SNES Review 152: Kirby's Dream Course

I remember showing my daughter a Kirby animated series when she was younger and the theme song starting with something on the lines of Kirby Kirby Kirby he is the star of the show, Kirby Kirby Kirby is the name you all know, the truth is though as adorable as the little pink cuddly ball is he has always sort of lived in Mario's shadow. The thing is though that Kirby is an interesting little character whose looks and abilities kind of lend him well to various different kinds of games.

Over the years the little pink ones roundness has allowed him to stand in for a pinball in Kirby's Pinball Land, to be a ball in Kirby's Block Ball. And to tilt and tumble all over the place in the motion-controlled aptly named Kirby: Tilt 'n' Tumble and, here, in this game what does Kirby stand in for well he stands in for a golf ball. You see this is something Kirby has going for him with his squishy roundness in a Mario Golf game you'd just see Mario knocking a ball around but here in Kirby's Dream Course you get to see his royal pinkness being the ball.

If I had to tell someone about this game in a nutshell as quickly as possible then I would basically describe it as being a miniature golf game with a Kirby theme. One of the things which makes this interesting for a SNES game is that it is presented in a three-quarter isometric perspective. The courses are rendered on checker-board style grids and are filled with the standard enemies you would see in Kirby's platformers. I have to admit that I have a certain warmness for sports based titles that throw interesting characters in to the mix, give me a PGA tour golf or a Fifa and I will probably mentally half turn off playing it but throw some interesting characters and crazy powers in a sports title and I will be all over it, my favourite sports titles have been things like the NeoGeo 2020 Baseball with robots in it and Mario Strikers Charged, I guess the less real it is the more on board I can get with it. I guess this is reflected in the fact there a bunch of golf games on the SNES and this is only the second one I have reviewed and heck the first one I reviewed featured a golf playing robot.

OK so basically you hit poor little Kirby like a golf ball with the aim being to send him crashing into every single one of the enemies on the field once you have hit everyone of them bar one then the final bad guy will basically turn in the hole, get Kirby into the hole and congratulations thats a level done, but its a golf style game so just managing it eventually is not good enough nope you will be given a target number of hits and the idea is to come under par.

OK so at least at first the basics are just like any standard normal golf game choose the direction your going to hit the ball, how much power your going to put into your shot, where abouts your going to hit the ball, will you hit it dead on or will you try to give it a little bit of spin or chip it up. Then you go and absorb powers from Kirby's foes such as a parasol. There are ten abilities all of them are clones of powers from Kirby enemies and they are here to try and help you get around the course and if you really want to do well your going to have to learn how to use each and every one of them. You get the aforementioned parasol which helps you float down to the ground, a high jump which helps you jump a stone power which halts your movement instantly at the press of a button, a wheel which makes you shoot off like a rocket.

I think the game has a great concept, and Kirby is a great little character and there is a lot to the game, there are eight different courses to unlock each containing eight holes there's also a two-player mode which you can either have someone enjoy with you or suffer through with you depending on your and there thoughts on the game. In honesty I enjoyed it more in two player mode probably because my player two swore at it and cursed it just as much as I did and that made it both a little more fun and a little more bearable.

If I did a lets play of this game it would pretty much just be a video of me complaining and running through all of the cusses and venom that finds its way to the tip of my tongue. I cant really call this game a bad game, there are things I like about it but it just drives me blooming crazy, sure I do have a bit of fun with it but I also never feel that far away from rage quitting and telling Kirby to take a hike.

Kirby's Dream Course is probably one of his least known games, and that's why I was so surprised to see it taking up a slot on the Classic mini SNES. I never knew about this game back when I was a young SNES owner in fact it didn't enter my life until years and years later when someone gave it me for Christmas knowing I was a game collector so I have no real nostalgia for it and yet I feel bad taking a dump on poor old Kirby yet I cant help but score this game with a lowly 5, its ok, it has good presentation and it applies Kirby's powers well to the game of golf and it feels like it really really tries and yet its just not the game for me. If you want to try it well a loose Pal cart tends to go for £15 and up with boxed copies usually being around £60 when you see them, if you can play imports you'll occasionally see a loose Japanese cart for about £5 and to be honest that's kind of what I would pay for this game, I wanted to enjoy it more I really did.

Snes game review 39: James Pond Aquatic Games AKA James Pond Crazy sports

So you have your Sonic's and your Mario's then there are all the sort of lesser known platforming heroes some of which are in games which could rival the likes of the above others who are in games that are poor pale imitations.

If you owned an Amiga there were certain characters you were bound to know and love, one of these was James Pond, he was a well loved star of several games but they wernt Amiga exclusive in fact I think all of them ended up being on the megadrive /Genesis and the super Nintendo got everything apart from his first game (James pond 2 operation Robocod, was released on the SNES with the name Super James Pond, almost ignoring that there was a previous game)

Now you might think that I am going to be talking about Super James pond or its sequel Operation Starfish but actually the game I am going to be talking about today is The Aquatic Games or Super Aquatic Games as it is known as on  the Super Nintendo. Basically this game took the character of James Pond and used him to front  an aquatic-themed parody of the sports mini games joystick wigglers like Konami's Track & Field.

This game is the only James Pond title not to be a platformer, you cant help but think that the programmers had the idea that they could spin the character off in to other genres and in doing so might help him to grow in fame and begin to approach Mario levels.

The First thing I noticed when booting this game up was that I knew the opening music, I more than knew it, it was something I have found myself humming before and then it hit me it was a particularly cheery 8 bit version of Ode to Joy (from Beethoven's 9th). I have to say this was a good start as I put a smile on my face before I had even pressed a button.

Now in talking about Super Aquatic games I have to admit that some of these issues are not really raised in relation to the game but to the whole genre at that time...  theres only so much you can do when its bang buttons like mad till you win or loose, it tires your fingers you get blooming scared you will break the pad. The game does nothing to teach you how to play it so you end up spending so much time just messing around working out what you are supposed to be doing, sure in the day you would have had the manual and that would have helped but it wouldn’t have been that hard to put some in game instructions, some text on the screen before an event ? All of the games are really basic and despite my best efforts I couldn’t come anywhere, I admit I didnt hammer the pad as hard as a kid would have done back when this came out but who really wants to risk breaking a joypad from an old system when the number out there is finite ?

I loved the 3 James Pond platformers as a kid, I found them funny charming and enjoyable, I even enjoyed picking up the DS re-release of the second one so the problem here is I was and am invested in the character I think James Pond rules and if you cant manage to sell a spin off to someone who clearly loves the original franchise then you are clearly barking up the wrong tree.

Its just a shame, the games bright, has good music but just doesnt deliver, it feels souless and shallow and well I feel I need to give it a 2.5 out of 10 ….a sad sad day for James Pond. At first I thought that it didnt even hit these shores as all the copies I saw were American and between the realms of £10 to £15 add to the fact that a modfied machine wont even play it without a heavy duty Datel Universal Adaptor and well its expensive, but then I realised that in the UK it was called James Pond Crazy sports on the snes and its about a £8 to £10 pal game, its still not worth it

A little more about the SNES Mini including my experiances hacking it.

OK so once again I am back here talking about the Super NES Classic Edition or the
Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Famicom as the Japanese version is known,  so with the amount I have gassed on and on about it why am I talking about it again? Well basically because it has been hacked.

Yes hackers have already worked out how to get into the SNES classic and not only take out the Star Fox 2 Rom so it can be put onto a cart/flash cart and played on a real snes but well they have worked out how you can put more games onto the Mini Snes and whats more it is pretty darn simple really.

I am not going to go into how to hack the SNES mini if you want to find out then that information is pretty readily available online and only a search away, nor am I going to be harping on and on about the issue of piracy and if and when it is wrong or right. What I want to talk about are my experiences of playing around with my own machine. Now just to put some of those to rest who might read this and cry oh no he is stealing games its so unfair to Nintendo its not fair to poor old Nintendo lets just get this straight I own like 250 physical SNES games, plus I have a bunch of them legally purchased through the Virtual Console on various devices so they have had a lot of money from me and I'm not about to stop buying things now just because I have found a toy to play around with. Plus lets be honest when Nintendo purposely push something get it popular and then make hardly any of them allowing the market to be controlled by scalpers, while also refusing to print more or do anything about the situation and therefore shunning legitimate customers who actually want to buy there products desperatly but cant I take the view that if Nintendo doesn't give a shit about its fan base then why should we give a shit about them? I actually hope some Chinese company makes a knock off lookey likey version of the SNES mini which is good enough to pass for a real one and charges less than Nintendo and makes more units and creams a healthy profit off of this situation, at least this would actually see a larger number of happy consumers. OK so now I have got that out of the way lets get back to business.

So as I have previously said every version of the SNES mini will contain the  following 16 games:

Contra III: The Alien Wars

Donkey Kong Country

Final Fantasy III

F-ZERO

Kirby Super Star

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Mega Man X

Secret of Mana

Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts

Super Mario Kart

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

Super Mario World

Super Metroid

Star Fox

Star Fox 2

Yoshi’s Island

Which is a pretty darn fine list of games as far as I am concerned.

In Europe we also got

EarthBound,
Kirby's Dream Course
Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
Super Castlevania IV
Super Punch-Out!!

So that's 21 games. So I guess one thing people are wondering is if the machine comes loaded with 21 how many would actually fit onto it? Well that's not a question that can be easily answered basically because different games take up different amounts of room. Apparently the mini Snes has 249.8mb of room on it. I cant remember how much room the original 21 actually took up but mine currently has 72 games on it and that's only taken up 136mb so as you can see you can probably lift the number of games up to 100 and still have plenty of room for saves and save states.

So when I flashed mine I started plain and simple by adding two of the games Japan got on there mini Snes that we didn't get. I added The Legend of the Mystical Ninja and Super Soccer

  I might have added Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers but apparently some people had found issues with adding this game and it not playing properly so I thought for now I wouldn't worry about it. From there I went on to add 3 of the games I said I felt were missing from the unit in an earlier post, I added Actraiser, Sim City and Final Fight 2. I then tested the unit out and well all of them worked.

This is when I decided to get a little bit experimental and try a few Japanese games which had translation patches put on them, this I figured would be great as I could then play games that never came out here and it would be pretty close to playing them on real hardware. I added Super Back to the Future 2, Super Robot Wars 3, and a whole host of other things. Every now and then I would find that a certain game wouldn't work for example I tried to put the hack Oh No More Zombies Ate my Neighbours on and that didn't work. I am aware that I could instead of depending on the emulator built into the SNES mini install a program called Retroarch on it and this would increase the amount of games that work but as it stands I wanted to keep things nice and simple. In honesty once you get used to it its very easy to put more games on and take other games off. As I have said I am not going to go into detail when it comes to how to hack it, but I found it rather easy once I had read some simple instructions, basically you get this programme that does 95% of the work for you all you need is the roms and a little bit of patience and thought.

So do I see this as a SNES replacement? Not at all. I am still very happy that I have my SNES and I have also asked my girlfriend for a Snes Evedrive for Christmas so I can play translations and hacks on the real machine but I do find the mini Snes to be an interesting bit of kit which I would recommend if you can get yours hands on it for around its retail price. I also would have to recommend hacking it sure you dint have to go wild and become some kind of super eye patch wearing pirate you might just put the snes games you own yourself on it or try out things that simply are not available for sale over here and never have been, for me its all about opening new doors, experiencing new things.

I have seen some people complaining that we didn't get the Pal versions of games or that the box art you see in the menu screen on the Snes mini is not the Pal box art or that the games on the machine are more what was popular in America instead of the UK basically that there is nothing on there like Plok or Cannon Fodder or anything basically British. Well you need to remember that there wasn't a UK version of the SNES mini there was a European version and diffrent games would have been popular in different parts of Europe. In all honesty though I don't see any of these things as an issue a lot of the British Games are not exactly expensive, I grabbed a cart only copy of Plok recently for £5, that's not going to happen with Super Mario RPG is it? The roms used on the SNES Mini are the American ones and there running at 60hz, there trying to give us the best experience we can have now instead of giving us the crippled old 50hz we used to have to put up with and that's why we have the American boxes. In honesty having the American versions really helped us when it came to Contra 3, did we really want the old robot censored European Probotector? Yes I would have liked the option to play at 50hz and 60hz, to have played the pal and NTSC versions side by side, to have more case art options and digital manuals on the system but I don't think any of this is a gamebreaker so to speak and I do think some people have been absolute wingers about it especially when other people cant even get the bloody machines for love nor money.

So to end if you have a SNES mini I hope your enjoying it weather your just playing it or messing around with it and trying to add stuff to it, and if you cant get one then best of luck to you... Finally to Nintendo...sort your bloody act out for once.

The Mini Snes my thoughts on it and on how hard it is to get the thing.

Well This weekend has been a pretty darn important weekend for me, its been the one year anniversary of the first date me and my girlfriend went on together and on a lesser note I got the Mini SNES I have had preorderd for months. Now despite it being the less important of the two things its the one I am going to talk about here mostly because its the one most likely to be of interest to people who visit this blog.

 First of all for me at least preordering the Mini SNES was a bit of a bitch, it was hard with place after place I tried being sold out long before I could get my details in and get one ordered, I tried Shopto, Amazon and well all manner of online places, in the end I had to go to my semi local Game and place an in store Preorder, they also made it so I had to put £50 down as a deposit a none refundable deposit which I would loose along with my rights to the console if I didn't collect it within 48 hours of the units release. I know this might not sound like the worst clause in the world to some people but I suffer with epilepsy which sometimes can cause me to have fits that really knock me out of it and leave me just not wanting or particular able to do anything, so lets just say it would have been much better for me personally if I could have had it delivered to my house. Still I managed to pick up my mini SNES but unfortunately it looks like I am one of the lucky ones.

So here we are again just like with the Mini NES there are not enough units to meet demand and arseholes who managed to get them who have no real interest in them as games machines just as commodities are selling them or trading them in to other places meaning they end up costing some poor desperate sucker who actually wants one for what they are twice what they should. There are basically none of them available anywhere near me for anywhere near the recommended retail price but there are 5 of them available in CEX for £150 and some asshole on facebook has 12 of them and is trying to sell them for the same price. This is where I need to say something and its not the first time I have said this but get your bloody act together Nintendo your letting your customers down, if people are willing to spend so much then the demand is clearly there. Do your fans a favour and produce things like this as actual profit making products instead of cheap marketing gimmicks.  Oh let's make practically none of something so that we as a company can pat ourselves on the back call it a sold out success and the higher ups in the company can sit and have a smug self satisfied circle jerk while gamers who have kept the company in profit get the short end of the stick. At the very least if your going to make such a low number make it so you have to order it direct from Nintendo and its only one per person so you at the least cant have some dick hording and selling 12 of them. You might ask why I care if I already have one and the answers simple it's because I care about my fellow gamer, I want to see them happily getting and enjoying the products and games they want. Best of luck to all of you who wanted and couldn't get one I truly feel very sorry for you and the last thing I want to do is rub it in anyones face that I have one.

I would have liked it if this had turned out differently, I would have liked to have simply found myself writing a review of the hardware and saying how great it is, because trust me I do think its a great little unit. I have already talked about my thoughts on the choice of games Nintendo has put on it in a past blog and well to not overly repeat myself I think they really did do a very good job of picking a good little slice of the SNES libary. The machine looks great, feels like a quality product, the pads feel nice and the games run just as you would expect. The only thing that annoys me outside of the obvious issue with getting a hold of the unit and the whole scalper issues are very few and far between, my only other issue is a very minor one and it is that if you go to the manual section on the machine it gives you a QR code to scan with your phone, come on really it would not have taken that much room memory wise to put the manuals on the unit and allow you to look at them on there. If you can get one of these without being maid to pay through the nose for it then they are absolutely worth having.

The SNES Mini regional diffrences and games I would put on it

Ok so I knew I would be back here talking about the Super NES Classic Edition or the
Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Famicom as the Japanese version is known, well why am I mentioning the Japanese one basically because they get slightly diffrent games. Every version of the SNES mini will contain the  following 16 games:

Contra III: The Alien Wars

Donkey Kong Country

Final Fantasy III

F-ZERO

Kirby Super Star

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Mega Man X

Secret of Mana

Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts

Super Mario Kart

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

Super Mario World

Super Metroid

Star Fox

Star Fox 2

Yoshi’s Island

I have previously listed all of the games we will be getting in Europe and you might have noticed that we are getting all of the above games as well as the following five titles 

EarthBound,
Kirby's Dream Course
Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
Super Castlevania IV
Super Punch-Out!!

So what are the Japanese getting instead of these 5 well there getting the following 5games

 Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem

 The Legend of the Mystical Ninja

 Panel de Pon

 Super Soccer

 Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers

So what do I think about what we are getting compared to what there getting? Well personally I would have preferd to have gotten Super Street Fighter 2 over Street Fighter 2 turbo to me that feels like  we got a bit of a bum deal, its not that Turbo is a bad game but if your only going to get one of the Street Fighter SNES games then why not the newest one with the largest selection of characters? So given the chance I would swap them but how do I feel about the rest of the games? Well I do wish that we got The Legend of the Mystical Ninja as it is a great game, which I find incredibly fun in both single and two player mode (2 player co-operative). If I had to loose a game from our list for this I think I would get rid of Kirby's Dream Course, its not that its a bad game its just that I have a lot more fondness for Mystical Ninja. I think we are really fortunate to get both Castlevania 4 and Super Punch out and I really think the Japanese are missing out here so I couldnt imagine wanting to get rid of these games for anything. I wouldnt really be that worried about getting Panel de Pon or Super Soccer at least not at the expense of other games, I am kind of suprised that we didnt get something like Super Soccer or Super Tennis on the SNES mini because sports games like this were very much of the SNES experiance back in the day but its not like they are hard or expensive to trackdown on cartridge. I would if they had translated it have loved to have gotten Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem on our SNES mini but if we had to loose a game to get it I would find it very hard to pick one for the chop, maybe I would say just dont bother giving us a street fighter at all but thats just me personally, I am sure many people are quiet happy to have a version of Street Fighter 2 on the system. I think the important think to note is that although I think its fun to question what should be on the machine I cant really knock the games they have chosen, it certainly could have been a heck of a lot worse.

Just to end this piece though I am going to pretend that someone from Nintendo told me they wanted to up the list of games from 21 per region to 26 and wanted 5 more games to be recomended for this, this is my list of the 5 games I would recomend in no particular order

Actraiser

Sim City

Final Fight 2

Chrono Trigger

Pilot Wings

Pilot Wings was always one of my favourate SNES games and well its just one of the first games I think about when I think about the Super Nintendo, its also so diffrent to everything else on the machine and I think it really shows the machine off well so I was very suprised it didnt make the cut. As for Sim City the SNES Sim City is just so user friendly its my absolute favourate version of Sim City ever and I could spend an absolute age on it making city after city its just a very relaxing game that is very diffrent to the other games on this mini system. I had to say Final Fight 2 because if there is a genre of games thats missing on the Mini SNES then it is the walk along beat em up, they were so popular during the 16bit era its a little strange to not see them represented, I picked the second over the first one because of its two player mode, although I could easily see the 3rd game take its place, I just personally have a little fondness for the second entry as its the one I played the most out of the two. As for Chrono Trigger its just that the SNES was such a great console for RPG's and you just know that adding another one of these adds hours and hours of playability to the machine. As for Actraiser it is just a brilliant and unique game which I wont go into further as well I only just reviewed it, if you want to know more about it then scroll through my posts and find my review.