RetroGaming

Early Kirby games in general seemed pretty easy coming off the Super Mario Bros games. I had Kirby's Dreamland on the Gameboy and I remember thinking about how Kirby could just inflate and float over half the enemies in the first half of the game. It got a little more technical later on but I don't think I ever really struggled to beat the game, even when very young.

In fact, growing up on the hard knocks of SMB led to some spirited conversations with my friends about Sonic the Hedgehog, as well. In Sonic as long as you have a single ring in your pocket you're immortal, and if you get hit just pick the ring back up. In Mario, if you get hit, you just fuckin' die. Maybe with one extra chance if you had a mushroom, but you don't get that second chance back until you find a new one. Now as an adult I realize the design spaces of the two games were different - Mario was actually intended to be a reasonably difficult platformer, where Sonic was arguably less about the precision platforming and more about just having fun going fast as fuck, boi. But as a kid you better believe I took every available opportunity to call Sonic fans casuals. It made me lots of friends, as you may imagine.