I finally beat Yoshi's Island 100%. :P

[Jono2]

after owning the game for 5 years (the GBA version) I finally got 100% today. :P



died 725 times. >_>


how many times did you die before 100%?

[Kayo]

still not there yet! :O

[Java]

I don't even have the game but if I did have it, I probably would have died about 1,301 times.

I want Yoshi's Island DS

[Chain Chompesque]

I don't know...I did it with State Saves. -,-

[Jono2]

I don't even have the game but if I did have it, I probably would have died about 1,301 times.

I want Yoshi's Island DS

YIDS is incredibly and cheaply hard.  Though it's a good game, the original is much better.  I don't have the original, I have the GBA version (mario advance 3), which has small edits.

[thunderhero4]

I don't even have the game but if I did have it, I probably would have died about 1,301 times.

I want Yoshi's Island DS

I got it for christmas last year, its really hard...alot harder, and it doesnt feel alot like the origional cuz of the look and diferent babies and music, but it was still fun and I actually beat the damm thing!

[Chain Chompesque]

Ah, Yoshi's Island DS. The most disappointing game I have ever played. Well, I guess I'd better start this up with Point One...the camera. Be aware that it's been a while since I've played, and a few things (Like the X button, it could be another) might not be right. Anyways...

When you run to the right, the screen does not move until you're at the tip of the screen. That makes it obscenely easy to blunder into things, assuming you don't have nano-reflexes. In the original, it was the opposite. The screen would move ahead so you'd be on the left and could clearly see ahead of you. The bar in the middle of the screen ALWAYS is in the way, I could not move it so that it wouldn't be blocking something. Even worse, you have to press X and the D-Pad, so if you want to move it down and you're in the air, you'll ground pound and fall to your doom. You could just press X, and wouldn't that be all nice and dandy, but for some reason you need the D-Pad as well. In other games, there is nothing in the screen bar and, say, if Mario stood in the middle, he would be cleanly divided in two between the two screens: Half of him wouldn't be hidden by the bar, like it would in YIDS.

The music is terrible. The only tune in minor key I could find was the end boss. Miniboss fights have little high-pitched, happy tunes. For instance, in one course, Bessie Bass's Battleship, it's dark. It's raining. It takes place on a freaking battleship. Wouldn't this be the perfect time for some, say, MINOR music? Maybe something scary? Well, that'd be nice, but instead we get a little high-pitched ditty, and the same style for the boss at the end of the level. Yoshi's Island, the original, had a great collection of tunes that were varied and extremely well-done, and I'm not just speaking from personal opinion: I've heard them lauded all around. The graphics are also odd: I don't care about graphics personally, but I know others do. The original had a crayon style that many people loved. It looked good because it was supposed to look bad. The graphics weren't great, but the art style made them great. In this, it's basically the same graphics but without the crayon drawing. Since the original's graphics were supposed to look bad but the crayon style showed that, you basically just get solid bad graphics because there's no quirky art style to absolve it.

Have we discussed babies crying? Because the first two reasons I posted make it so easy to get pasted with no warning or chance to dodge, you have to endure painfully annoying screams every time you get hit, so I generally wanted to grind Baby Peach into some garbage disposal headfirst after hearing that whine for the thousandth time. I played the game with the sound off for the most part after world three. The difficulty jump was too strange, I found as I played. When I didn't try to get 100 points on each level, it was extremely easy. I'd die maybe once or twice. When I did go for one hundred points, however, suddenly the difficulty would skyrocket upward. That makes the game fairly inaccessible to anyone except for new, casual gamers or hard-core platformer people. It's also a pain to get the 20 Red Coins in every level, because they could be any coins. In the original Yoshi's Island, Red Coins could only be those with red tints on them. Of course, there were many fakes, but you wouldn't have to go spend half an hour in some little bonus room picking every little coin in it up, because just one could be red: In YIDS, there are rooms like that where only one is red. ...And there are easily a thousand coins in some levels, bonus rooms included. In the original, there was even an item you could use that showed you exactly which ones were red. And that brings me to my next point...

The lack of items was disappointing. Minigames would reward you with cool items that would, as I mentioned above, show you which coins were red, give you watermelons with which to shoot seeds, find secret balloons, refill your eggs, give you some extra stars to fill you up at the end of a level, and all that kind of good stuff. In YIDS, all you get from minigames are extra lives, so there's little inspiration to play the minigames and they aren't interesting. The extra star items, however, were the most important. Since Stars were basically your health, and you had to be full on them to get a perfect score on a level, you would have to play through levels taking minimal hits: As I explained in my first paragraph, that's unfairly difficult to do in YIDS, whereas it's much more skill-based in Yoshi's Island. Of course, it's still quite difficult, so if you had worked hard to get all the red coins and flowers, but only had 10-29 stars, you could pull out a "+10 Stars" or "+20 Stars" item to give you what you needed. In YIDS...uh, good luck out there, buddy. I recall in one bonus level, "Welcome to the Tower of Yoshi," you had to collect every single star in the level, (And it's easy to let one or two escape from a balloon) while still moving upward from a trap rising up from the bottom of the screen. You start with 10 stars, and there were exactly 20 in the level, as I hit every balloon and found that. So that means no getting hit, either. And bonus levels are HARD in both games.

The babies were disappointing. Reviews had led me to believe that, once you get them, you have Baby Wario and Baby Bowser for the entire game. Nope, in fact, you only get them for five levels each. Pretty disappointing, and rather aggravating. I mean, really, I've been waiting eight years to get a Baby Wario, and when I finally do--For the amount he's there, I practically don't. This point is kind of minor, of course, but it does add up with everything else. (If I'm gonna be nitpicky, I might as well say my other minor point: There is no option to restart from the middle ring in the pause menu, so you have to kill yourself if you're going for a perfect score and happen to miss something.)

Lastly, the game was, overall, cheaply difficult. A whole lot of the difficulty came from the annoying and poorly done camera. And, frankly, you KNOW there's a problem when the camera is trouble in a sidescroller. In addition, for some bonus levels, you have to play through them with taking no hits: And that's a pain with the camera issues. In one bonus level, you have to ski down a slope doing nothing but jumping. I blew through over 200 lives and spent over an hour on that part, just because you have to be so exact with your jumping to get all of the red coins and flowers. Usually, I always go for 100%, but this was the only game I gave up on. Oh, sure, the original had a few flaws, and a few crazy hard parts...but nothing much, really, when you compare it to this. Besides, the items also eased the pain in the original. I'll always remember Yoshi's Island fondly, but add two letters to that title...and I have to roll my eyes.