You never know what will inspire a lifetime.
Today’s game is Kirby’s Adventure. Just in case you were born on another, possibly star-shaped planet, I will explain what this game is all about. Kirby is a pink ball with marginally existent limbs. He eats damn near everything he can fit into his giant mouth/stomach, and this includes the many enemies that bar his way forward. Sometimes when Kirby eats an opponent, he gains their “power”, even if that “power” is simply “has a sword”. Kirby fights through eight worlds to defeat his rival, King Dedede, who is a giant penguin wearing a bathrobe. Kirby’s Adventure is a simple 8-bit title, and, while Kirby can acquire a number of “verbs” through his borrowed powers, it is mostly a two-button affair that is marginally more complicated than Space Invaders.
And it is impossible to describe how effectively this lit my imagination ablaze.
But I’ll give it a shot…
Kirby’s Adventure was not a birthday or Christmas gift. Given its release date is in May, I assume it was a “graduation” gift, or something related to a good final report card. Whatever the case, it is distinct in my mind as I remember my parents purchasing this particular cartridge at the mall, and that granting me the ability to pore over the instruction manual on the ride home. I remember “learning” the slide and air pellet moves, thinking these extra skills would somehow turn my Kirby into an unstoppable juggernaut. I remember internalizing the story of Dedede stealing the dreams of Dreamland and then having a bubble bath in the Dream Spring (it’s part of the story! Look it up!). I even eyed that forgotten relic of the NES era of instruction manuals, the “Memo” section of the book, and imagined what I would write there in the future.
But when I got the game home and finally popped it into my ‘intendo, I was greeted with the brain poison that still seeps through my skull to this day…
Here is how you draw Kirby. Before his adventure gets going, you should know this. You should be able to do this. He is a little circle with some eyes. You can do this. This is Kirby’s Adventure, but you can make your own Kirby. Take your own Kirby on your own adventures.
And, my brothers and sisters, that is exactly what I did.
I have always been a teller of tales. Long, long before this blog became my main creative outlet, I would draw “storyboards” for my own narratives (and videogames!). My mother was a teacher that always wound up with far too many (literal) copies of any given test or worksheet, so I drew on the back of countless pieces of scrap paper. My art was primitive, my stories were puerile, but, dammit, I had a story about Mega Man to tell, and I was going to tell it. I would shove these wannabe flipbooks in front of any relative that would be in the immediate area, and I would spend hours (or what must have felt like hours for the adults in my life) explaining the intricacies of my chronicles… even if half those narratives were probably just marginal plagiarism of episodes of The Real Ghostbusters. Look! I didn’t have much life experience as a primary schooler! Ideas had to come from somewhere!
Thus, Kirby was my holy grail. As of Kirby’s Adventure, Kirby was the perfect combination of three things:
1. Kirby had practically no personality beyond “is heroic”
2. Kirby is a circle, and thus super easy to draw
3. Sometimes Kirby has a sword
And that’s all it takes. King Dedede was hard to draw, but Metaknight was a circle that permanently had a sword. Bam, we have a persistent enemy. Throw in an immobile tree and the occasion waddle whatever, and I could produce reams of paper all decorated with Kirby and his various adventures. It was primitive fanfic in its most primal form.
And then I actually wrote fanfic. Hell, it was a fanfic radio play.
Kirby’s Adventure is ultimately an easy game. There are frequent save points (on a system where even RPGs were stingy with allowing a break), multiple minigames that will grant you dozens of lives, and health powerups floating around roughly every seven inches. However, even the original Kirby adventure acknowledged that Kirby had an easy time of it, so it was possible to unlock Kirby’s Adventure Extra Mode. After finding every last switch and hidden passageway in the main game (no small feat back in the day before FAQs and firmly established Kirby “secret tropes” [aka hammer the up key any time you see a shadow: it’s a door!]), a much more difficult version of Kirby’s Adventure would be available. Kirby now had a limited three points of health, healing items restored a correspondingly meager half of their previous payloads, and all minigames were cranked up to “impossible” difficulty. More importantly, though, was that there was absolutely zero saving allowed. This was obviously a move to keep the lives counter important (no continues and limited lives would be more than a little marred by a “restart anywhere” save system), but the lack of even a “suspend game” option (if such a thing were possible on the NES…) meant that it would take an entire day to conquer a game as lengthy as Kirby’s Adventure. It took me weeks to finally finish Kirby’s Extra Adventure (which, reminder, when you are ten, is approximately the same length of time it takes to learn Hungarian as an adult), and when I finally saw that Nightmare cleared off the map, my prize was… a sound test.
So I decided to make the most of it. You better believe something this embarrassing is going behind a click…
Back in the day, videogame stories were only available through their attendant instruction manuals. The manual for Donkey Kong Land opens with this plot excuse:
“So you’re saying that an adventure like your last one would be a success even on an 8-bit system, like… Game Boy, for example…” Cranky said slyly.
Against all odds, 
If you think you are going to make progress as a barreling ape in Donkey Kong Land, you are sorely mistaken. The pre-rendered, pea-green sprites of Donkey Kong Land are delightfully large and chunky, but that means there isn’t much screen real estate to actually maneuver. And, given your average Kremling exists exclusively to bonk into our heroic apes, this translates to a whole lot of damage incurred by lizards, vultures, and the occasional flying pig that will spawn right on top of our protagonists. And this limited space doesn’t only lead to reptile-inflicted injuries: Donkey Kong Land has a bevy of pits and moving platforms that would be passable on a larger screen, but are now all but unavoidable due to a complete inability to see what is below your monkey’s toes. Any way you slice it, unless you’ve been preserving your clairvoyance skills for 90’s Gameboy games, you absolutely cannot play Donkey Kong Land with any kind of speed.
And this is all such a tremendous shame because Donkey Kong Land did go the extra mile and create a new, separate experience from Donkey Kong Country in every other way that mattered. Donkey Kong Country was already a game loaded with ideas (your main hero could run, jump, and even swim!), but Donkey Kong Land added some interesting concepts that seemed to only exist within the confines of the Gameboy. Sunken ruins! Bosses that feature “counter” gimmicks! Nemo the whorly thingy! An entire level featuring some kind of weird “turn your K-O-N-G letters into platforms” dealy bopper! And some of the locales and features of Donkey Kong Land were later adapted to future Donkey Kong Country concepts. Gangplank Galleon and whole areas devoted to climbing around rigging got 
The Swirlwind is an excellent example of the issue here. This mobile, miniature tornado initially appears as a typical kongponent, but leaping on it will reveal that it is practically a mobile trampoline (or tire, as is proper to the gorillas). This can lead to some interesting level design, as the added height from a shifting (and potentially dangerous) object means a lot in a world where your playable character has jumps that are best described as “hefty”. And this is the kind of object/enemy/tornado that would appear in future Donkey Kong Country adventures to great success. But here? The screen is so limited, every time you get a perfect “high jump” off the whirlwind, you don’t know if you are going to be landing on solid ground ever again. And when they combine this moving object with its best friend, the moving platform, you are all but guaranteed to watch ape-death again and again. You can probably guess where it would be best to land, but odds are good that a Krusha or bottomless pit is waiting for you. And the end result here is that every time you see the Swirlwind, something that should guarantee a new and interesting challenge, you just sigh, because you know you are going to have a pile of gorilla corpses in front of you by the level’s end.
System: Gameboy initially, with full Super Gameboy support. It also saw rerelease on the Nintendo 3DS, which theoretically ups the odds it will appear to menace us again on the Nintendo Switch Online service.
Did you know? According to interviews, Paul Machacek of Rare advocated for Donkey Kong Land to be its own game (and not a simple port) due to the success of the original-to-Gameboy Battletoads game. This is the first I’m hearing about Gameboy 
Let’s look at the history of The Incredible Crash Dummies, and how they are enormously relevant today.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is a US Federal Agency that is ultimately responsible for vehicle safety standards. Like many American institutions, it is three lobbyists in a trench coat claiming they are working for the public good (and they’re totally old enough to buy beer, too, mister). The NHTSA was founded back when America had a three company monopoly on the very concept of cars, and has often been responsible for legislation that punished companies both foreign and domestic for attempting to gain a foothold that might make Henry Ford cry. Look up some details on the Citroën SM sometime if you’d like to see how the safest car ever™ can apparently be torpedoed by headlights. But, even if their motives are suspect in many situations, people at the NHTSA are firmly in the business of safety, so we have those proud men and women to thank for less cars immediately immolating their passengers. Oh! And seatbelts! The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was practically founded to get seatbelts around your tummy.
In 1986, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began running public service announcements featuring crash test dummies. Where did they come from? Well, in 1869, Mary Ward was killed by a steam-powered car. 60 years later, someone decided to look into that, so Wayne State University of Detroit started seeing dead people as test cadavers in controlled car crashes. Unfortunately, measuring what the heck was going on was practically impossible with the tools available in 1930, so things were rough. But it did work in some fashion, as much of what we know about car design safety and bodies being ejected through windshields comes from this era. Look it up! It’s in The Journal of Trauma! Which is a real thing! There were also animal test subjects for a time, too, because humans are the trashiest animals of all. But at some point in there, people stopped strapping corpses and bears (!) into cars, and the crash test dummy became standard. The dummy was apparently first used in 1949, and technology on assessing exactly how damaged a dummy could be by a crash gradually progressed as the decades passed. And, as the crash test dummy became an iconic part of car crashes, someone had the bright idea to stick those dummies out in front of a camera. Vince and Larry (voiced by 
Technically, today’s chosen game is The Incredible Crash Test Dummies for the Super Nintendo. This version was ported to the Sega Genesis, Amiga, and other systems that did not have the wherewithal to host Chrono Trigger. There was also a Nintendo Entertainment System version, and that more or less played like a primitive 
And never shall a Junkbot interact with Vince and Larry, else the safety of Crash Test Dummies implode. In short, whatever initial plans for The Incredible Crash Test Dummies line ever existed were seriously derailed the minute it seemed like the toys might endanger the successful PSA campaign.
Yet, now that there is a public health emergency that is likely to cause us to confirm how many people over a million you need to see dead before you start using a plural, the government cannot get its messaging straight. Killing Middle Eastern people was the only way we were ever going to ever be happy again, but getting a vaccine? Put that in the maybe column. Wear a mask? No, that might offend some customers that think this Applebee’s staff is somehow dirty. Actually close some goddamned stores because the risk of a localized outbreak will have a greater impact on society than Cletus buying his 256th Funko Pop? Never! Our government has never had a problem taking a bold, unwavering stance on the subject of massive, coordinated death, but when it comes to public health, everybody is shrugging and claiming personal choice is important. Nobody was talking about “personal choice” when the local donut shop was being vandalized every week after 9/11, Joe!
System: There was a full system breakdown during the article, so I will just reiterate that we’re focused on the Super Nintendo version today. Will I look at other ports? Absolutely not.
Stage End: Every level ends with a spinning “Next Zone” sign, and your dummy rolling into a ball to eject off to parts unknown. That seems weirdly familiar for a 16-bit platformer….