kirby canvas curse

Kirby Mass Attack

Kirby Mass Attack CoverLike the titular pink puff, the Kirby series has worn many hats in its nineteen years. Almost every 2D action-platformer has been partnered with an experimental pinball sim or an arcade racer or some amazing miniature golf mutation. As much as I enjoy each iteration of the main Dream Land style, the spinoffs are what really intrigue me, even when they fail. Sure, Kirby Tilt 'n Tumble may be unplayable with the Game Boy Color's dark screen and restrictive viewing angle, but it broke ground for motion controls six years before Wii Sports taught us to waggle.

It's a good season for Kirby fans, as we get a bit of both sides in under two months. Kirby's Return to Dream Land in October looks like the long-awaited Super Star successor, and September sees Kirby get multiplied in Kirby Mass Attack. Revisiting the stylus-centrism of Canvas Curse, Mass Attack tasks players with flicking, dragging, and leading up to ten Kirbys at a time through a puzzle platforming adventure. It's not the most eye-opening Kirby spinoff -- the concept is essentially a pared-down Pikmin -- but it makes the most of a middling concept.

Kirby Canvas Curse was widely dubbed the Nintendo DS's first worthy purchase. Kirby Mass Attack may be its last.

Top 10 Video Game Commercials of All Time

Mercenaries 2 oh no you DidntWe've all grown up among an onslaught of advertisements. It is almost impossible to look anywhere in a semi-urban place and not see some sort of ad. Television has perhaps been their most successful medium, and video games have been advertising on the same tube we play them on for as long as they have been around.

So to celebrate the hundreds of video game ads, we present the Top 10 Video Game Commercials of All Time. This is the definitive list, carefully developed by our writers and then culled down by Greg and Nate. Blood was shed and tears were wept as we narrowed our "short list" of 25 ads down to just these 10. Without intention, we managed to select a set of ads that not only cover over 20 years of gaming from Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and the PC, but a wide variety of types of ads, from live action re-enactments to comedy to musicals.

This is the first official "list" we've ever posted, and we promise more in the future. They may seem easy to make, but we spent hours putting this together and had a ton of fun doing it.

Retiring my Nintendo DS Lite

ds DslwhiteThe Nintendo DS was the first game system that I followed from announcement to launch. It was way back early 2004 that Nintendo first hinted at a dual-screened handheld, then codenamed "Nitro." Considering that was the only information available, it's not surprising that many questioned Nintendo's strategy. Why two screens? Nintendo offered some hypothetical benefits, like extra camera angles for sports games, but their words were hardly convincing. Little did we know, it was Nintendo's first step into the "blue ocean" strategy that would lead the company to greener pastures.

And yet, the original DS launch in November 2004 came and went with little fanfare. I was aware of the date, but didn't even realized that it arrived until I walked through a Wal-Mart electronics section and saw the grey handheld on the shelves. I kept walking. I was Nintendo faithful, sure, but it was hard to get excited about a launch lineup headlined by something nearly a decade old. It wasn't until the impending release of Kirby Canvas Curse in the summer of 2005 that I decided to bite the bullet, trading in half of my Gamecube library to GameStop in order to pay off the Nintendo DS and one game.

While it's certainly worth praise in its own right, I think Canvas Curse deserves to be remembered as the flagship of the DS library; it was the first of a fleet of incredible games that would follow in its wake. A system redesign, dubbed the DS Lite, accompanied the platform's newfound software vigor. Reduced size, brighter screens, and an iPod aesthetic provided enough worth for many to upgrade (including me) and many more to buy in for the first time. The sleeker profile and beefier games are what truly began the success story of the best-selling handheld game system ever.

But even Nintendo's first detour in the generations-old graphical arms race would lead to a dead end eventually. With the launch of a successor, the 3DS, history tells us that the best we can hope for is a year or two of life support for what was once Nintendo's "third pillar." It was an incredible performance that none could have predicted, and I think the Nintendo DS deserves a hearty round of applause before its curtain call. I've decided to contribute to the celebration in that age-old tradition of blogging: the top ten list.

In no particular order, here are ten great games that exemplified some aspect of the Nintendo DS' legacy.

Retiring my Nintendo DS Phat

ds ConsoleIt's been four years since I received what is probably the best handheld system of all time, the Nintendo DS.  My original DS was the red one that came packed in with Mario Kart DS.  Even though I was obsessed with Mario Kart on the GBA, I only played it on the DS once.  No explanation for that one.

I love this system because it's truly a portable fan's dream, not to mention all the awesome and innovative games available for it.  The best feature of the DS is that you simply close it to put it in standby and open it to start playing right away.  It's like a laptop but works super fast and never fails to come back.  Battery life can last for days with it in standby meaning you can close it up at night and then resume right away in the morning.  There has been many-a-time where I fell asleep playing the latest Ace Attorney game in bed, and the DS fell to the ground and closed on itself.  No need to even save the game!

Kirby: Canvas Curse

Kirby Canvas Curse CoverKirby: Canvas Curse was one of those early Nintendo DS games that really showed off what the system could do and what happened when good developers took the time to take advantage of the DS's unique capabilities. Typical Kirby games have you basically playing a platformer, fun, but unoriginal and done to death. Kirby: Canvas Curse takes all direct control of Kirby out of your hands, instead, you draw lines on the screen to act as a path for Kirby, and the poke him along with the stylus to get him to roll along on your lines. It sounds simple, and maybe awkward, but it simply works. You can get Kirby rolling really fast and then launch him off one of your line ramps into an enemy, or make him do loops, or even scale walls with near vertical strokes. This is also one of the deepest Kirby games to date, even beating out Kirby Super Star in terms of number of things to do. The game encourages you to replay levels many times to collect more medals - to buy more stuff. The neat thing is the levels are usually different than the last time you played them, offering enough variety to keep the fun going for a while. Now for some scores out of 10.

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