YOSHI

Yoshi is a puzzle game developed by Nintendo, staring Mario and Yoshi, with some rather famous developers behind its creation.

Game freak was partially responsible for the development of the game as a contracted studio, with Satoshi Tajiri as game director and Ken Sugimori as artist. You may know Game Freak and their developers more for their cult classic Mega Drive game Pulseman! I've never played it myself but I hear it's pretty good, Sugimori's character design skills really shine. Oh, and Mario and Wario.

Yoshi, I'm afraid, is a very dull game. You play as Mario, swapping around four plates at the bottom of the screen. Four different types of enemies can fall down, and matching two will pop them. Bottom and top halfs of Yoshi eggs can also fall down. Make a sandwich of a bottom half, enemies, and a top half, and the stack will collapse and a Yoshi will be born, granting points.

It's easy to get into a rut, since there's no real logic to what enemy drops down when. You can get one pile so high that you don't feel comfortable moving it to catch an enemy that would match with the one on the piles top. Or you just fat finger it and now you're digging. Horizontial matches would also be nice, but this game doesn't support that. Mode A starts you off with an empty board and mode B starts you off with some garbage you have to clear. Sometimes you get only egg tops and no bottoms, and sometimes a bottom will spawn and it'll be a dogs age before a top comes to finish it off. I don't find this game particularly enjoyable or mechanically deep.