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Yoshi's Cookie review

Game: Yoshi's Cookie
Platform: NES
Genre: Casual (Puzzle)
Developer: Nintendo
AKA: Yoshi no Cookie (JP)

Reader review by JoeTheDestroyer

March 20, 2011

Salvaging mediocrity must be a lucrative business. It seems whenever developers come up with a title that no one in their right mind would glance at, they have to tack on familiar faces or names to sell the product. Strip those faces from said product, though, and what you're left with is generic and forgettable. Yoshi's Cookie is just such a game, using Mario characters to create a puzzle game where there didn't need to be one. One can only surmise that the haphazard addition of said characters was thrown in only to make the game sell more than five units.

Mario walks out wearing the garb of his new job: baker. The fat Italian version of Barbie seems to be collecting careers. Off to the left is the mythic blank space upon which blocks tend to fall, only this time there is a grid of various cookies sitting there, waiting to be consumed. Using minimal wit, you are tasked with moving the cookies around to form matching rows and columns with the hopes of clearing the them out. Yes, it's as boring as it sounds.

The first few levels, or hell, the first dozen or so levels, take hardly any skill to clear. You move a row here, a column there, and the cookies clear without any resistance. If you happen to be of the slow sort, other cookies will rain down from the top and from the right. Should your cookies build up too far one way or the other, the game will end. Not to worry, because this game won't be getting difficult for a long time.

By the time it does get difficult, you'll either be hungering for a better title or fast asleep. Your only other option would be to adjust the difficulty, but like many other mediocre puzzle games, Yoshi and Krazy Kreatures spring to mind, adjusting the difficulty does not magically make the game interesting. The dull gameplay, that simple shifting of rows and columns, does not become addictive or engaging or exciting, even when the pace quickens.

As a Nintendo fan and a fan of Dr. Mario, I'm quite disappointed. Coming from Nintendo and Bullet Proof Software, I expect a hell of a lot. Yoshi's Cookie is a dull affair with little of anything interesting to offer. Maybe as a mini-game it would have been effective, or maybe if Nintendo would have made a collection of various puzzle games on one cart, but this game just doesn't stand on its own.

Rating: 5/10

More Reviews by JoeTheDestroyer
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