Game:

Nintendo Puzzle Collection (2003)

Duration: 7:04

8,650 views

25

The so-called story mode...and the unreadable garbled text that comes with it.

I'm kinda disappointed that there's no way to read the text, but at the same time I imagine it just goes like this:

Mario and Yoshi make cookies and Bowser decides to steal them while they're taking a nap and leaves a note describing his fiendishy complex scheme so that Mario will find it when he wakes up.

Being the sport he his, Bowser gives cookies to all his minions and our heroic duo follows the trail of crumbs to each successive baddie and they hold epic cookie-sorting contests to see who can fill a case of cookies with sorted and sleeved confections the fastest. Somehow being defeated thusly makes them surrender their cookies.

Anyway, the battle mode itself is rather interesting and worth taking a look at so that you can figure out what's going on exactly. Each side has a gauge with 25 ticks on it, and every time you clear a line of cookies it will fill up by one point. Next to this is a fuse that will slowly burn down until you clear a line, ending your game if it completely runs down.

As you clear lines of cookies, Yoshi cookies will start to appear. Yoshi cookies are cleared the same as any other kind of cookie and give you another notch on your gauge, but they also have an interesting side effect. Under each character's portrait, you'll see a line specifying a target ("P1" or "COM" ) and an effect. Effects are varied and can be set upon either player regardless of who triggered it, but a helpful X or O will flag the condition offered to let you know if it is to your advantage or disadvantage to trigger it. The target and effect will shift randomly roughly every five seconds of control that player has over their field. This basically means that when things are clearing on your side of the field, the effect and target won't randomly shift on you.

The effects include:

+/-: Adds or removes the specified number of ticks to the target's meter for cleared cookies.

Panic: Randomly scrambles the cookies on the target's field for several seconds, disallowing any action by that player for the duration.

Blind: Places ? Blocks over the nine cookies in the middle of the target's play field.

Slave: Grants the user control over the target's cursor. It is synchronized with the user's and all moves will be identical for the duration. This effect will also immediately wear off if a clear is made on the target's field. This is the only effect that is neither postive nor negative when the target and user are the same. You can't exactly count controlling yourself as a meaningful effect anyway.

Panic and Slave both stop the fuse and do not count against the target for the purposes of determining the time they have remaining to make a clear.

Causing chain reaction clears doesn't seem to have any effect on the actual scoring, but doing so will generally get you a lot more Yoshi cookies to work with.

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