Kirby's Star Stacker

Deep from the memory hole of Nintendo puzzle games comes Kirby's Star Stacker! Originally developed by HAL labs in 1997, the game is most well known for its 1998 Nintendo Power Service on SNES, which only got a western release in 2022.

Since I don't know where else I'd talk about this, the Nintendo Power Service (not to be confused with America's Nintendo Power magazine, higher and higher fighting your way through enemy fire) was a kiosk found in convenience stores where you could take a special Super Famicom flash cart and burn new games onto the RAM cartridge. If this sounds shockingly similar to the Famicom Disk System kiosk's that I talked about in the review I wrote literally an hour ago, that's because they're effectively the same idea. The game did get a proper cartridge release in 1999, by the way, leave it to HAL to support the Super Famicom to the bitter end.

Anyway, Kirbys Star Stacker is a game that plays most similarly to Puyo Puyo, but also not at all really. There are three kinds of tiles represented by Rick, Kine, and Coo, who are all animal buddies in Kirby's Dream Land 2 (awww!) When two of these tiles match vertically or horizoltally, they pop. Stars between tiles bridge them, assuming there isn't a mismatched tile between them. Getting more than a two combo causes a few more stars to fall down from the top of the screen, filling the lowest row first. More matches, and more stars fall from above, cascading into what could possibly be a very large combo.

This is the core of the game, setting up for big combos and trying not to top out your board. It's sort of hard to lose the challenge mode, at least on the lowest difficulty of 'normal,' since when blocks are cascading down from the top there's usually something at the bottom for them to chain with. There's also a Round Clear mode, 2-player VS, and time attack.

Being a Kirby game of the era the graphics and music are amazing, and the fun gameplay loop make this game a sort of sleeper hit on the Game Boy. Track down a copy if you can!