Doug Seliger

Nintendo says they try to do something different with each installment of their big franchises, but it seems like nothing is ever really a huge deviation from the mean. Every Zelda game since Ocarina of Time has been trying to be a better Ocarina of Time, Pokemon just keeps shoveling boatloads of new monsters down your throat, and it’s becoming really hard to find new reasons for Samus to lose all her power-ups at the beginning of Metroid games now (with the latest being “a man told her not to use them, so okay”).

"Sorry Samus, no girls allowed in space."

The exception here is Kirby. While a few of these games do fall into the usual Kirby routine, you don’t have to look too hard to find one that’s really different, and Mass Attack is the latest example of this.

Kirby’s out doing whatever Kirby does one day and some wizard zonks him with a wand that turns him into ten smaller versions of himself, and now you’ve got to beat him up. I do love a simple premise, and KMA has a simple control scheme to go with it; the action is controlled entirely with the stylus and touch screen. Your gaggle of Kirbies goes wherever you point, you can grab and fling them individually onto enemies, double-tap to sic ‘em all on one target, and with a few exceptions, that’s pretty much it.  If a Kirby is hit by an enemy, he’ll turn from pink to blue; if a blue one’s hit, it’s toast unless you can fling another Kirby up to catch his ghost before it gets away.

Stuff of nightmares here.

There’s no eating bad guys and stealing their powers this time around. Instead, you just tap an enemy to send your party swarming after it (or fling Kirbies at it if it’s flying out of reach) and they pummel it into submission.  There’s always been something a little unnerving about Kirby, and watching ten of him pile onto a Waddle-Dee and just beat the ever-living hell out of it does little to help the uneasy thoughts.

It’s deceptively simple.  As you progress, you’re put in situations that really test your ability to quickly and efficiently manage all your Kirbies.  One level has you climbing the inside of an unstable tree; the stage tips left and right as your group runs around, and if you dawdle for too long on one side or the other the whole thing collapses.

If you keep your Kirbies alive and unharmed and pick up medals scattered around each stage, you unlock some extras and bonus games. One of these is a simple vertically-scrolling shooter, complete with boss battles and power-ups.  Some of these aren’t as fun as others, but there are a few treats here that will really extend your play time beyond the main game (which itself has a fair level of replay value in the form of alternate pathways and going for high scores).

The music is your typical Kirby fare–inoffensive, with a few catchy tunes here and there.

All in all, KMA is a fun little time-waster that you’ll keep coming back to for a while.

Highly Recommended

Pretty much this.

This is a weird game.

You are Vincent Brooks, a 32 year-old manchild perfectly content to work a crummy job for the rest of his life and never commit to his domineering girlfriend of five years, Katherine. Once she starts talking pressuring him to meet her parents, Vincent loses what little cool he had and ends up drunkenly hooking up with a random younger woman named Catherine, who happens to be a stage five clinger.

On top of all this, you and every other guy in town are cursed with horrific nightmares every night–and if you die in them, you die in real life. And there’s your premise.

Vincent orders a foot-long coney. Maybe.

As far as actual gameplay goes, it’s split up into day and night. During the day, you progress the plot by talking with other characters, answering questions, making moral choices and the like. This all affects the game’s karma system, which influences which of the eight endings you’ll get.

During the night, you control Vincent in his nightmares. This involves running around, pushing blocks in order to climb a tower and escape falling to your doom. There are special blocks that explode, crumble beneath you, launch you into the air, and more. There are also enemies to contend with–in the dream world, all the men see each other as sheep. This is the actual “gameplay” part of the game–trying to scale the towers as quickly as possible, occasionally while dealing with a boss enemy.

It’s a weird, weird game, but I liked it. Particularly great is the dream soundtrack, consisting entirely of remixes of famous orchestral pieces by Bach, Beethoven and the like.

There are eight endings. I’ve only seen one. I may go back to get another, but it’ll only be because I like the block-pushing puzzle parts of the game and not the doofus characters the story’s about.

Somehow a bit more disheartening than a regular "Game Over."