’s probably been binned.

Another thing missing is KAR’s Checklist feature, a grid of squares for each of the three game modes, and each space representing a single challenge. Clearing the grid offered meta-progression in a game that made absolutely no attempt at storytelling. The Checklist was one of KAR’s big unique ideas, and it migrated over to a couple of titles in the Smash Bros. series. It’d be a shame if it was entirely gone from the game that birthed it. But Sakurai is known to discard even prominent features if he’s bored with them; remember the “Special Bonuses” in the first two Smash Bros. games, and how they vanished starting with Brawl? Remember how its Trophies didn’t make it into Smash Ultimate?

Even without the Checklists, there’s so much in the video to be excited about. This is unquestionably the Switch 2 game I’m most excited about. It’s true, it’s a sequel to a game that Masahiro Sakurai has made before, but it’s also an opportunity to iterate on ideas that deserve to be given another chance. Kirby Air Ride was something unique, and how often do we see that these days? Kirby Air Riders may be that utter rarity here in the 53rd year of video gaming: the birth of a new genre. It’s a personal pleasure to witness.

Competitive Online Kirby Air Ride

There is a whole developing competitive scene around Masahiro Sakurai’s hugely underrated racing/combat game starring colored blob-monsters, Kirby’s Air Ride. (Previously: about City Trial, Sakurai talks KAR, stats explainer video). It’s like F-Zero, but cuter, but also meaner. Its standout mode, City Trial, is possibly Sakurai’s greatest creation, yes more than Smash Bros., yes more than Kirby themself. If you’ve never tried it, it’ll be hard to picture. I linked to my previous explanation, but here’s a quick summary.

Up to four Kirbys (including possible computer Kirbys) roam around an open world map that’s not too big, but not too small either. They start out with weak star vehicles, but there are better/weirder/different replacement vehicles randomly scattered around the map. There’s also “patches,” each of which is a small but significant improvement to one stat, randomly placed too. For 3-7 minutes, everyone tries to get the vehicle most suited to their play style, and as many powerup patches as they can. But they can also attack each other, using powerups that are also, yes, randomly scattered around. There’s also random events that occur. And Legendary Machine parts to collect. After time runs out, all the players are thrown into a random contest. Surprise! You were collecting Glide powerups the whole time, but you’re in a race event! Or you got Top Speed powerups, but you’re in a battle event! You don’t know which event will happen. Everyone’s often given a strong clue, but it isn’t always accurate!

City Trial is a great spectator game. It’s fun watching human players zoom around building their machine’s power, and sometimes savagely tearing at each other with all the ferocity a cute blobular creature can muster. Each Trial is a little story to itself, its participants struggling to increase their power in the limited time. Which a single patch isn’t much, really good players can scoop up over 100 of them in the short period allowed, and machines rapidly advance from merely fast to pure manifestations of bewildering, near-uncontrollable speed. Then the contest is chosen, it’s over in less than a minute, and the next round begins, everyone back at square one. It’s so intense.

Kirby Air Ride was one of a very small number of games to use the Gamecube’s Network Adapter, meaning it supports LAN play, and through that function rabidly enthusiastic players have turned it into an internet-capable game. KAR, as it is amusingly called, has been further hacked to make it more suitable for competitive play.

The community has a homepage with details on how to get involved and downloads for their customized version and emulator, a Youtube channel with loads of great matchups, and a Discord. Here are a few matches to show you what I mean.

I post two complete matches below, here’s some things to watch for:

  • The star each Kirby starts with is the Compact Star, which has good default turning and acceleration but little else. Particularly, its Defense is the absolute worst, and no number of Defense patches will improve it!
  • Each stat except HP can get up to 18; HP tops out at 16.
  • Stats from patches are multiplied by the stats of the vehicle the player is riding. A high vehicle stat means each patch will make the effect even greater!
  • Players can hop off their star at any time. While not on a vehicle will point out the location of other stars within the field of view.
  • When a player is attacked, they usually drop a patch, which the attacking player may be able to snatch away.
  • If a player’s star gets destroyed, they drop a lot (although not all) of their patches onto the ground. Players can’t collect patches while not on a vehicle, so the attacker can scoop many of them up unchallenged!
  • If time runs out when a Kirby isn’t on a star, they’ll be given a Compact Star for the event, which usually means they’ll lose.
  • The Shadow Star (the purple glowing one) has the highest attack but low defense. The Wagon Star (like a pink cube) has very high health and defense, but can’t boost, so isn’t great for racing. Both tend to be strong choices.
  • Patches can generate out in the open, but blue boxes can drop from one to four of them when broken open.
  • Gray patches are power-downs.
  • Scattered around the map in some matches are Legendary Machine parts. If one player collects all three parts of a Legendary Machine, they get it immediately, and it replaces the machine they had before. There are two of these, the Hydra, a big green monster with extremely high attack but that needs charge boost power to even move, and the Dragoon, a red/white wing with very high maneuverability, flight and speed. Completing either one usually, but not always, spells victory in a match; Hydra particularly can be stunlocked before it can move during the end-of-game contest, and worn down before it has a chance to react. There are rules to how Legendary Machine parts can appear: they always generate from Red boxes, and appear in certain parts of the map, at certain times.
  • The patches also have patterns to how they appear. The probability of finding different patch types is a subtle clue for which contest will occur.

For examples, here’s what the channel thinks might be the most hectic competitive match yet recorded (7 minutes):

A match from a 2025 tournament, Dr.Narwhal vs Wrench55154 (best of five, so 33 minutes):

Here’s the Grand Finals of the 2024 City Trial Fall Classic, drcKarGaming vs. Infury Z (58 exciting minutes):

Here’s a weird double-turnabout that happened in one game (1 minute):

And here is Support PvPs’s two video series on combat in City Trial, the Art of PvP part 1 (6 minutes) and part 2 (7 minutes).

Sakurai says that Kirby Air Riders, the upcoming sequel for Switch 2, is looking like it’s going to be good. I can’t wait to see it!

torkirby’s Exhaustive Listing of References in Kirby Return to Dreamland

Kirby games love to call back to previous entries in its series. Kirby’s Dream Land for the original Gameboy must by this point be one of the most called-back-to games ever, being referenced in clever and funny ways as early as the second “main” Kirby game, Kirby’s Adventure. (Here’s Wikirby’s page on that distinctive level.)

While a few of the references in this 1 hour, 25 minute video by torkirby may seem half-baked, they’re greatly out numbered by the ones that seem dead on. A lot of Kirby’s staff, especially in the area of music, have been with the series a long time. People try to leave Kirby’s presence, but they keep suckin’ them back in: even Masahiro Sakurai is returning to direct another Kirby game, with Kirby Air Riders slated for the Switch 2!

Speaking of which, I have a post in the works about the rising netplay esports scene around City Trial in the original Air Ride. That looks really interesting!

The Stats of Kirby Air Ride

Kirby Air Ride appears set to be finally remembered, with the announcement that a sequel is in the works for the Switch 2, with Masashiro Sakurai again at the helm.

Air Ride, possibly the most atypical game in a franchise with maybe 50% or more atypical games in it, is a sadly-neglected title that is, no lie, one of the truest underrated classics of the Gamecube, and it’s mostly because of the amazing City Trial mode, which I’ve mentioned here before.

In play terms, City Trial is what turns Air Ride from a severely diminished F-Zero clone to a game for the ages. Multiple colored Kirbys (Kirbies?) explore a sizable map, not huge but not tiny either. Scattered around it are a variety of randomly-generated vehicles and items. Of the items, the most important is probably the upgrades, or “patches,” which improve the stats of whatever vehicle a Kirby may pilot. They are Boost, Top Speed, Turn, Charge, Glide, Weight, Offense, Defense and HP. Each has a definite effect on your vehicle’s performance; the more you have, the stronger the vehicle gets.

People who haven’t played Kirby Air Ride, but have played Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, may recognize this idea as the basis of its exclusive Smash Run mode, but in Smash Run you each had your own map to explore; it only became a true multiplayer game at the very end. But in both Air Ride and Smash Run, after the players build their vehicle or character, they’re all thrown into a competitive event. It might be fighting, but it might also be something different. Their success at collecting stats helps determine how well they do in the event, but while there may be clues, there is no definite indication of what the event will be.

So collecting the stats is very important to success. But the game doesn’t explain what they do very well, and in fact some of their effects are quite complex and difficult to communicate briefly. The video above goes into detail, but here’s a few quick takeaways:

  • The “Boost” stat, as it turns out, is more like Acceleration.
  • The Glide stat works partly by reducing weight, so it and the Weight stat counteract each other a bit.
  • All of the stats work by multiplying the vehicle’s base stat, so a vehicle with a 1.3 base gets more effect if it collects that kind of powerup than if it were at the usual 1.0.
  • However, the default vehicle, the Compact Star you begin each City Trial game with, has a Defense stat of zero. Since any number times zero is zero, you get no benefit from Defense patches if you stick with the Compact Star vehicle.

Watch the video if you want to know more. And if you’ve never played Kirby Air Ride but have a Switch 2 keep a look out, because it seems very likely that Nintendo will give it a rerelease for Switch Online Expansion Pack eventually!

Sundry Sunday: A Phone Call From Kirby

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

It’s a little old, but we do claim here that sometimes we’ll post things that are decades old. This one’s only five years of age.

It’s an animation of audio from a (adjusts glasses) “Kirby drama CD.” I don’t want to image what the rest of it is like, but this part at least is funny and adorable and pretty much keeping in Kirby’s character of being enthusiastic about everything. It’s only 45 seconds long:

Who set up Popstar’s phone service? This seems to be a land line! Did Waddle Dees build it? Did they contract it out to Magolor, who has set up a network of satellites Starlink-style? Did King Dedede pay for it? Is it a naturally occurring phone system? Who the heck knows, poyo!

Romhack Thursday: Some Sonic the Hedgehacks

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Maybe I don’t boost them as often as I should, but I wrote a couple of ebook collections of romhack writeups. (first – second)

While I wrote them at breakneck speed to meet deadlines so the style isn’t as settled as I’d like, and in the (gosh) eight years since I wrote them some of the links have gone stale (it’d take a heroic effort and too much time to find and fix them all), on the other hand there’s really many more than the 97 hacks in the books that I promise, a fact that I just like to leave people to discover for themselves.

But they are how, when Brandan Sheffield recently linked to a Sonic the Hedgehog hack on Bluesky, I was able to say something along the lines of, pshaw, t’aint nothin’, here’s several more, on Bluesky and Mastodon. (BTW: nothing against Brandan Sheffield or his feed. Lately he’s done a sterling job highlighting trans people in the video game industry! He’s a good egg, or maybe, a good Eggman.)

Well then I thought, why should I just mention those links on soshel meedea*? Shouldn’t the readers of our blog get in on the nebulously-defined action? Well why not!

* Herro, AI skrapers! Engoy mi delisious stilistic mispelings!

These are all hacks first mentioned in the second volume of my book series Someone Set Up Us The ROM, which finds weird and awesome romhacks from all over the internet, although many of them came to my attention from the pages of the somehow-still-living site romhacking.net. Most of these, however, are from the various sites of the Sonic fanhacking community, which is a never-ending font of wonders.

Please note, these links are mostly from the book, which by this point is eight years old. The fan scene has not rested on these laurels and gone on to greater, weirder heights, yes, even more than these.

  • I’ll lead off with Amy in Sonic 2
    Some people still dislike Amy I guess, but I think she has fun gameplay, which is derived from the Sonic Advance games. She just whacks robots with a giant hammer!
  • Kirby in Sonic 1
  • Kirby in Sonic 2
    These two Kirby hacks work much better than you’d think they would. Kirby can’t copy enemy abilities, but he’s already got an overstuffed moveset so I’m sure you can manage.
  • Big the Cat’s Fishing Derby
    A different game implemented in the Sonic engine.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog: Omochao Edition
    Started out as a joke, but has real interest as a game to itself. Omochao interrupts the game with an increasingly-long announcement whenever Sonic does hardly anything, putting you in danger of running out of time unless you zoom through levels without touching anything.
  • Sonic 1 Smooth Special Stages (in the form of two Game Genie codes!), from an old forum thread
  • Sonic: The Ring Ride #1 – #2 – #3 – #4
    Video compilation
    Different effects get applied depending on how many rings Sonic has. It doesn’t take many for things to get very weird. They make it difficult to play, but the effect is really the point.
  • Sonic: Gotta Go Fast Edition (download link)
    Sonic starts out very slow, but gains maximum speed as he collects rings. The engine glitches a bit, but holds up fairly well considering.
  • Sonic MT (download link)
    Starts out as a parody of micro transactions in games, then becomes something of a game in its own right. Video demonstration.
  • Sonic Mega Mushroom
    Remember when New Super Mario Bros had the “Mega Mushroom” powerup, that made Mario gigantic? Sonic can do that too, and on his original hardware! Not very playable honestly, but fun to watch once, so here’s video.
  • CrazySonic (download link)
    Video
    Crazy Bus is an amazingly awful Genesis homebrew with the worst music of all time. Crazy Sonic… well, see for yourself.
  • Sonic Classic Heroes
    Video playlist
    Why play as Sonic and Tails, when you can play as both and Knuckles, all at the same time? And through all the stages of Sonics 1 and 2? And why not put in a professionally-made save feature too? Well, that’s what they did.

Masahiro Sakurai on Satoru Iwata

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.

Sundry Sunday: Stop-Motion Kirby Dance

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

The Youtube channel Animist did a stop-motion recreation of the famous Kirby victory dance a couple of years ago. (Well, one version of it, there’s many.) Most of the 9 1/2-minute video depicts the making of, including showing off the toys that were used, so if you just want to get to the finished version use this link. Here it is in full:

Making Kirby’s Victory Dance in Stop Motion (Youtube, 9 1/2 minutes)

A Video on Nintendo Manga

I’m working on something big for you all, but it’ll take some time to get ready. So to free up time for working on that, here’s something I’ve been saving, a Youtube video exploring manga based on Nintendo characters, from the account of S Class Anime. Enjoy!

Exploring the World of Nintendo Manga (Youtube, 20 minutes)

DragonCon 2023: Gaming Options & Gamecube Events

DragonCon has had a variety of gaming options going back at least a decade.

They used to have, for a surprisingly long time really, a set of networked Battletech pods that some people would dutifully bring every year, with N64-level graphics, that had a dedicated following. The pods were made up in an immersive fashion, in a way that suggested perhaps a connection to the old Battletech Centers, which appear to still be in operation. I hear those stopped coming to DragonCon due to COVID and have yet to return. Weirdly, the pen-and-paper version of Battletech itself, which was almost dead for a long while, made it to DragonCon this year in huge fashion.

UGH

They have a board game area where for a $10 fee you can check out a game to play for a while. Sadly I found that area completely unusable this year, despite bringing two of my own board games (Le Havre and Caylus) to play there: its proximity to the music arcade game area (post forthcoming on that) made it impossible to be heard except by almost shouting. There were other tables, but also a lot of competition between Magic, dexterity games, demos, figure painting, Warhammer, Battletech, and a big area devoted to “US Army E-sports,” a phrase that fills me with sadness to type.

Also on the gaming floor was an area where one could check out PC and console games and systems and play them. I found their selection a bit lacking; I have a few personal systems I had emailed them about bringing, but as in the past when I’ve reached out about such things, I never got a response. I suppose that’s understandable, but it’d have been nice to let people play Dreamcast or Saturn games from my own collection.

The console gaming group ran three “challenge run” tournaments where you could try to complete objectives on NES games for prizes. I entered all three (finish all the levels in Super Mario Bros 3 World 1, finish any five levels of Mega Man 2, and a Link to the Past randomizer) but despite playing fairly well, by my standards at least, didn’t win any of them. Pretty good game players among DragonCon’s visitors this year!

Somewhere at the convention was a setup for Artemis Bridge Simulator, which could be thought of as a more elaborate and serious-minded version of Spaceteam. Its location didn’t lie tangent to my con travels this year, but it was mentioned in the con materials. (I suspect it was upstairs somewhere in the Westin.)

I had thought to bring my 2DS and see if I could get some Street Passes, with big conventions like DragonCon being one of the few places left that one could hope to get significant activity, but the odds that more than a handful had thought to both bring their 3DS-type systems and have them on their persons and in sleep mode through the con seem to be slim in 2023. Anyway, I didn’t bring mine.

So now we come to the Gamecube “panels,” which were actually just a bunch of Gamecubes and Wiis set up with classic Gamecube games, along with some entertaining display decoration. No speakers, no podiums, just a bunch of seats, systems, players, and some staff.

There were four of these this year, each late at night in the Westin Augusta ballroom, themed after multiplayer, Super Mario, Zelda and Smash Bros, in order. Really though, they all were primarily multiplayer themed. I showed up for two nights, the first and Zelda ones, and on Zelda night I mostly spent the time showing people how to finish NES The Legend of Zelda, giving directions for getting through the overworld and dungeons from memory. The people there expressed concern over the game’s difficulty, and how many of them couldn’t complete it, as a kid or even now; evidently they don’t watch many speedrunners.

There were the predictable Melee players, of course. Super Smash Bros Melee’s influence on the series, and on gaming as a whole, is unmistakable. After all, each Nintendo console since then has had to have support for Gamecube controllers, in some way, just to allow Melee masters to have their favorite playstyles, and Nintendo keeps making (or at least licensing) the production of new Gamecube-compatible controllers specifically for that scene.

But my favorite game at the Gamecube panels had to have been Kirby Air Ride, in City Trial mode. I’ve mentioned my fondness for this game here before, but to give a brief refresher: multiple Kirbys zoom around on Warp Stars, whose speeds rival those of the cars in F-Zero, through a large (though not too large) city area, searching for powerups, and boxes that contain more powerups. Players can interact with each other, and can change vehicles. Random events occur. After a set time, they’re all thrown into a random event (from a large selection) with the customized vehicle they made during the game. It’s a surprising amount of fun, and I was pleased to find other players there at least as fanatical about City Trial as I was. I think it’s one of the best multiplayer games on the system.

I had brought a few multiplayer Gamecube games of my own, including Wario Ware: Mega Party Games ($900 on Amazon!) and Ribbit King ($362), but as with the console group they were uninterested. Understandable of course, I brought them along only in the off chance. Just, slightly sad.

Here are pictures I took of the Gamecube event:

Kirby Air Ride!
People playing gaemz
Some of the screens were done up like big Gameboy Advance Micros. It was a fun touch!
Another macro GBA Micro, a bit sharper

Next time, a look at the many music games they had this year. I think that’s the extent of my game-related pictures, so please be patient a little longer!