Yoshi's Cookie (NES) Playthrough
228A playthrough of Nintendo's 1993 puzzle game for the NES, Yoshi's Cookie.
Yoshi's Cookie marks Mario's fourth starring role in an NES puzzle game, and this time, the Mushroom Kingdom's favorite plumber is moonlighting as a baker. He had already been a plumber, a construction worker, a race car driver, and a doctor, so I guess Nintendo figured that he might as well also try his hand at the culinary arts.
Mario works at a cookie factory, and it's his job to keep production moving. Cookies constantly pile into the playfield from the top and right sides, and to clear them out, Mario has to arrange cookies of the same type into rows and columns. Once the screen has been cleared, the stage ends and you can move on.
There are ten rounds to conquer, each made up of ten individual stages, and at the end of every round you are rewarded with a silly cutscene.
The gameplay is easy to come to grips with and starts out a bit slow, but you'll appreciate how simple the mechanics are when the speed ramps up in the later rounds. Yoshi's Cookie emphasizes reflexes over thinking, and before long, every stage becomes a frantic exercise in damage control. It's fun in short bursts, though as is the case in most of Nintendo's NES puzzle games, it can be a bit frustrating in the final rounds when the RNG screws you over and you end up losing through no fault of your own.
The story of how Yoshi's Cookie came to be is an interesting one. It began as an arcade game named Hermetica, but after it failed to capture any interest in a location test, developer Home Data sold the rights to Bulletproof Software. Bulletproof created a SNES port, and after seeing it, Nintendo decided to snap up the rights to create Game Boy and NES versions, and these ended up becoming Yoshi's Cookie. They then licensed rights to the Mario characters to Bulletproof, and Bulletproof reskinned the SNES version to match the theme of the 8-bit games.
And finally, there's one thing that always struck me as a bit odd about Yoshi's Cookie - its name. It's awkwardly suggestive, don't you think? I guess we should count ourselves lucky that there was never a sequel named Peach's Muffin... ew.
Mario's jazz hands are pretty funny, though.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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