Yoshi's Cookie

released on Nov 21, 1992

A port of Yoshi's Cookie

The Game Boy version of Yoshi's Cookie was released as part of a dual launch with the NES version of the game. While they both featured the original three forms of game play, individuals on Gameboy were at an advantage in the form of the amount of players that could compete against one another in the VS mode.


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Probably played this a lot as a kid just because I loved Yoshi and the cookies looked tasty, even in 8 bit. When I wanted a break from Tetris or Tetris Blast this was my go-to puzzler

As a little break after a case in Ace Attorney 3, I decided to play through this little GB puzzle game that I nabbed for 100 yen at Book Off a week or so ago. This was a game I had on SNES as a kid, but never played all that much of. This seemed like a good a time as any to fire up the ol’ Super GameBoy and finally see what this Nintendo Tetris-wannabe was all about~. It took me about 1.5 hours to play through the first hundred stages and reach the credits, and I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

As said previously, this is one of the many wannabe Tetris clones from the 90’s, and one of the several that Nintendo themselves put out (and on the very handheld that Tetris itself helped make famous, no less). Mario and Yoshi are running a cookie factory, and they need your help to guide them to help the cookies not overflow the factory. At the very least, that’s what I could gather, narrative-wise XD. It’s a simple points-based falling-block puzzler, so it’s hardly worth much caring about the story, but it makes for a cute aesthetic at least~.

In a bit of a change from usual puzzle games (though a fair bit like one of the games that Gunpei Yokoi would later make for his Wonderswan, Gunpey), you don’t have blocks just coming from the top of the screen, but from the right side as well. Lines of new blocks come simultaneously from above and from the right, and they pause while you’re clearing lines. The only way to clear lines is to shuffle pieces around so you have a complete, unbroken line of pieces (usually cookies) of the same type from one end of the cookie cluster quadrangle to the other. This is dependent on the end, as well, so if your quadrangle is currently 3 by 6, you can much more easily make a match on the 3-long side than the 6-long side. This comes with a catch, however, as should either side of the quadrangle extend beyond the edge of the screen, it’s game over for you.

It’s a quite good puzzle game, as it is! My main complaint would really be that it’s a bit too easy, at least on slower speeds (I played on low speed and didn’t game over a single time in my quest for the credits), but when it gets harder, it’s impossibly hard. The cookies themselves are fairly easy to tell apart on the GameBoy (even the Super GameBoy) monochrome color palette, but once you extend beyond the first 10 rounds (which are ten stages each, so that’s the first 100 levels, effectively) using the code they give you after the credits, the piece shapes can change. For me, I decided to see how hard round 99 would be, and it’s unsurprisingly absurdly difficult XD. A thing I didn’t mention before is that matching a given piece type five times will get you a wild card cookie that will match with anything. In those later rounds, you’re given a special sixth type of piece to deal with, but you’ll never get more of that type dropping from the edges. You MUST get rid of it by matching it with wild cards, and that is incredibly difficult to do. It also doesn’t help that the piece shapes change from cookies to sprites from the GB puzzle game Yoshi (or Mario & Yoshi, if you’re in PAL regions), which look far more similar to one another than the usual cookies do (making it far easier to make mistakes).

The presentation of the game is really just what you’d expect for an early-life GB puzzle game. Simple animations but relatively detailed sprites make the little cutscenes you get between rounds extra cute, and the normal cookie pieces, at least, are well distinguished and easy enough to tell apart, even in a rush. There aren’t many music tracks, but the ones that are there are good songs and fun to listen to while you puzzle away.

Verdict: Recommended. It’s not gonna set your world on fire, sure, but this is a perfectly fine puzzle game on the GameBoy. There are certainly other puzzle games I’d recommend before this one, if given the chance (from Tetris itself to even the aforementioned Yoshi), but that doesn’t take away from this game’s general competency. While it probably shouldn’t be your first choice of puzzle game, it’s a great little way to kill time and a perfectly fun enough puzzle game to include in your GB library~.

yoshi's cookie! on the game boy!

this was my mom's favorite game oddly enough. i remember doing my very best to get the blocks to the very top to hatch a winged star yoshi! the music is also very good. just a wonderfully sweet game.

Imagine if those cookies were your butthole though