From the gentle pastel backgrounds to the stark black outlines of the primary-colored characters and enemies, there's the slightest bit of imperfect sloppiness to the visual design that evokes a grade schooler's dream world more than a pixelated game system.Ī lot of people don't realize that the 2D sprites in Yoshi's Island were backed up by a version of the polygon-pushing Super FX chip-the same one that powered early 3D SNES games like Star Fox and Stunt Race FX. Mario games have always been bright and colorful, but Yoshi's Island brought a hand-drawn aesthetic that really captured the game's sense of childlike wonder. Gameplay footage from this stone cold classic.
It's hard to explain to someone who's never played Yoshi's Island just how right it feels to trace a series of gentle, perfect curves through the air with a well-timed executed series of flutter jumps. This new feature added a crucial, extra bit of post-jump precision to the standard Mario jump, and allowed for a lot of platforming challenges that required mid-air direction changes or extra-long flutter leaps. If you have enough elevation, you can flutter multiple times before eventually floating to the ground. If you continue to hold the jump button after the peak of Yoshi's arc, he'll kick his feet in the air to first slow his descent and then start floating upward again, achieving a new, slightly higher peak. What used to be a run-and-jump series was now run-and-jump-and-slurp-and-shoot game, and the Yoshi's Island designers built levels that catered to these new abilities wonderfully.īut the true key to Yoshi's Island's appeal, to me, is the flutter jump.
Yoshi's oversized tongue let players slurp up enemies and transform them into projectile eggs that could be fired in any direction. Yoshi went from an occasional helper in Super Mario World to a permanently controllable character in Yoshi's Island, tasked with protecting a near-helpless Baby Mario riding on his back. Yeah, you were still running through levels and jumping on things, but the myriad ways Yoshi's Island expanded on the Mario formula made it feel like an entirely new game. Then Yoshi's Island came along and showed that Mario games could be about a lot more than that. Running left to right (or maybe down to up).
(And it can now be played through Nintendo's Switch Online service.) Our Masterpiece essay on Yoshi's Island originally ran in September 2012 and it appears unchanged below.īack in 1995, I thought I knew what a Mario game was. We planned on resurfacing a few pieces from the archives to keep the lights on over a holiday, so it seemed only right to select one honoring an all-time classic that turns 25 this year. For many, that includes gaming on titles new and old. 6, 2020: It's Labor Day Weekend in the US, and even though most of us now also call home " the office," Ars staff is taking a long weekend to rest and relax.