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Yoshi's Story is one of the most eagerly anticipated N64 games since Super Mario 64. A well-known and popular Nintendo character; a sequel to an extremely good Super NES game; the first wholly Nintendo-produced game since Starfox. That's a whole lot of expectations for any game to live up to. The question is: is Yoshi's Story worth the wait?

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Hmmnyeehh... you'll have to get back to me on that in a few pages.

Kiddie Corner

Overall, Yoshi's cute qualities and exploration will keep kids playing happily for hours. Older gamers, however, will want to think twice before cracking the binding on this Story. Yoshi squares off against the game's main villain, Baby Bowser. Yoshi's Story Is an easy game to finish, though finding all the items is time consuming. In an industry that's all too often focused on wrangling in consumers, dominating market share, and making millions on AAA releases, it's entirely refreshing and encouraging to stumble across a video game publisher willing to donate 75 percent of its proceeds from a title to charity in order to help brighten the lives of children who are suffering from serious illnesses.

The original Yoshi's Island on the SNES was distinctive in that it combined a very taxing game with child-like presentation, the graphics deliberately looking as if they'd been scrawled, splashed or even abandoned halfway through by a pre-schooler. In some ways this was in keeping with the game itself, which had Yoshi and his many relatives, all called Yoshi, trying to carry a baby Mario to safety through numerous charming yet hostile landscapes. Although the game was, in my view, even tougher than Super Mario World (though not as tricky as Mario All-Stars), a lot of potential players were put off precisely because of the style of the game. Well, looks like somefink for kids, dunnit?

Yoshi's Story stands a good chance of suffering even more from this problem. The look of the game's front end has gone beyond forced cuteness into the outright twee, at least in my view. If you're under five years old or one of those students who watches Teletubbies (for purely ironic reasons of course, yah) then you might get a kick out of it, but once you've got past the initial sense of'ahh, isn't that sweet' it doesn't take that long before all that sugar rots your teeth and sets your stomach a-churning.

Interestingly, the style of the front end isn't really carried over into the look of the game itself. Crayola scribblings are out; high-res Silicon Graphics renders are in. If Bill Gates ever has kids, this kind of thing is what he'll be sticking to his fridge with alphabet magnets.

Yoshi's Story is certainly a feast of eye candy, proving that the N64 can actually make use of all those colours it's got stuffed under the bonnet. Unlike the 'hand-drawn' Yoshi's Island, Story is full of gleamingly crisp, lovingly detailed landscapes made of everything from soft fabrics to armchair leather. Yoshi's enemies are equally splendid to look at, all his opponents from the tiniest insects right up to the screen-high monsters lurking in some levels being treated to the same attention to detail. Everything is beautifully animated and given a shading effect that makes them almost pop out of the screen. Mischief Makers dropped some hints about what the N64 can do in 2-D, but Yoshi's Story pushes the boat out so far it's run ashore on the other side.

Sound, often an under-used part of N64 games, is also rich with clever details. Leaving aside the chorus of singing Yoshis that whine away over the title screen, the music is the perfect accompaniment to the game itself. A jungle level gets pounding tribal drums, a desert island stage features an upbeat Caribbean backing and one chapter even has rumbling shouts of 'Yosh-i! Yosh-i!' urging you on!

A really cute touch is the way the music goes wonky when Yoshi is down to his last blim of energy (the energy bar is represented by a flower in the corner of the screen, which loses its petals as Yoshi takes hits), then slowly winds back up to speed when he regains his strength.

Just about all the creatures in the game squeak and mutter away to themselves, which once you're familiar with their burblings can sometimes be used to work out what you're about to face on the next screen. Yoshi himself is especially vocal, grunting with effort as he flails his legs to give himself just a little more height in a jump and squealing in terror when he takes a long fall. He even growls at approaching enemies!

Brought To Book

The game is structured like a story - well, with a name like that you'd sort of expect it - in six 'chapters', each chapter being broken up into four smaller sections. Paragraphs, I suppose. You choose your route through the story (oh god, it's one of those damn Fighting Fantasy books!) by opening up Yoshi's pop-up book. Opening up a new page sends cut-out representations of the horrors ahead springing up at you, giving an idea of what you can expect to encounter in each chapter.

Initially only one level is accessible in each chapter - others open up the more you play the game, but right now I'm uncertain as to what the actual trigger is that lets you enter new levels. Sometimes you might be presented with a full foursome on opening the chapter, other times you'll only get a single choice. As far as I can tell, new levels are opened by collecting the giant hearts hidden around the worlds, but I could be wrong. Since the manual's in Japanese it's not really much help in solving this riddle, but there is a game option where you can practice levels you've already completed, which does improve your chances of uncovering the secrets hidden in each level.

When Yoshi enters a level, he always starts off with only one petal of energy, so his first priority is to bring himself up to full strength. The quickest way of doing this is to collect the fruit which are the key to the whole game. As near as I can gather, the plot of the story is that the evil Bowser (yes, it's him again, or someone who looks an awful lot like him) has stolen the Super Happy Fun Tree and put it in his castle, and Yoshi is the man, or dinosaur, or whatever, up to the task of bringing the tree back to where it belongs.

Luckily for Yoshi, fruit from the tree has been scattered all over the landscapes he has to traverse on the way to Bowser's castle. Once he collects 30 pieces of fruit, the exact number being shown in fruity form around the edges of the screen, he's completed a chapter and can turn the page. Fruit restores Yoshi's energy, and particular colours of Yoshi - there are six of the little fellas to start with, plus another who can be hatched from an egg found along the way - prefer different kinds of fruit. For example, the yellow Yoshi gains the most benefit from bananas. If fruit are scarce, Yoshi can make do by eating the locals!

Mmm, Fruity

This fruit-collecting aspect makes the structure of the game a bit different from Nintendo's previous platform games. Since there's no specific exit to a level, the impetus isn't so much on getting to a certain point as quickly as you can, but more on wandering around looking for fruit. On most levels it doesn't make that much of a difference because on the whole, the stages are fairly linear. However, there are some - like the jungle treetops level, where Yoshi has to pick his way over a maze of bamboo platforms - which sprawl all over the place and can get a bit annoying when you reach yet another dead end and have to go back the way you came.

Yoshi Crafted World Review

Yoshi's abilities are for the most part the same as in his Super NES adventure. As well as normal jumps, he can give himself a little physics-defying extra boost in mid-air if you keep the jump button pressed, and pushing down on the analogue stick makes him slam into the ground, squashing anything beneath him and jolting things loose from the background. Yoshi's main weapon is his tongue, which as well as grabbing the vital fruit and pulling him up onto certain floating blocks is also used to snag enemies and pull them into his gaping maw. Eating his opponents, as well as usually providing extra energy, also lets Yoshi instantly lay eggs (that's one hell of a metabolism) that follow him around in a trail and can be thrown to bring down flying attackers or pop the tongue-proof bubbles surrounding some fruit and power-ups. Large green-and-white blocks also spew out eggs when Yoshi headbutts them. The analogue stick is used to aim the eggs, and is a lot easier to control than the Super NES method of a rotating cursor. The eggs explode when they reach the position of the cursor, so you have I to make sure that it's located on or past the target when you fire or it'll detonate harmlessly in mid-air-very annoying if you're down to your last egg! Interestingly, Yoshi has actually lost some talents from the older game - he can no longer spit objects in his mouth at his opponents, as anything he grabs with his tongue is now automatically swallowed. This suggests a definite trend in Nintendo's games toward simplification, reducing everything down to the bare minimum of controls. It's not just Nintendo who are doing this - Art Of Fighting Twin, also reviewed this issue, trims the control method to the bone. But is there a point where games become too simplified to maintain interest? With Nintendo's stated intention being to make their games accessible to younger and younger age groups, it's a question that's going to keep coming up in the future.

Sequelitis

If you've played any of Nintendo's 2-D platform games before, and with a track record like the Mario games you probably have, then a lot of Yoshi's Story will be immediately familiar. Even with the rendered scenery, many of the landscapes Yoshi has to traverse are recognizable from their past appearances on the Super NES. Lava caves? Check. Bowser's castle? Present and correct. The enemies, too, are largely the usual suspects, with Shy Guys, Piranha Plants and numerous other well-known Nintendo faces doing their damnedest to obstruct Yoshi's quest for fruit.

Yoshi's Crafted World Walkthrough

This recycling of old elements does come across as being surprisingly unimaginative of Nintendo. Although they would no doubt claim the reason for this as being something along the lines of 'it brings a smile of recognition to the faces of players when they see familiar characters from earlier games', it strikes me as being more a case of 'why spend time coming up with new characters and settings when we've got all these perfectly good old ones already designed?' Although it is good to see that Nintendo's team haven't lost their touch with the new enemies they've devised for Yoshi's Story, the fresh faces are vastly outnumbered by the 'regulars'.

The same applies to the level designs. Even though they're obviously a lot nicer to look at on the N64, there are numerous sections which could have been pulled directly from Yoshi's Island or Super Mario World on the SNES. By this I'm not talking about the straight platform sections, but the actual obstacles Yoshi comes across. The final castle levels, in particular, bring on a very strong feeling of deja vu, with rotating drums and blades whirling around on tracks being two very distinctive features from the first Yoshi game.

'So what?' you might well ask. After all, not everybody who owns an N64 will have played the earlier games, and even some of those who have probably won't care about the repetition of old elements anyway. It is, after all, a Nintendo-produced game, a Shigeru Miyamoto-supervised game at that, which pretty much guarantees perfectly-tuned gameplay. Yoshi's Story certainly can't be faulted in that respect - it's very rare that you feel the game is treating you unfairly, and the unusual (for a platform game) use of the analogue stick gives you very precise control over your big-nosed reptile. If you can resist the temptation to scarf up fruit as quickly as you find it and instead delve deeper into the levels, there's a quite a lot of neat stuff to be found.

However, there is a major downside to Yoshi's Story. Even with a 128Mbit cart, there are limits to how much can be squeezed in - 2-D games, with all their graphical data, take up a lot more memory than 3-D environments. The strain is definitely showing in Yoshi's Story, as there are a meagre 24 levels to the game. What's more, that's 24 surprisingly easy levels.

In order to cater for the younger players they're now chasing, Nintendo have set the challenge level of the game so that it won't frustrate inexperienced gamers. Fair enough if they were going to be the only people playing the game, but much of Nintendo's success is built on their very loyal fanbase, who have been playing their games for years and are going to be the people most likely to buy their latest. Anyone who has cracked all the levels in Mario All-Stars is going to breeze through this in no time at all. I'm not the world's greatest gamesplayer by any means, but I completed the game less than three hours after first plugging it in, and by the end of the first day I'd opened up 16 of the 24 levels. By the end of my second day's play, I only had two levels left to see!

Even if you've never played a Nintendo platform game before, you're not likely to find Yoshi's Story all that taxing to beat. Most of the time, Yoshi dies not from running into enemies or being hit by objects but from falling into holes if you misjudge a jump, and once you know where they are they cease to be much of a menace. You don't have to be Einstein or De Bono to figure out the puzzles, such as they are, and the bosses - one gang after the third chapter, and Bowser at the end - are absurdly simple to defeat. Even Mischief Makers is both bigger and more challenging! It's not necessarily a better game to play than Yoshi's Story, as Treasure's title isn't nearly as polished as Nintendo's, but it's got more variation in the gameplay and will take longer to complete.

Yoshi's Crafted World Website

It sounds almost sacrilegious to say it, but Yoshi's Story would have benefited from being a bit more like Mischief Makers. The letter's linear structure is, ironically, very similar to that of the original Yoshi's Island, and Yoshi's Story would have been much better if players had had to go through all 24 levels in a set order instead of meandering through them on successive plays. As it stands, you only have to complete six levels to finish the game, and though there's still the extra challenge of trying to open up the other levels, it's not quite so much fun going through a story if you already know the ending!

While I'm complaining, I might as well mention a couple of nitpicking faults - once you've completed the game you have to physically reset the N64 to play again rather than just being able to press Start, and when you finish a level there's no way to skip through the time-consuming scoring screens and, infuriatingly, the 30 seconds of scrolling Japanese exposition and wincingly irksome Yoshi song. These are only minor annoyances, but Nintendo games don't normally have these kinds of irritations at all!

Yoshi's Story is rather a flawed gem. Although it's made with Nintendo's usual flawless production values and looks absolutely gorgeous, the fact remains that it's shamelessly recycling past glories instead of offering anything new or innovative, and it is just far too easy to be good value. It pains me to do it, but the limited lifespan of Yoshi's Story means that for the first time ever in 64 Magazine, a first-party Nintendo game can't be given an automatic recommendation. Let's just hope this is a one-off.

Zach Scott Youtube

Yoshis Wooly World WiiU
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GAME OVERVIEW
Yoshi’s Woolly World game is an upcoming 2015 side-scrolling platformer video game in development by Good-Feel for the Wii U video game console. Embark on a new Yoshi adventure in a world made from yarn, cloth and textiles. Yoshi retains much of his moveset from the Yoshi’s Island series of games, including using his tongue to swallow enemies and using his flutter jump to reach hard areas, and many elements such as flowers and mystery clouds return. However, unlike other games where swallowing enemies would produce eggs which Yoshi could then throw, Yoshi instead produces balls of yarn.

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Zach Scott Mls

NINTENDO WIIU
The Wii U is a home video game console created by Nintendo and the successor to the Wii. The system was released on 18 November 2012 in North America, on 30 November 2012 in PAL regions, and on 8 December 2012 in Japan. Play the new generation of Nintendo games in gorgeous HD on the Wii U console – an amazing value for the whole family. Every Wii U console comes packed with an array of applications to enjoy the day you bring your system home, after a quick system update. The system’s primary controller is the Wii U GamePad, which features an embedded touchscreen. The screen can be used either as a supplement to the main display or in supported games, play the game directly on the GamePad without using a tv.