There is no emulation of Kirby: Tilt & Tumblr in Ba Sing Se. Right, Kirby? Uh oh, he's hitting us with that 🤨 i don't even know why bro do that, we are progressing smoothly with no deaths whatsoever (falsehoods). Oh wait... I know these crunchy voice clips. It's when he fucking falls off a fucking cliff in the anime. No? Well, they might as well be. I'm hearing it a bit too much though. You're falling once your whole body is above a pit, which makes perfect sense, yet idk this is supposed to intensify moments of dread where your Tesla (Kirby) just doesnt control how you expect him too and he barely cheats death. Right now it's just "bruh I just died, Alexa play Astronomia 2K19". I'm not sure why that is or how to fix it, but I know how to complain about it and the customer is king I hear.

It's nice how the gist of the gameplay is both the crutch and the random hypnagogic jerk. As all good gimmick games should be. Even something as simple as deciding whether you want more stars, time bonuses, or Backloggd micro-celebrity reputation points changes everytime u jump. That aside, it's also great that it focuses on hazards rather than enemies, although both would serve similar purposes here. Great selection of bosses, Kracko, Kracko, Kracko... more like Krackhead he's always coming back for more! I can't believe we fought him a la Space Invaders, instead of being stationary you can make it close and personal, and while there's only one enemy, the arena keeps downsizing? Very cash money.

Well, that sure is something Nintendo created, their game design is all over the screen, it innovates but is also a bit archaic. I'm not sure why it's a Kirby game if they wanted to half-assess that aspect (money), they get my special thumb of disapproval! I think my time record for a death is 0.3574 seconds, luckily I had 80 lives at the end, roughly equal to the lives of 9 cats. I guess I can treat Kirby like lifestock 😂 I would never do this to my boy, rest assured. I have some integrity, worst I can do is turn him into a ball... AGAIN. This man is possessed. He gotta have gobbled up a devil fruit. But if Monkey Ball can do it, why not Kirby? Jokes aside, I did not expect such finely tuned slope physics on Game Boy, but if I've ever come across any befor, I simply forgor.

Gang please standby I think we need to confirm whether this has too many gimmicks. For 2 hours and 28 levels, I think we got the right amount. I don't wanna see another cloud going through all the cos and the sin. It put me through all the stages of grief in non-chronological order. The timeline is disrupted. 𝓪𝓫𝓸𝓻𝓽 fellas.

I’m going to be honest here, this review isn’t legitimate. I normally don’t like to review games as I played it with a hack that improves the experience because I feel like it makes the review invalid in my mind. It’s fine if others do it but for me, it just makes me feel bad. I made an exception with this game. If you don’t know, there’s a hack that lets you play with the d-pad and buttons for the whole game. It’s not perfect but thanks to this, I got to enjoy a game I probably would have never done before.

This game has some fun level design but I do feel like it does repeat some ideas a little too much along with repetitive themes. For a game with 32 stages, it could be a bit better. What is here though is pretty fun and probably due to the hack, it was a pretty easy adventure. There’s even some fun minigames here like the one where you can make Kirby drive off a cliff and die, that’s hilarious. Once you 100% the game, you have to play the whole game again but it’s a little harder and those red stars you need for 100% are in the exact same areas which feels a bit lazy. I was surprised at how well thought out the level design was and how it never really felt dull and even at times feels kind of smart with the placement of obstacles. I do wish the bosses were better though with how it’s normally supposed to be controlled, I get why they’re the way they are.

I don’t really have too much to say about my playthrough but I enjoyed what was there even with the issues and I do wish 100% did more than just be like “wow you did perfect” because that took like 5 hours. Just try not to do it in one sitting and you'll be fine. The game is on NSO if you wanna try it with the Gyro controls but I probably will just stick to this hack even if it’s not the intended way to play the game.

In this game Kirby can't float on his own so he dies when falling on the edges of the map.

I played this on my phone to try to come close to the original experience with the motion controls. Man this game gets frustrating quick, but it's so cute and it's really polished.

I won't finish it as I can't take a whole game with these controls.

Oh my god. This is a game that seems really cool and neat but I have absolutely no idea if this would have been better on like, a theoretical backlit game boy where it would feel less sensitive and therefore not quite as bad as it does. Maybe I should try and fix my gyro sensor but honestly it’s way too much of an ungodly nightmare to control for me that I just found myself getting frustrated and wanting to throw my Switch at the wall, which is absolutely not the feeling you want from a Kirby game.

Sorry Kirb. This is a miss from me buddy. I feel like rating it lower would be unfair considering I feel like it’s probably pretty competent if you do gel with this kinda game but boy I don’t.

Finally, after all these years, I have now played and beaten every (non BS Satellite) Kirby game! I don't like emulating Kirby games I haven't played before, so I'm thankful this was put on NSO as I didn't have the $250 to shell out for a physical copy like I did with SFC Super Star Stacker.

Kirby's last ever 8-bit adventure sees him curling up into a ball for most of the game for the first time, with you tilting the wheel to move him around. He's a little slippery though, so you've got to be careful which can be a bit annoying when the game asks for you to be precise.

This is also the second game in the series where Kirby is voiced, and the last game where he would be until Return to Dream Land. Since it's on the GBC the audio is super crunched, but honestly there's a charm to that which I like and I admire when devs go that extra mile even if it isn't always perfect. It's just re-used samples from Kirby 64 and Smash 64 which is a little disappointing but I gotta admit I smiled at the KIRBY TILT N TUMBLE on the title. Just wish King Dedede was voiced too that would have been rad.

The levels feel like Kirby's traction was a bit better in development, as one touch of the wrong thing will send him to the other side of the earth. It's only really bad in a few levels which are scattered (the difficulty curve feels off for some reason). My only true complaint with the controls is that shaking the console to jump was not a well thought out idea, as it gets really hard to jump and control your direction at the same time. That really should have just been a button. It makes simple things like jumping on a static cloud tough.

The minigames are solid, I wish two of them didn't just use tilt functionality as a cursor but at least one's a shooting gallery and the other is Simon Says so they're different enough.

The levels themselves however are really creative and took full advantage of the control scheme in their design. No idea overstays its welcome (except the bosses, I do wish that the Watchers were used way less often and they had one or two more unique ones) and the level gimmicks all get their fair share of use. A few don't succeed, but most of them do.

The graphics are top notch and filled with cute animations, and the soundtrack's original songs are solid. As for remixes I wish they branched out of Kirby's Dream Land as I'd love to hear a GB arrange of Gourmet Race or at least the verse of King Dedede's theme that was added in Kirby Super Star in 8-bit, but these are the sacrifices you have to make for fitting Kirby's voice I guess. My only other audio complaint is that the Balloon song starts over every time you grab the power up rather than continuing to play it during the loop.

My journey with Kirby isn't over, as I still have some games I need to 100%, including this one which its requirements sound like a pain in the ass, but I know I'll eventually do it (but maybe with a no-gyro controls mod) and hey, maybe it'll be cheaper at some point and I can own it too!

I personally didn't end up having a good time, but it's not a bad game. It's actually a really creative exploration of tilt mechanics, quickly switching from one high-concept level to the next Donkey Kong Country-style without giving any one mechanic time to grow stale. Given how much of a novelty this type of game design was, such that the cartridge would have used a custom gyroscope, I have a lot of respect for what they were going for.

Where it fell apart for me was with the port to Switch. Ironically, it's because of how much technology has improved; the Switch port leverages the Joy Cons' built-in gyroscopes, which are worlds ahead of what Hal Labs was able to stuff into the GameBoy Color carts. Because it's so sensitive, you have to have much more precise control over your movements than you ever needed in the original. Plus, if you're playing the game docked (which I was, since I was streaming my playthrough), there's an additional degree of abstraction and separation from your play that just makes it that much harder to wrap your head around. This is absolutely not a fault of the game itself, and I have in fact played a good chunk of the Japanese cart on original hardware for comparison; the base game is hard, but not quite as hard as it is the way I played it. My recommendation to you is to absolutely play it in portable mode, if you're trying out the Switch port.

Still, I do think some of those levels are designed to be annoying time sucks, and I'm not keen on that. Several levels are "walls" that will halt your forward momentum until you can solve them. Some of these I think are okay - 3-1 is a huge time sink, but it's very forgiving and specifically designed so the player can recover and try again while they learn. But other levels are endurance runs, and those really wear on me. I hold particular distain for 3-4, 5-2, 7-3, 7-4, and 8-4. I'm generally not a fan of any sequence where you're waiting for something to happen, whether that's the dumb bridge-building robots, the dumb conveyor belts bringing you back to the room's entrance, or anytime you're bouncing off a single bumper and trying to turn all sparkly. I know these are just how the challenge is designed and represent normal difficulty progression and scaling; maybe it's be better to say that I didn't enjoy the process of getting good enough to master the particular challenge this game had to offer.

For that matter, while all the sub-games are cute, there's a persistent issue that you MUST leave a high score in order to gain 1ups from them. Not a big deal at first, but it's quite easy to screw yourself over in, say, Kirby's Chicken Race by scoring really well the first time, then being unable to surpass that as the game difficulty scales. And Do The Kirby is another example of the game wasting time to get to a certain point. I like Simon-type games well enough, but a 3up is not a strong enough incentive to spend ten minutes per attempt trying for a new high score.

This is one of the earliest games to give Kirby voice acting, after Super Smash Bros. and Kirby 64. This is Makiko Ohmoto, who would become his regular voice actress, but you can kinda tell that everyone was still figuring out what the little guy should sound like. There are all sorts of early bits of weirdness, like Kirby cheering "Yatta!" when he collects a red/blue star, or his horrifying anguished groan when he drowns. All things that would be ironed out, but funny to run into here.

This would be Kirby's very last 8-bit outing, notwithstanding throwbacks like NES Remix and 3D Classics Kirby's Adventure. The game almost feels like a back-to-basics title, trimming its ensemble most of the way back to its Dream Land cast (with some exceptions, like Mr. Frosty and Starman), taking out Copy Abilities, and reintroducing a Mint Leaf-equivalent. A consequence of all this is that the game feels a bit sentimental, like it's an accidental send-off to Classic Kirby. By coincidence, this would be the last title before Kirby's rough patch, where progress on a mainline GameCube title stalled out and Kirby mostly got by on its anime and handheld outings - not unilaterally bad things, but inconsequential enough in the broad gaming market that Kirby fell from its B-list status among Nintendo properties to C or D-list. On a personal level, this would have been the last Kirby game to come out before I got into the series with Nightmare in Dream Land - so finally getting to play it really felt like I was putting a bow on my full series playthrough.

I have pretty mixed thoughts on the game, as you can see, but I'm willing to accept that that's largely a me-problem. Still, do try to play it in handheld mode, if you're playing it on Switch.

As a kid I had Yoshi Topsy Turvy for the Gameboy Advance, which was a solidly mediocre game where the gyroscopic controls really felt like a gimmick. So I went into this with low expectations, but was pleasantly surprised to find a really solid game. It reminded me a lot of playing with those wooden marble labyrinths as a kid. The gameplay is simple but solid, with a handful of little optional challenging sections to get the collectables. This is probably way easier to play on the switch than it was on the Gameboy Color though, what with having to bend around to still be able to see the screen and all.

You know, in hindsight, I should have known better. A game purely reliant on gyro controls for your movement of a ball around many narrow courses where you can (and DEFINITELY WILL) fall off the track. I get it, Nintendo has always loved experimenting with motion controls. As another review here suggested, maybe this would actually be better on the actual Gameboy with less responsive gyro capabilities so it would be easier to handle. As it stands however on the Switch, it is far too easy to send Kirby off a cliff or over a jump at ever so slightly the wrong angle.

Despite being a utterly frustrating experience, it does still get a couple of points for effort. It is still well made, and it looks pretty good. While most of the boss fights are reskins of each other, the final one was pretty enjoyable at least. As another virtue of being a GameBoy game, it also has some positively CRUNCHY audio (especially on Kirby's lines) so be prepared to hear some garbled screams or even drowning(!) sound effects that sound straight out of the GameBoy speakers.

Overall, I recommend you do not play this. But if you absolutely must (perhaps out of a love for Kirby), I recommend being prepared to abuse the NSO rewind features if that's how you're playing it.

Ok this rating may seem ridiculous, but I cannot stress enough just HOW MUCH FUN this game is on the Switch. The tilt controls work perfectly, and the level design takes full advantage of the game's main concept. It never gets stale, as so many fresh ideas are thrown in throughout to mix things up. It's so much more than just a gimmick. I hope this game's average rating improves in the future. I highly recommend this overlooked game. If you like the ball-rolling levels from Mario Galaxy, you'll like this game just the same.

It's a cute idea to tilt entire Game Boy Color™ to move your little Kirby on small screen. Honestly, level design is a delight, game gives you a ton of lives (since you are going to lose about the same amount), obstacles interesting to overcome, secrets are really cute, minigames are fun. It's a genuinely good cute Kirby game.
But holy shit, controlling it with undocked Nintendo Switch™ is a nightmare. I was genuinely concerned if I ether will smack my head over Switch screen or accidentally undock my Joycons and drop console into pieces. I probably should have played this with unattached Joycon to save myself some nerves but what's done is done. Ether way, game sometimes requires you to be way too precise, especially for some secrets. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for this kind of re-releases, its a unique game and it must be preserved to experience.

One of the rare cases where the obvious tech demo for the accelerometer try actually to build a game instead of being a mere showcase. The idea of doing each level with a unique concept like Mario (and funnily enough, unlike Kirby platformers) is neat! But their choice of going for the most frustrating and punishing level design they could think make the game a chore (what is really like 90s Kirby games!). Sometimes the game also prefer the weird tech instead of the better design options. Particularly the jump, which is not functionable at all.

I'm glad that this exist but is a very passable game