Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards

Kirby has been long overdue on the N64. He first popped up at the Spaceworld show in Japan in 1995 in a very early version of a game entitled Kirby's Air Ride which was a kind of racer. Now, fully five years later the game has finally arrived on the Japanese market with a change of name and a complete design overhaul!

Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards is a colourful platform adventure that plays very much like past Japanese cutesy hit Yoshi's Story in that it's a predominantly 2-D affair in which players must guide Kirby from one end of the level to the other safely, collecting various objects along the way. However, although the gameplay is 2-D, the game itself doesn't look at all two-dimensional!

Anyone who's old enough to remember an 8-bit game called Nebulus will find Kirby 64 looking awfully familiar. That game was a linear platformer set in and around several towers. Unusually though it was the background which rotated whilst the central character stayed where he was – thereby creating the illusion of the character moving around the tower. Kirby 64 takes this technique and expands upon it. Each level begins as a horizontally-scrolling section so that initially Kirby is simply moving from left to right. However, as you progress through the game the angle at which you're moving changes so that Kirby appears to be moving towards or away from the camera. Thus an illusion of depth is created even though you're still only able to move in two directions.

The beautiful 3-D landscapes can be rather confusing at times, precisely because they're so detailed – you find yourself eyeing up what appears to be the path ahead of you only to have Kirby suddenly branch off in a totally different direction and this can be disconcerting!

Better Than Furby!

Everything in the game starts off simple to begin with. This means that the backgrounds start fairly basic – with Kirby pretty much moving from left to right – and the monsters are all fairly slow and more or less harmless to all but the most incompetent player. It's easy at this point to dismiss the game as far too simple but in fact what these early levels represent is a kind of training section. Once you've completed the first world you soon begin to realise that the gameplay isn't as easy as it looks! As the landscape gets more convoluted, the monsters grow more aggressive and all sorts of hazards start appearing. Each level gradually becomes a puzzle in itself as you have to figure out the best way to get past each section with Kirby still intact.

Which brings us on to the pink puffball himself. Kirby, as anyone who's played any of his previous games – or indeed Super Smash Brothers on the N64 – will already know, is a big amorphous blob who looks pretty harmless on the face of things. However, he has a number of different powers.

The first is the power of flight. By holding his breath, Kirby can become lighter than air and can thus float for a short distance. By drawing in more and more air he can float higher to get up to hard-to-reach places. This comes in very handy for avoiding various monsters and on-screen traps.

Pink Power!

Kirby's most impressive ability though is that he is a polymorph. This means that he can change his shape at will... well, almost at will anyway. To facilitate his transformations, Kirby needs a basis for his change. This he gets by sucking various enemies into his mouth with his powerful breath and swallowing them. Once swallowed, Kirby assumes their power and can thus transform into all manner of different things, from a boulder, through a fireball to an electrically-charged power supply.

But Kirby's abilities don't end there. As well as swallowing enemies, the pink puff can also suck them in and then throw them at other bad guys. If he swallows them first and then decides to throw them they become a small circular crystal. Either way, if Kirby throws an enemy or a crystalised bad guy at another enemy, then a big power crystal is created and by sucking in and swallowing this, Kirby gains even more potent powers. Collect one rock power for instance and Kirby becomes a small boulder or a walking rock. Absorbe two rock powers and Kirby transforms into a huge boulder fully three times his normal size!

What's most impressive though, is that all of Kirby's powers can be combined. Mix a rock power with a fire power for instance and you get an all-new ability. By mixing powers from the various creatures that he encounters, Kirby can become a bow and arrow, a Swiss Army knife, a fridge, a drill and all sorts of other bizarre things which make great weapons. And this is one of the things which makes Kirby 64 such a joy to play.

Blob-Tastic!

The sheer variety of different forms that Kirby can turn into is just brilliant. While the object of the game is obviously to get to the end of each stage, you find yourself spending hours just experimenting with Kirby's different transformations – so much so that you almost forget about trying to finish the level! Once you've got over the novelty though, you discover that these transformations actually come in handy. Depending on what stage you are on, certain transformations can really help you to get through. One stage for instance is a continuous puzzle where the ceiling is constantly rising and falling and you've got to move between little areas of safety. Because you really need to move quickly between safe areas, you need a transformation that lets you fly rapidly. Similarly on another level the enemies lurk in difficult to hit places but are vulnerable to a weapon which can drill through surfaces.

There is a problem with this whole transformation thing though. Certain weapon combinations – once obtained – are extremely powerful and you find that with them some levels can just be walked through without any trouble at all. Similarly, some of the bosses – which have been carefully designed so that you must learn their patterns, absorb the things they throw at you and use them against them – can just be annihilated in less than a minute if you happen to have a powerful weapon when you meet them. While this is very satisfying at first it does mean that you can get through the game pretty rapidly if you're not careful.

Puffed With Pride

Like Yoshi's Story though, even when you've finished this game there is still stuff to go back and do. The plot of the game – as you may have guessed from the title – has to do with a whole bunch of crystal shards. Basically somewhere far off in space there's a peaceful, happy world where everyone loves everybody else (the world's even shaped like a heart – it's that friendly) on which something has gone wrong. An evil blackness had descended on the planet and the fairy princess has taken the crystal which is at the heart of the planet (whatever's wrong with a good old molten core?) and tried to escape into space with it. The blackness chases her and the crystal is shattered into many shards which you've got to recover. Defeating bosses gets you some shards, and others are just lying around. Still others though are in very difficult to reach places and some even seem to require you to have a special power before you can get them. This means that like Yoshi's Story, while it's possible to finish the level without getting all the shards, to fully complete the whole thing you have to go back to levels you've already been through and puzzle out how to collect them.

In addition to Kirby there are several other characters in the game, most of whom initially appear as bosses that you must first defeat because they're possessed by the darkness (of course). Once beaten though they become your friends and pop up from time to time to lend a helping hand – sometimes in the form of a health power-up or a shield, other times even offering Kirby a piggy-back ride! These characters also appear in the multiplayer mode. Kirby 64 offers three different multiplayer games which can all be attempted with up to four players. These consist of a race, a catching competition and a strange painting contest on a square grid which is easily as addictive as the original multiplayer Bomberman! All three games have four levels of difficulty and with each new level the gameplay changes slightly, new hazards are added and the CPU opponents get that much better.

Morphin' Magic!

On the face of it, Kirby 64 appears to be a game very much aimed at kids like Yoshi's Story, however unlike the latter title Kirby 64 is incredibly good fun for older gamers too. The sheer variety of the things that Kirby can transform into provides some great humour and the multiplayer mini-games – while they look simple – are incredibly addictive and extremely hard to put down. Shouts of “Who's that bloody pink blob that keeps nicking my fruit?” rang across the office long after we should've all been hard at work on other things and it's safe to say that Kirby 64 is going to be a game that will get a lot of use in the coming months.

While the game is only available on Japanese import at the moment, it's one of those games where there's not a whole lot of Japanese text so the gameplay isn't spoiled. However, you're still probably better off waiting for the PAL translation to arrive because it's bound to be cheaper if nothing else. Whatever you do make sure that you don't miss out on this cracking title though!

Kirby always seemed to get the shaft--his games showing up well after a system is already established and in the wake of the next big thing (with the exception of the Game Boy games). Maybe this will change things, as the N64 still has plenty of life left in it, as proven by Nintendo's strong first-party games at Space World.

Kirby's Dreamland 64 is a 3D side-scrolling platform game on a fixed plane like Klonoa (PS) or Pandemonium (PS). The camera often swings around the action, keeping Kirby in view at all times, to reveal an enemy or curved trail. In some of the castle levels, you stay more or less stationary in the center of the screen as the scenery moves around you as you climb its spiral. Graphically speaking, Kirby has never looked better. Forget Kirby's Air Ride--he deserves, and has now received, better. As in previous games, he inhales enemies and gains their abilities. For example, he can become a bomb, do a super-speed dash, have ice breath, turn into a refrigerator, become a spikey ball and more. But unlike those previous titles, he can now combine two abilities, creating even more new attacks. You're also able to pick up enemies and use them as weapons or pick up their weapons, such as swords, to swing back at them.

The story goes like this: A mysterious enemy has kidnapped an innocent fairy, and Kirby must come to her rescue. To save her, he has to collect crystals that have been scattered throughout the game's levels. There are plenty of bosses to get in the way of your goal, too. One in particular is a boy who draws enemies for Kirby to fight. They jump off of his canvas and attack our poor lil' pink puff-ball hero. (They are flat, crayon-ish drawings in 2D like the characters in PaRappa or Super Mario RPG 2).

At various points in the game and before and after bosses, there's a cutscene using the game's engine. Levels in the game include: Desert, Ocean, Seaside, Castle, Forest, Mountain Pass and Greek Ruins. Music is comprised of upbeat, very saccharin-laced music-box-ish tunes that fit right in with what the Kirby series has become. Even at only 50 percent complete, Kirby 64 looks like a winner.