Kirby Dream Land

The Game Boy's release in the late 1980's gave portable gaming a real kick start and while Tetris was the undisputed king of the handheld Kirby was one of the key characters of the console thanks to Kirby's Dream Land series. The first game in the series was released in 1992 and it was the first appearance of the almighty video gaming bumble gum lookey likey and it was one of the Game Boy's top selling games (over 5,000,000 units).

As one may expect from the name of the game the player controls Kirby, a small round character with feet and arms and little else. The character is

simple yet cute and oddly effective as a key franchise character (who has now been in over 20 games since Dream Land). Kirby's skills are being able to jump, float like a balloon, spit bubbles at enemies and swallow enemies (which he can then spit at opponents). Whilst Kirby would later (in future games) progress to the point where he could devour enemies (and steal their skills) he was unable to in Dream Land which may feel a bit disconcerting if you've played the more modern games before playing the original Dream Land.

The game is in monochrome through out (due to the limitations of the Game Boy) though despite this it actually looks rather good with clear sprites and well designed enemies. Sadly though the guy does have a wide number of limitations outside of the graphics. Firstly the game isn't very long lasting, in fact it only has a handful of levels and it can quite comfortably be complete in an hour and a half (which is a bit of a relief as the original game lacks a save feature). The key problem (and also the reason why it's so short) is that much of the game is just far too simple, aside from the Bosses all the enemies are very easy to kill or get around and the levels can often be "flown" across by Kirby which takes much of the challenge out of the game.

Whilst Kirby would later become one of the icons of Nintendo games this was a bit of an under-stated debut and lacks the complexity of some of the later Kirby games. Whilst it's surely aimed at kids I would assume they'd rather play Mario (or even Sonic) rather than Kirby Dream Land. That's not to say it's a bad game, just too simple and too short and with it's recent release on the Nintendo Virtual Console 3DS it's certainly not a much buy.

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Details:
Console-Game Boy
Release-1992
Developer-HAL Laboratory
Genre-2D Platformer
Players-1

Trivia:
Kirby is one of very few platform characters who didn't kill enemies by jumping on their head (much like DoRemi Fantasy)
Kirby was originally a dummy character that was used for testing until folks at HAL Laboratory decided they liked him.