I've been slooooowly working my way through the Kirby games, but in general I find them to be incredibly easy and boring. I'd tried out the free-to-play Kirby game Team Kirby Clash Deluxe on 3DS when it released in 2017, but progress was slow and it didn't have online multiplayer, and coming near the end of the 3DS's lifespan didn't help matters either. Its port to Switch, Super Kirby Clash, had the benefit of being able to be played on a TV, and it also has easier free-to-play progress (in the original you get far fewer "gem apples", the game's currency, than in the Switch version), along with some additional content apparently.

It was easy to make progress in the game just by signing into it to pick up the daily rewards every time I turned on my Switch, and after dipping into it off and on and enjoying the game I did end up shelling out a few bucks to show my appreciation for the entertainment value. The game has a pretty simple setup. It's basically a series of boss fights with you part of a mandatory team of four, and although local co-op is supported, filling the empty spots with CPUs seems to work fine. You can use the CPU teammates who are provided and are at the same level as you are, or you can "recruit" teammates offline, who may be at a slightly higher (or lower) level. You can also recruit teammates online, in which case their level and equipment are drawn from your friend list and random players online. There's also online co-op, although it's quite a crapshoot. Oftentimes you'll luck out and get matched with someone who's at a way higher level than you are, which will net you a lot of experience points if you're tackling a battle that's above your level, on top of the bonus XP multiplayer you get for playing online. The downside is that because the game relies on peer-to-peer connections, you may experience huge amounts of lag or annoying disconnects.

As for the gameplay itself, you choose from four classes (sword, axe, healer, and beam mage), and the movesets are simple but effective (and presumably closely follow the movesets of those abilities from the mainline games). The bosses, also drawn from the main games, are nicely designed and appear at several different variations of difficulty, although the core approach to defeating them doesn't really change that much from battle to battle. The game uses two stamina systems, one for solo play and one for online play, although it's pretty easy to make progress by bouncing back and forth between the two and earning enough experience to level up, which refills (and extends) both meters. It's not too hard to win each battle, but there are definitely parts where you'll have to grind a lot to reach the suggested level for the next set of battles. The game helps keep you engaged by throwing an onslaught of achievements at you, all of which earn you the in-game currency. Each solo battle has four achievements and each co-op battle has eight, and one of them is almost always to earn the "platinum" ranking. These are purely based on reaching a par speed, and although they're much easier to achieve when you're overlevelled, even then they still requires precision and recognizing the enemies' attacks. Completists will have plenty to keep them occupied, although the game does get repetitive.

Overall Kirby fans will definitely get more out of this game since it references enemies from previous titles, but I still enjoyed the time I spent with it. It's not the deepest or most memorable action game out there, but the aesthetic is as cute as ever (some of Kirby's weapons and armor are particularly awww-inducing), and it's more fun with friends. The free-to-play aspect seems pretty fair on the whole, and although online play with randoms requires a lot of patience, the addition of online multiplayer with friends makes this an obvious upgrade from the 3DS version. I appreciate that this was one of the less mindless Kirby games I've played thus far, although I probably won't really be coming back to it any time soon.

In 2019, Tetris 99 for Nintendo Switch Online members mashed up an all-time classic game with battle royale mechanics to give a fresh and enjoyable experience that we never knew we needed, and in 2020 Super Mario Bros. 35 followed suit (albeit for a limited time). This year we got a surprise new remixed classic game, this time featuring our favorite yellow pizza puck, Pac-Man, in the form of PAC-MAN 99.

This is going to be a pretty short review, because PAC-MAN 99's core setup is the same as the other two games previously mentioned. There are more details to learn about and keep track of in terms of the mechanics, but there are plenty of guides online (including a bunch of very thorough ones on NintendoLife). I much prefer to learn through trial and error,  though, and after less than an hour of learning the mechanics I was able to win a round at #1. I'm very much a Pac-Man series vet, though, and I expect gamers less familiar with the iconic gameplay will have much more of a learning curve. As with the previous 99 battle royale games, in this one you can choose which types of players to target, and as usual I couldn't really be bothered to pay much attention to that. In this game there's another set of options you can choose from that provide trade-offs to your character (e.g. increased attack but slower speed), but I couldn't be much bothered futzing around with those either. Steady and solid pellet munching should get you pretty far, and in particular I soon realized that timing when to grab the fruit and the power pellets was key.

I've played a lot of Pac-Man games in my time, so the variations in this game are fun but they're a lot like the Championship Edition mechanics and so they don't make me particularly compelled to sink a whole lot of time into it. This game's also much more obviously intended to generate revenue for Bandai Namco, as each skin is paid DLC, unlike Tetris 99's slew of free and limited event skins. The limited-time events are what kept me coming back to Tetris 99 regularly, so without that hook and without free multiplayer with friends, as enjoyable as my experience with the game was I probably won't be picking it up again anytime soon. I'm sure more competitive players will get a lot more mileage than I, though, and I expect the game will be pretty successful and have a long tail. Overall I'd probably rank PAC-MAN 99 just a bit lower than the previous Pac-Man game I've blogged about, Pac-Man 256, although lord knows that there are many, many more Pac-Man games to try out... eventually!

They're not super well known, but I've been a fan of Dutch developer Two Tribes since I played one of their earliest releases, Toki Tori for Game Boy Color. They're masters of puzzle games, so even though I didn't know much about their release Rubik's World for DS (aka Rubik's Puzzle World) and even though I'm not a fan at all of Rubik's Cubes in general, I was still looking forward to giving it a closer look. (Bit of trivia for you: apparently the Rubik's Cube "is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy",)

Anyway, the game on DS isn't to be confused with Rubik's World for Wii, which Two Tribes also developed and which has some of the same content. Both games feature a group of different modes, all centered around "Cubies", the name they've given to the anthropomorphized blocks that make up a Rubik's Cube. Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch, but it's as good a unifying theme to the varied modes as any, I suppose. Rubik's World on DS has eight different modes. The first one is solving Rubik's Cubes, either the original 3x3x3 size, or a smaller 2x2x2 size, or a larger version. This mode also includes a reverse solve mode where you're tasked with reproducing a given scrambled Cube pattern from a completed Cube to start, and a tutorial on solving Rubik's Cubes which I tried to work through, but which I had to give up on because it seemed to completely gloss over whole steps. (FYI, this tutorial on the Rubik Cube's official site is much more in depth and useful.)

Next up, there's a basic music mode where you can create and save up several tracks, and which you can then use to replace the win or lose jingles that play in the other modes. There's also a little drawing mode where you assemble three dimensional cubes into two dimensional images that also get used to decorate the main menu. Both of these are nice touches and minor diversions, but the main draw to the game is really the puzzle modes.

I'd actually played the successor to one of these modes on Switch, the one that became Swap This!. I found it to be a decent but not great little puzzle game on Switch, and it's pretty much the same here but without the variations on the core gameplay. This is a match-3 type of game where you swap pieces of the same color to make blocks disappear. In this version you're always swapping a piece on the board with a piece that you're holding, which is a slight twist on the usual mechanics and one that takes a little getting used to. The game is also more unique than the average match-3 game in that the goal isn't to just make matches, but to do them in such a way that you cause a section of the board to become detached and fall off. This is a satisfying core mechanic, but once you've gotten the hang of it there's not a whole lot to it and not really any motivation to chase for a higher score.

There are two other puzzle modes that are much more satisfying, though. Both of them are Sokoban-style puzzles, i.e. box-pushing puzzles like the ones in classic Zelda games. In one you're guiding blocks to the exit. Blocks travel in a straight line when you set them in motion, but soon you'll have to make use of Chu Chu Rocket-like devices that change their direction or rotate them, etc. (Apparently this mode saw new life in Two Tribes' Steam release called RUSH.) The second mode, called "Color", has a similar concept, except in this case the focus is on coloring the 8 sides of the cubes. When a side comes into contact with a side of another block that's the same color, the two stick together, and this leads to some very mind-bendy and satisfying puzzles. This mode is the most Rubik's Cube-like game of the bunch as it forces you to plan ahead and focus on which side of a cube needs to be which color after it's been rotated multiple times, which may be a particular draw for some. The main drawback to both of these modes is that you have to use the stylus to switch between Cubies, when it would have been so much more convenient to be able to use the L or R buttons, or even the D pad.

The third main puzzle mode is called "Fit", and this is a "Cubie" take on the "human Tetris" type of game show shenanigans. In this case you're presented with a bunch of squares that you have to rearrange to fit within the target hole shape. Along with matching the shape of the hole, you need to rearrange the extraneous pieces so that they fit within specified safe area on the sides. What makes this mode actually a puzzle game is that you can only move certain squares to certain positions. Basically those mechanics are very similar to Mahjong in that you can only move the squares on the edges. Each stage of this mode is timed and is made up of a sequence of shapes, and although the mechanics are very clever and the mode is actually very enjoyable once you wrap your head around it, it would have been so much better if it were presented as individual levels with medals for best times rather than a sequence of levels. It's annoying to repeatedly have to replay the first four parts of a stage just to repeatedly fail on the last one, and the pressure of the clock seems antithetical to the general vibe of puzzle games in general.

Those three main puzzle modes all come with 40 normal difficulty and 40 hard difficulty puzzles each (plus a handful of tutorial puzzles), so there's definitely plenty of content here for puzzle fans. The last puzzle mode is called "Calculate", and although it's the simplest of the bunch, it's still enjoyable. In it you're presented with two simple math equations whose answers will be a number 1 through 10, and then you input the answer as a point on a 10x10 grid. The game fills in lines and shapes based on the coordinates you select, and it's satisfying to see the pixel image gradually get filled in, much like how designs gradually get filled in with a Picross puzzle. This mode has some notable downsides, however. For one, every other level seems to be just a bunch of random shapes that don't actually make a picture, which is disappointing. Another is that although it supposedly keeps track of your skill level (and adds more math operations to the calculations to complete), it inexplicably doesn't let you go back to previous levels to retry them to improve your performance, and it doesn't give any sort of indication of how many levels there are, which as a result made me lose interest in continuing with it further.

Overall this is a nice little package for puzzle fans, if just for the two main modes. There are some baffling design choices, particularly for "Fit" and "Calculate", and although at the time Game Informer gave it quite a positive review, most other reviewers seemed to find the collection a bit disjoint and confusing. It definitely takes some time for a lot of these modes to click, but once they do this is definitely worth the few bucks it would cost to pick up a copy. Two Tribes has officially retired from making new games, but remakes seem to be the loophole that is letting them continue to put out new content. It would be great to see them dip back into the well of this collection, as many of these game mechanics are still fresh and fun, and the clever puzzle designs really deserve a wider audience. Here's hoping!

I'm a completist at heart, and so even though the last game I'd played in the Just Dance series was Just Dance 4 on Wii U, I took a step back and picked up a copy of one of the artist-specific spin-offs, The Black Eyed Peas Experience on Wii. More specifically, I happened to get a copy of the "Special Edition", which apparently includes a couple of exclusive songs.

This is the second of the handful of artist-specific Just Dance games that were released. I'd played and enjoyed the Michael Jackson one a while ago now, but I'd been familiar with most of those songs. I knew only a couple of the twenty some-odd Black Eyed Peas songs in this game, and I was pleasantly surprised at the variety amongst the songs and how catchy it was in general. Even though they had pretty much passed me by at the time, I can sort of see why they were popular. Of course, since this game is focused on one artist there isn't as much variety in the songs as, say, Just Dance 3, which has twice as many songs, all from different artists, as well as from different genres, but to offset that the choreography in this game is in general noticeably more intricate. I also felt that the grading was harsher. It seems like in this game you get bonus points for playing with a buddy, so that may have been why, playing solo, my ratings (out of 5) in this game were generally much lower than in the other games. As is par for the course it takes some time to figure out how to get particular moves to register with the game in terms of how to hold the Wii remote, but I don't focus too much on the scoring in these types of games anyway, so that wasn't a big deal to me.

In terms of the aesthetics, the game has this really weird chunky pixel effect on some of the visuals of the menus, which seems like it was taking inspiration from the BEP's music video "The Time (Dirty Bit)". I just found it to be kind of creepy and off-putting, but maybe BEP fans would appreciate it. Instead of the neon color scheme and glowing white dancers of the main games, this game has four dancers who, presumably, are representing the four members of the group. For a lot of the songs the game shows parts of the music video in the background, and I'm guessing the choreography references the originals, but I don't really know. There isn't much in the way of unlockables, which, again, is to be expected with these games. The game keeps track of your high scores and lets you record your initials, and when you've played all the songs in one of the four albums, it unlocks a little video message from one of the band members.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was a perfectly worthy entry in the Just Dance series. Even though it's specific to one artist, there's a still a good amount of variety in the music, and the choreography is definitely better than in the Michael Jackson game. I would rank this around the middle of the pack for the Just Dance games I've played so far, which isn't bad at all, although to be honest the games aren't all that different from each other. Just Dance 4 is probably the best one so far in terms of minor tweaks to the established formula, but there have been annual releases since then so it could very well be that later installments have added additional incremental improvements. We'll have to see!