• Released in 1991
• Developed by Nintendo
• Genre: Tetris Rip-off
• Popularity Level: San Jose Sharks
• Leonardite Rating: Patently Uninspired













• When Alexey Pazhitnov wasted Red Army time by creating Tetris, there was no way to know the can of worms that he was opening on the world. With the runaway success of his classic time-waster, came the mindset that swept the gaming industry and Tetris in particular:

If there's one thing people want, besides money or sitcoms starring Jim Belushi, it's twenty more games where things interminably fall from the sky.

I'm glad to report that this fad has now passed, as new puzzle games are as rare as a pop singer with musical talent. But back when the NES was on the fast track to the video game retirement castle, the lazy programmers decided that rather than put some effort and try and come up with some innovative games before the public forsaked their Nintendos, they would just "Pazhitnov" their projects and make them into lame puzzlers.

Hellooooooooooooooo Yoshi!


Sure, Yoshi wasn't alone. His brother Yoshi's Cookie, Dr. Mario, Wario's Woods, et. al were all lame Nintendo creations that we were force-fed. Add in third party brands like Panesian, who gave us G (string) rated titles like, Peek-A-Boo Poker and Bubble Bath Babes, and you can see where Alexey gave the programming world a giant vacation by creating this genre.

But today we are talking about Yoshi, which unlike Bubble Bath Babes and Wario's Woods, did not feature naked women. (Actually, only one of those games had naked women in it. Care to guess which one? I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised)

The first thing you need to know about Yoshi is that if you're expecting to have fun with Yoshi riding him like in Super Mario World, or kicking the crap out of people with him like in Super Smash Bros., you are gravely mistaken. No, friends, Yoshi's debut game features 248% more Mario than Yoshi. There are already about a hundred games that drop a "fun" Mario cameo into them. You'd like to think that since Nintendo has developed a new character and named the game after him, you'd get to use him. But hell no, since it's Nintendo, we might as well star Mario yet again. Yoshi does make an appearance, but it is so brief and so pathetic that they should have just put a shirt on Mario for five seconds that says "Yoshi." Then Nintendo wouldn't have been as guilty of false advertising.

To play this game, things fall from the sky in the "no matter how well I do, I'm still screwed" style that we've all come to loath in the oversaturated puzzler scene. The difference here is that things fall more than one at a time, in any one of four columns. Mario's job (Hey, you get to control Mario! Whoop de f'ing doo!) is to arrange these cursed characters so that they stack up two at a time and disappear. The game continues until the things stack up to the top and the Earth blows up.


The speed also changes variably throughout the game, so at times two things will be falling very slowly, while a minute later you'll have all four positions with stuff falling down on them at high speed leaving Mario busier than the proverbial one-legged man in his ass-kicking contest. But since he's depriving you of getting to use Yoshi, I wouldn't mind seeing one of the falling goombas bite his nose off or at least kick him in the groin a few times.

Now, there is a fun little twist to this game (It should be noted that when I say "fun", I mean "extraordinarily useless.") You see, sometimes you'll get a bottom of an egg to fall. You then try and stack some of the objects on top of this egg piece. You do this because later, the top to the egg will fall and if you match the two up, the objects will ALL disappear. But the money part is...

Yoshi pops out of the egg! For two brief seconds, because you connect two egg pieces, Yoshi finally makes a brief appearance in his own game. If I were Yoshi, I'd have been calling to see if Sonic needed an ass-kicking, prehistoric sidekick before ever signing over my soul to Nintendo again.

If I were in charge of Nintendo, in addition to buying a nuclear-powered toilet, I would have made a fundamental change that would have saved the game. Since Yoshi is clearly getting screwed in this game, I would have left him out completely and let him debut in Super Mario World. Instead, since we are hatching eggs, I would have brought in everyone's favorite egg-content and had him star in the game:



Yes, I do believe this would have improved the situation sufficiently. But unfortunately for mankind, we have some lazy Japanese guys running Nintendo instead of me. The shame.

Bottom Line:

At this point I'm sure you are:

A) Absolutely confused as to what the hell is going on in the game

Don't worry, it's not because of my description. Playing the game really doesn't improve this situation much.

B) Sure that I don't like this game

This is not true. I actually do derive some enjoyment from playing Yoshi. In fact, thanks to some ingenious slacking nerds out there, there's a code that implants this game onto the Texas Instruments TI-83 calculator. Luckily for me, I never had to do any actually learning in calculus my senior year. What is the amplitude of an S-curve? Hell if I know. But I routinely shattered the high scores on everyone else's calculators just to piss them off. Now that's a life lesson we all should learn. Thank you, Yoshi, if it weren't for you, mathematics just wouldn't have been the same.

E-mail the Leonardite
T-Rex says: "All right, it's bad enough that they made us look like feelings-oriented sissies in the Land Before Time, but the way Yoshi gets raped by the Nintendo Corporation in this title is enough to make me devour that grumpy pteradactyl."





"On second thought, compared to this wardrobe abomination, Yoshi sucks marginally less."





Taken from a GameFAQs.com review of Yoshi:
"Well, that's about it. I like this game, but not near as much as Tetris. If you happen to be deciding between the two, I would say take Tetris by far. At any rate, I think that this is a pretty good puzzle game. Give it a try sometime. See ya!"

See me where? I already think less of myself for looking up Yoshi reviews online, now I have to live with the knowledge that I might run into you at some point? Man, this whole website idea is starting to blow up in my face.



I'll never forget this guy in my class bringing in an entire sheet of code that looked like someone fell asleep on the keyboard. You were supposed to enter in these million characters and the game would be able to run. I still wonder what my teacher was thinking when he asked how to enter at least fifteen odd symbols that she didn't even know about and then asked for a link cable (to transfer the game to the rest of us when he was finished.) I should also point out that this was during the first week of classes. I guess she must have figured that anyone who is desperate enough to spend an hour typing crap into their calculator deserves to play friggin' Yoshi.






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