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Title: Kirby's Canvas Curse
Platform: Nintendo DS
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: HAL Laboratories
Difficulty: Medium
So Sunday (July 3rd, 2005) I went into Electronics Boutique looking to buy a DS. Lucky for me, they had a preowned one in good condition, so i got it and Kirby's Canvas Curse. I had read some reviews and already played Mario 64 and Warioware Touched, so I decided to try out Kirby. All the reviews gave it high praise and it looked like a great game made for DS, so what the hell? I'll be damned if this isn't the best game for the DS yet.
The story is kind of weird. One day in Dream Land, Kirby is enjoying a nice stroll. Suddenly, the colors warp and a strange witch appears, turning Dream Land into a big painting. Along with changing the world, she changes Kirby into just a ball. No hands or feet anymore Kirby, you're out of luck. Sucks to be you. But then Kirby sees the witch's magical paintbrush, and he grabs it and he gets warped with a ray of light. ... Yep, that's the story. So then you play.
These graphics are pretty... I LOVE pretty things. They are very vibrantly colored using all the colors on the spectrum. While the graphics are certainly pretty, they aren't the best that the DS can do. This isn't the game you would show to the PSP fanboys saying: Oh yeah?! Well look at what my DS can do! All of the enemies are good looking and Kirby himself is... well, he's still a pink ball. Nothing special there. The backgrounds are just paintings, but they all look really cool, and the foregrounds are superbly designed forays into the DS's touch screen functionality. This is one of those games that shows you that you DO NOT have to be in 3-d to have good graphics. Overall the graphics are pretty, I like pretty things, as I said earlier. Take a wild geuss what I'll say about the graphics. No, seriously. DO IT.
The sound is good. It's no full orchestra or anything like that, but for a game you're most likely going to be playing on the road while listening to music or something, you don't really care about that do you? No voice-overs, but Kirby never speaks anyway so once again, who cares? The music is catchy and has some classic Kirby anthems in there as well. You can also unlock various songs using your medals that you find throughout the game. The sound effects are good too. You'll hear all kinds of different sounds throughout the game, so it's not short on sounds.
The gameplay. The ABSOLUTE BEST PART OF THIS GAME, is the gameplay. You see that stylus there? Not getting much use on most of your DS games, eh? Most of the time to look at a map or steer awkwardly? Well not anymore! This game is TOUCH SCREEN ONLY. You will never press any buttons. No d-pad. Yes the top screen displays various things like health and a map and whatnot, but you never really need to look at it. For one, you'll be zipping through the levels so you have to keep your eyes on the bottom screen and keep your hand ready to draw rainbow lines to keep Kirby from getting killed, or worse, ...killed. No, not everything kills you. So you keep Kirby going by either him rolling on his own, or you drawing lines to avoid danger. How about the sucking, you ask? Kirby does no such thing in this game. You either tap the enemy then run into them, or tap Kirby to do a spin attack and kill them. Some enemies will obviously give you power ups like Tornado, or Electric or something. The boss fights are a different story, there are 3 different types of boss. You have the race boss, the race against the clock by correctly painting the line boss, and the Kirby is a pinball now, so make bumpers to knock him around into stuff boss. Each one has 2 levels and you will play 1 boss at the end of every world. There are 7 worlds though, so who is the final boss, hmm?? Pfft. I'm not telling you.
The biggest downfall of this game is that the main game is dreadfully short. I'm talking 2-3 hours short. You can blaze through this game in a long car ride, if you're not driving of course. If you are driving while trying to play this game, you may have some troubles. The game makes up for it's shortfulness with TONS upon TONS of extra content and replay value. If you beat only the main game without playing anything else, you will only have about 18% of the game done. Do the math. There are a few extra modes. The main one being Rainbow Run. Basically, after you beat a world, you get to play it in Rainbow Run. There you have 2 modes, Time Trial and Line Trial. There are 3 goals in each one, and for each goal you beat you get a medal that you can use to unlock things in Medal Swap. Time puts you racing against the clock trying to get to the end the fastest way possible. Line makes you use the least magical paintbrush lines possible to get to the end. Sub games are just minigames you can play for beating both levels of the bosses in the game. They're fun too. Medal Swap is basically where you trade in your medals for extra content like extra vitality and different character balls. Play Rainbow Run a lot to get more medals.
This is a really innovative title that uses the DS's funcionality the best out of any game for the system yet. All of the aspects of the game come together into one awesome package that will keep you entertained long after you beat the game. I give Kirby's Canvas Curse a 9.5 out of 10.
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