You mind a personal intro? Actually, fuck it, I’m just gonna. This one’s already entirely self indulgent anyway.
I’m planning a move. The farthest I’ve ever done, in fact. Lotta anxieties around that, lemme tell you! One opportunity this avails me is a chance to trim my belongings down, which includes my game collection. Don’t feel bad for me – I genuinely see this as a positive! I’m absolutely not a minimalist, but I am one of those weirdos whose mental state deteriorates proportionally with clutter. As I picked through my stuff playing “should it stay or should it go” I got to my GB/GBA carts, a pre-trimmed collection I wasn’t planning on reducing given that it all fits in a tiny container, but I picked through ’em anyway and locked eyes with Kirby for the umpteenth time. Yeah, sure, why not.
Kirby’s Block Ball was the first video game I ever owned. Not played, but owned, mine. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid but my fascination with friends’ systems combined with 90’s purchasing power eventually saw my Mom and me heading to a Target with intent, then walking out with a Game Boy Pocket bundle. She scouted that deal like a hawk and I was absolutely not going to complain regardless of the included cart; video games were the sickest shit ever and now I was going to have one! And my system was red!!!
I feel like in hindsight she probably realized a Game Boy was the wrong choice from a financial perspective. Sure a home console would have cost more up front, but the money we saved on AAs would have paid for college. Sorry mom!
Little me eventually got Mario Land 2 and was gifted some other carts here and there, but Kirby’s Block Ball always remained a favorite. I’d go back to it to chase high scores, or do that weird child thing where you fixate on a very small piece of an overall package, which in my case meant finding a level that allowed me to trigger the Air Hockey minigame as quickly as possible and 3-0ing that thing over and over again. I wonder if it explains a lot about my tastes and tendencies. Of course my long-term entry point was a weird-ass spinoff nobody played. I was always going to be this way.
As an adult with critical faculties who’s played thousands upon thousands of games and even occasionally gotten paid to do so, my relationship with the medium has changed. I’ve had my sentimentality burnt off by sheer exposure, my enthusiasm for games remaining just as intense, but manifesting in an entirely different way. I am fully capable of separating myself from my experience and evaluating the game in front of me, I swear. Watch!
Kirby’s Block Ball is more clever than it is good. It’s a wildly innovative take on Breakout and its ilk, with Kirby’s transformations allowing for significantly more finesse and the stages feeling almost more like puzzles than the traditional walls’o’bricks, but its refusal to layer its ideas until the final world limits its replayability and to some extent its appeal. It almost feels distrustful of the player (which to be fair was likely to be a literal child so that may have been warranted) and their ability to retain all of the mechanics, so it almost never asks that you utilize more than one at a time. Combine this with slow ball speed and stages that trap your ball inside unbreakable blocks, and you’ll often find yourself watching the game play itself as you think about how you could do it better.
…ok but also, like, this game is sick as fuck sometimes? The powerups are mostly movement-based but the Needle in particular letting you stick yourself back on a paddle to re-aim? OH my god. In keeping with Kirby as a franchise the bosses are hardly a challenge, but I really like how their attacks can shrink your paddles down to a single star, with all the ball control and defensive issues that implies. I like the “border line” par scores you need to achieve on each level in order to get to Dedede, and how that final gauntlet does ask you to tie everything you learned together for the most part. They demand you fully master each area as you need to generate as many extra lives as possible so you can convert them to points at the end. Neat! Really, genuinely neat! I’m doing the Marge potato meme with the cart right now, you gotta believe me.
In many ways I believe nostalgia to be a poison. If you’re constantly looking backwards, the best case scenario is that you’ll stay where you are. I’m especially distrustful of anyone who’s overly engaged in the “retro” hustle. No amount of money or time can buy your childhood back. We need to be willing to have new experiences, take risks, push yourself to become someone better. I don’t go so far as some and say that people experiencing this yearning are fashy “retvrn” types or anything, that’s incredibly uncharitable towards most folks, but I do feel pity. Surrounding yourself with artifacts, the toys you had or maybe wish you had, will stunt and barricade you more than support you. Injection molded plastic makes for a poor foundation.
The thing is, these old games? They hold up in their own way, even when they aren’t great. It helps that they were designed to just be games, not lifelong commitments with complex monetization schemes beyond what to set the MSRP to on a retail shelf. The state of contemporary gaming is sickening, dog. I hate that if I turn my Switch on the first thing I’ll see is an advertisement. I walk past the Xbox in the living room that we basically only use for movies and am reminded that Microsoft is actively committing war crimes right now. I hop on my PC to play my beloved indies and some bigass multiplayer mess is trying its damnedest to squeeze money and attention out of me, uneven value prop be damned. I didn’t ask for any of this shit. I don’t want any of this shit. This industry is unfathomably ass. I just want to immerse myself in someone’s interactive world, to dissect their ideas, to see what they wanted me to see, to play, and to come out of it with something to talk about. Instead I’m surrounded by clutter, only it’s against my will and I’m not allowed to clean it.
The Game Boy is a toy. It was designed by a toy company so they could sell more toys compatible with it. It was relatively complex from an engineering perspective, but as a user it couldn’t be much simpler: a d-pad, a few buttons, a slot to pop a game into, and a power switch to fire it up. You play until you flick that the other way or run out of battery, then you go about your day, hopefully a bit happier for having had the experience and maybe willing to try more carts. It was still transparently transactional, but it was only as invasive as you allowed it to be. When I turn Kirby’s Block Ball off and put it back in the box where I keep these old things, I will not receive push notifications enticing me to pick it back up. If I choose to it will only be because I have genuine interest in doing so.
I like that. I like being able to say “when”, and I don’t know that I fully realized how much I missed it. I want to retain that agency over my attention, even if it means I get some funny looks or miss out on the flavor of the month. I want to choose anticipation over trepidation.
Also, god damn this game’s music goes so hard. Have you heard this boss theme? Do you have any idea how hard I popped off when they finally acknowledged its existence again??? I didn’t even play Kirby Fall Guys or whatever, but if you give me slap bass this good I will always bob my head on beat approvingly.
I’m not giving this one a rating.
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