Several weeks ago, my wife and I discovered a garage sale at a nearby house. Being a collector of retro videogame cartridges, I am usually open to browsing at garage sales, but certain garage sales are more likely to have older game cartridges than others. Primarily, I look for the age of the house and neighborhood; if the house and neighborhood is around 15 to 20 years of age, the owners are more likely to still have the artifacts of their children's pasts, namely toys and games. I also look for economically middle-class areas because people there probably had enough disposable income to purchase video games back in the day, but not enough to live in a more affluent neighborhood. Also, I tend to think that wealthy people just throw their old junk away, while middle-class people tend to save their junk in the hope that they will sell the junk... in a garage sale. At least, that's what I do.Anyway, it was at that garage sale many weeks ago that I recovered two SNES cartridges: NBA Jam and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (heretofore Yoshi's Island). As I wrote in my previous post, NBA Jam for the SNES was a shadow of what it was in the arcade, and that's saying much because I wasn't a huge fan of the arcade version of NBA Jam. Thankfully, I only spent about $1.50 on it, so it wasn't a massive monetary drain. Conversely, Yoshi's Island was (as many other reviewers have written) and is a wonderful gaming experience. When it was released in North America in 1995, I was at UCLA starting my third year of study. I have no recollection of its release, mostly because I was a Sega Genesis owner and a sports gamer. Like many SNES games I have since purchased, Yoshi's Island had passed me by at its time of release and was unknown to me for over a decade.
Yoshi's Island is a platforming sidescroller in the grand tradition of most games in the Super Mario Brothers/World franchise insofar as you need considerable skill to leap from platform to level, you encounter ground-scurrying baddies, and it involves Mario. However, Yoshi's Island turns the Mario concept on its head: instead of you playing as Mario and riding Yoshi as in Super Mario World, you are Yoshi and you must carry baby Mario to the end. When you are hit by a baddie, you lose Mario as he floats away in a bubble. Knowing that your very survival in the game depends on retaining and delivering baby Mario to the end of each level, you must recover Mario and keep him safe from danger. All the way, instead of just squashing your foes, as with Super Mario World, you can ingest your opponent by latching onto your opponent with your sticky tongue and pulling them into your mouth. In addition, you can lay eggs and throw them at foes, which is odd because isn't Yoshi a male? Okay, so sea horse males carry their embryo offspring, so I suppose that Yoshi is exceptional like sea horses (and whatever other animals about which I am ignorant).
Yoshi's Island also departs from its predecessors in how it is rendered; the foreground of each level is an oddly harmonious mix of digitized platform elements and ground textures painted as with watercolors and broad black strokes. The background is a bit more reminiscent of Super Mario World with rich and intricate details, yet with virtual brushstrokes that sometimes engender the feeling of strolling through some kind of digital painting. The bad guys range from the familiar mask-wearing guys from Super Mario Brothers 2 (the North American version, that is) to spitting fish and even end bosses that seem to be full of hot air. Yoshi's Island also departs from its predecessors with its music, which benefitted from the capabilities of the SNES with many layers of melody and rhythm. In 1995, I'm sure that players of Yoshi's Island may have been blown away when considering that, only 10 years previous, the music had come a long way from the simple, albeit memorable melodies of the original Super Mario Brothers. If anything, I'd liken this game's music to a much more upbeat Super Metroid or even a game that was released around the time of Super Metroid: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
This review does not do justice to Yoshi's Island. Since I recently acquired this game, I have yet to scratch the surface of this adventure, but what I've seen thus far has impressed me immensely. As with many games of the past, there is much more challenge (and sometimes cheese) than today's games. I believe that many children and adults are missing out on some of those classic gems, like Super Metroid, Link to the Past, Sonic & Knuckles, and Yoshi's Island. Furthermore, games on the SNES (and some on the Genesis) were able to save your progress, so gaming in the mid-90s had hit that sweet spot of being able to play a meaningful game for a good amount of time, yet being able to walk away and enjoy your day, knowing that you could continue where you left off tomorrow or next week. Nowadays, games are so engrossing and so entrancing that people wile away consecutive days on-screen. Because of this, I continue to mine the past for treasures like Yoshi's Island: games that are wonderfully challenging but easy to set aside for other things, like Euro-style board games.
