click the picture to buy this game. you get a free pink stylus!
by nintendo for nintendo DS
a review by tim rogers
Touch! Kirby, which has some kind of explicative and silly subtitle in its American version's title, is the longest in a line of games from a producer who probably drinks a lot of beer, watches a lot of baseball, and is otherwise a very typical and agreeable Japanese guy. I find most Japanese game producers are this kind of guy. Kirby, the hero of the games, named after the comic artist Jack Kirby, if I'm not mistaken, is a pink ball of malleable fluff. The box art for the first game showed Kirby as being white, though what color the artists said he was doesn't count, because that game was for the original Gameboy, and Kirby looked a kind of sickly shade of pea green, anyway. It was revealed in later, colored installments, that Kirby was pink, and that he was from some secret place beyond the stars, where all the inhabitants held powers to suck up, eat, and transform into any living being.
This quickly, and rather clearly, paints the portrait of Kirby as a character in a mid-nineties videogame, where the adoring fans were mostly teenage boys with soft, slightly feminine spots for stuffed animals. The world as it concerns game design was, at the time of Kirby's inception, rather hung up on freedom. Hence Kirby's ability to swallow down any enemy, gaining the power to breathe fire, or turn into a wheel and roll over enemies. The original Gameboy game, if I'm not mistaken, could be beaten in less than a half an hour if you just pressed "up" on the control pad, inflating Kirby with air, and puttered around each stage, avoiding conflict, until you reached the goal. Yes, Kirby, as a character who can inhale enemies and breathe fire or inhale air and fly peerlessly, is flawed, and uninspired for the same reasons as he is inspired. He was created what seems like on the spot, to buffer Nintendo's flagging franchises — he was supplied-on-demand proof that Nintendo could still do "new" things. There was a game called Kirby Super Star on Super Famicom, which supplied players with "six games," three of them being worthless three-second versus affairs and the rest of them being three "full" Kirby adventures. Let us be warned that a "full" Kirby adventure is about one-tenth of an actual game. There were some good moments, nonetheless, in the exploration-heavy segments, though at the end of the day, those moments amounted to little more than a few hot dog buns in a trash bag full of Styrofoam peanuts.
As much as Kirby himself represented malleability and adaptation to new areas, the games' designers allowed themselves to fall into a rut wherein every game starring Kirby was the same kind of bob-around-in-the-air side-scrolling adventure with illusions of freedom. 1994's Kirby's Dream Course was an interesting alternative, making Kirby inexplicably into a kind of golf ball. The goal was to put Kirby into the holes in each course. Why he had to enter each hole first by adjusting trajectories, puffing himself up with air, and then releasing escaped all players and designers. The end result was that it was fun and very interesting. More Gameboy games followed.
I've always held the belief that anyone who lists "Kirby" as one of their favorite franchises is either below average intelligence or a poser pretending to be "in touch" with something they're not really in touch with. I find all of the games bland and all of their attempts at character to be boring. Yet Touch! Kirby is so far the best game of 2005. Kirby can't "fly" anymore, nor can he even use his vacuum abilities. In fact, he doesn't even walk anymore. He rolls. You guide him through levels by drawing rainbow-colored lines with the Nintendo DS stylus. There's some storyline device for explaining the rainbow-colored lines. Something about a pot of magic paint. The magic paint is from that same place "beyond the stars" where Kirby comes from, I take it. It doesn't matter. You use the paint to draw lines on the screen. Sometimes you run out of paint, and need to wait for some of the paint on the screen to disappear so you can draw more paint. If you touch Kirby with the stylus, he rolls forward with a small burst of speed. If you touch enemies, they freeze for a second; if Kirby touches them while they're frozen, he kills them and absorbs their powers; the powers can be used by touching Kirby again. Draw a line under Kirby and ramp that line up, then touch Kirby, and he rockets up the line and jumps at the end. Draw a line with a loop-de-loop in the middle, touch Kirby, and he'll go through the loop, building speed. If there's a little star-emblazoned box in Kirby's way, quickly touch it with the stylus to eliminate it. If it's a big block, touch it several times. The stylus is quick and responsive, and even touching a tiny block seems like something that can be, enjoyably, done over and over again.
The game is not easy. A few levels in, you'll have to navigate spikes, spinning obstacles and bottomless pits. You might be able to frustrate yourself through these levels without knowledge of the deeper systems of the game. In the end, though, the game reaches out and does something few games do these days, and that is that it rewards you for using your imagination. Should you ramp Kirby up into the air and then catch him in a gentle enough circle as he falls (he falls more slowly than he rises, probably because that's what beings from "beyond the stars" do), and then tap him while he's inside that circle, you can involve him a loop of endless speed. Draw a good angled line beneath that circle, and when the rainbow paint starts to disintegrate and Kirby falls through the bottom, he'll hit that ramp and — well. He'll really go somewhere. The range of the moves you can make is limited only by your imagination and your drawing ability. The first time you try a couple of more harebrained, Rube-Goldberg-y ideas, you'll be thinking halfway through, "Naw, that won't work," and then, when it finally does, for just a moment you'll feel this little pang of guilt. You'll feel like you cheated the game. Then you'll feel like a kid reading Nintendo Power in 1990, oblivious to the fact that it's the game publishers who send those level-select codes in, not players like you.
The other analogy I was going to use for the above paragraph — there was a commercial a long time ago, for this Super Nintendo controller called the "Turbo Touch 360." The controller used a touch sensor instead of a regular D-pad (a "rocker switch," as the commercial called it), and it claimed this hurt your thumb less. The commercial boasted that now, through the magic powers of this controller, you could move your game characters "as fast as you can move your thumb." As a kid with really thick glasses, I found this boast ridiculous — no, I was privy to say, you can only move your game characters as quickly as the game's program will let you. I found the commercial and the controller as silly as the kid on the playground who said there's a Game Genie code that turns Super Mario into Batman. A game can only put out what has been put into it. Well, it's been more than ten years, and Touch! Kirby allows you to transplant line shapes from the inside of your head onto a game screen; that the game you are interacting with is a traditional side-scrolling platform adventure is probably for the best. It sticks these radical "ideas of the future" into something that has grown quite as archetypal as the image of a burning fire.
So yes, I like this game. The upper screen is, sadly, something I never look at. I have more or less attained a feel for when the paint is about to run out, so I don't need to look at the paint meter. As I have played many platform games and beaten all of them, the inclusion of a map on the top screen is a nothing issue. It's just there. It doesn't do anything. What's more, I don't care how many doohickeys I've collected, or how much energy I have remaining. If I reach the end of the level, I reach the end of the level. If I die, I start again. I play this game because I like it, and I like it a lot. That's about as much a compliment as a game can hope for, I think, in these days of bigger graphics and better engines.
I said a few months ago that I believed the future of the DS lies in developers' ability to give up on dumb, gimmicky ideas and start using that bottom screen for utilitarian purposes. For example, make it the menu screen for a role-playing game. Square's quite rotten Hanjuku Hero uses the bottom screen as a scratching post of sorts; while playing the ludicrous game, scratch furiously at the bottom screen to fight . . . more ferociously? Why are we doing this again?
Enix is porting Dragon Warrior II over to the DS, I hear. That might not be too bad. It seems that the bottom screen is going to be used to pick battle commands. This is lovely — get rid of the whole scrolling-cursor archetype. We don't need the cursor anymore. The stylus is better than a mouse, even, for something like this. The whole impression that we're touching our games, I take it, would come across all the more cutely to an RPG fan if you're just touching the menus. Keep the action on the top screen, hold the DS with your left hand, working the control pad, and keep the stylus in the right hand. If you're left-handed, this might cause a problem, though I'm not, so there you go.
Yet Nintendo's Touch! Kirby has kind of altered my thinking a bit — it's made me think, if you've got a good idea, if you've got a genuinely virtuoso new genre of videogame and the years of experience programming failures it takes to execute your new idea well, and this radical new drawing-control method is the only way to do it, by all means, do it.
We mustn't make the mistake of comparing this game to Touch! Yoshi. That game involves Yoshi walking freely; we draw clouds underneath him so he can avoid danger. It is free-scrolling, and it is actually rather bland and empty. There is little room for creativity outside the pleasant free-falling vertical modes, and even then, we're just drawing bubbles that capture the enemies, something that has little context in the game and feels tedious the first time we do it. In that game, the requirement to look at the upper screen in order to predict coming dangers feels only slightly more tacked on than Gamecube Splinter Cell's radar feature, which allowed you to plug a Gameboy Advance into a controller port and view the radar there. In Yoshi's case, the top-screen compatibility was tacked-on during the design stages. Kirby's development seems to have proceeded with purpose from planning to completion: these guys knew exactly what kind of game they wanted to make. The execution of the stages, much different from in Yoshi, displays the team's firm grip of the concept. The bosses may be rather simple; still, their concepts are smart, and when the game in question finds players satisfied at their own cleverness once every thirty seconds and is a joy in all technical departments, and even when the music isn't bad, well, that makes it a winner.
This raises important questions about Nintendo's future. Nintendo has said that their next system, the Revolution, will either frighten away developers who are concerned only with better graphics and bigger budgets, or else draw in people who've never made or played games before, inspired by this new wave. Touch! Kirby really is something of a revolution in and of itself. Though part of me wishes Sonic Team would have come up with it first, and made a Touch! Sonic the Hedgehog, giving me freedom to type in bold capital letters that Sonic the Hedgehog is back, I arrive at the end of a not-so-gushing, level-headed four-star review of this game with peace when I say that, yeah, I guess I'm kind of happy for Kirby. Whether the future of Nintendo's game design will respect this game, with its deep virtues and knowing respect to its former genre, or Nintendogs, the vapid dog-raising Tamagotchi that lets you totally touch dogs with a stylus, that requires you to buy one package that contains three dogs, thereby missing out on the other six dogs unless you buy three copies, which got a historical perfect 40/40 score from Famitsu, well, only time and E3 will tell. Will Nintendo make player-satisfying games with structures and goals, a la Kirby, or will they fall deeper into the Famitsu-beloved rabbit hole of allowing strangers on a train to wirelessly interface with no purpose in mind other than to touch one another's polygonal dogs? Maybe they can make both. That's highly possible. However, it's like Elvis and The Beatles — yes, you can like them both, though you have to like one more. So, Nintendo, which one do you like more? I like Kirby more.
AND THAT'S THE STRAIGHT DOPE.
Or, uh . . .
—tim rogersWritten: May 2nd 2005 17:00
