Yoshi’s Safari

The last of the Super Scope games we’ll be looking at tonight is Yoshi’s Safari. Like Battle Clash and Metal Combat, this was made by Nintendo and feels similar to it in many ways. Mario is called on by Princess Peach to go to the Jewelry Kingdom, not to fuel her out of control sense of self-worth with pretty rings, but to gather all the powerful gems stolen by Bowser and his Koopalings and rescue Prince Pine at the request of his father, King Fret.

This was the first game that the princess was referred to as Peach, and was the last game to feature the Koopalings until they were used as throwaway bosses in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga years later. The Koopalings were eventually replaced by the horrendously ugly and horrifically annoying Bowser Jr. clones. But I digress.

Mario gets on Yoshi, and for reasons never explained, now has a bazooka that he will use to wreak havoc on Bowser’s minions, Goombas and Koopa Troopas alike, and blow their fucking brains out. After calibrating your Super Scope and selecting one or two-player modes, the game will open up to a stage select screen. You can play them in any order, but I just did them as they were numbered. After beating the first seven stages, four more open up in the “Dark Realm,” where you fight standard big Mario enemies like Big Boo and Magikoopa instead of the Koopalings of the first stages.

This game is an on-rails shooter. Yoshi is a moron and will walk right into any obstacle that is in his path because nothing can stop him. Mario is the only one who can prevent Yoshi’s seemingly inevitable death by shooting an array of indistinct blue balls at a variety of enemies. Each stage is about 3 minutes long, and the player may sometimes fight a mini-boss during the stage, and at the end of the stage they will have to fight a big boss to get the stage’s gem. There are items along the way, too. Mario can get coins from shooting enemies which not only increase his score (scores are recorded in this game, up to 5 per level) but increase his lives by one once he gets 100 coins.

There are Fire Flowers which increase the length the player can use turbo fire. These are placed really oddly. The player only needs two to permanently max out his power gauge, and one is located in the first level, and the other is located in the seventh. Seems pointless. But for other reasons, Fire Flowers are pointless because the player can prevent the gauge by ever running out by simply not using turbo and just mashing the fire button instead, which is what I did.

There’s also pink (?) mushrooms that restore the player’s health, stars which make them invincible, and sometimes for reasons unknown, an item won’t be used automatically when you get it and can be used instead during the boss battle if the player wishes. I don’t know why this happens, because the items look and are obtained the same way.

Yoshi can also jump, which is never used with the exception of jumping over huge holes placed in every stage. There are boosters right before every hole and the player has to time their jump perfectly when hitting the booster to clear them. The timing for this is bullshit and I kept falling down them. You aren’t even punished for doing it. You are picked up and put right in front of the jump again and just lose some of your coins. Big deal.

Yoshi’s Safari is just like the “safaris” your parents used to take you on when you were a kid in your totally safe first-world country: boring. You walk mostly a straight path and have no control over where Yoshi is on the path. There are gates in every stage that split the path, and Mario can shoot them to switch the gate and choose his path. Down each one of these paths is a “harder” path where the player can fight a mini-boss and earn a special item that increases his score at the end of the stage.

Which path is the correct one, though, is a complete gamble. This is stupid because it punishes less skillful players who want the easy path, and pisses off the player who is a perfectionist and wants to see everything the first time through (me) at complete random. Artificial game-lengthening at its finest, and a total time waster.

While on his “safari,” Yoshi will be attacked by hordes of Bowser’s minions. They always fly in groups based on their species, and are never mixed, which is pretty boring, and can be taken of pretty easily by just rapidly firing your gun at them and blowing them away. Almost all enemies are fought the same way, and attack the same way (just by running at you and hitting you). If enough enemies ram into you Yoshi will die and you’ll have to start over, unless you are at the boss stage in which case you just start from there.

Let it be known however that I only died once, and that was at the very last stage. The game’s pretty easy. Because the enemies fly at you in hordes, you don’t have to move your gun much to cap them all. The only times I got hurt were by those stupid Spiny enemies or when an enemy I thought I shot didn’t actually go away and still hit me, leaving me to think that this game’s hit detection could be better. The hit boxes on the enemies are fairly small with only your rapid firing to overcome it.

You can also shoot Yoshi in the head, which fucking hurts him. This is really stupid because all the enemies are in close proximity to Yoshi and hit him by touching his head, and the game obviously encourages rapid-firing over accuracy, so you’d expect to hit Yoshi a lot trying to protect him. Luckily, this is only a real problem with the Spinies, which not only take too many hits to kill but also march along the ground toward Yoshi, who is placed at the bottom of the screen, so yeah.

At the end of every stage you fight a special boss. It’s usually a Koopaling in some kind of mech and you have to hit its weak point repeatedly until it blows up. The varying difficulty between bosses is bizarre. None of them are ever hard, but some can be stun-locked into never attacking while others take hits just fine. Like Battle Clash and Metal Combat, you deflect enemy shots by hitting them down with your own. Real easy. Despite all this, the bosses often have way too much health and are tedious as all hell.

“Tedious” is the exact word I would use to describe Yoshi’s Safari. It’s a total button masher, just keep blowing away endless hordes of enemies that aren’t satisfying to kill and rarely pose a threat to you as Yoshi walks a generic path with completely unmemorable scenery. Most rail shooters have special events that happen during the stage to keep you interested, but not Yoshi’s Safari! Like I said earlier, the best you get is a hole you jump over. Yeehaw.

Also, as said before, the enemies never mix when they attack you in a horde, which they always do, and there’s not enough variety in any one stage to keep things from getting boring. There’s a big variety of enemies, but many of the types are used sparingly for no reason. There’s no thought put into creating clever traps for the player or inventive enemy placement that makes the player more aware of their surroundings and might even have to do more than just button mashing. I don’t know.

When I was playing this game, at first I thought “this is pretty boring, but the classic SNES-era Mario charm kind of makes up for it.” By the end of the game, I changed my mind because of how repetitive the game was. I was sick of it. The graphics are very oddly colored.

The sprites, in particular, are inconsistent. Some of the bosses have this bizarre crayon-like shading to them and it’s very off-putting and makes them match the density of the colored backgrounds. Some bosses have brighter sprites like they should and stand out more. It’s very weird and seems like two different people designed the graphics at times.

Also, this easily has the worst music of any Mario game I’ve played. It’s done by a bunch of no-names and most of the music either coasts by or is actually pretty annoying. The only stage’s music I somewhat liked was the bridge stage, level six.

Don’t let the fun colorful box art fool you: Yoshi’s Safari feels very cheaply made; like a fan’s flash game. I don’t recommend it to anyone and its natural intrigue of being a forgotten title in the Mario franchise barely anyone has played is the best thing it has going for it. Now that I’ve played it and realized it’s no good, that intrigue is gone for me. It’s like seeing a big present with sparkly bright colored wrapping and opening it up to find a mud-covered rock.