[A-Z Games] Y: Yoshi's Island

5 (Five).

Between 1985 and 1995, Nintendo released five proper, console, Mario games - and Yoshi's Island was the first to not be numbered such. It seems faintly ludicrous that the king of gaming was so infrequently used at that time and that is probably why we all have such fond memories of the games. Super Mario Bros did not really have a proper sequel^[1] until, bizarrely, 3 on the NES. Super Mario Bros 3 was, like Super Mario Bros, a genre defining piece and even 25 years later, a lot of the ideas within it are retained in modern games. After this, the numbering method went a little awry - Super Mario 4 is actually the launch title for the Super Famicom, Super Mario World^[2] and is called it on the front cover although this seems to have been forgotten by most. Yoshi's Island is subtitled Super Mario World 2 and so, it seems, the practice of giving Mario games on different hardware different names was coined.

Yoshi's Island sees you inhabit a world of Yoshis which is a wonderful, pastel coloured world made up of hand drawn loveliness. This was the first time I really remember a game, a blockbuster game, feeling like a conscious style decision had been made. I know this is not actually true, but the move to realism was definitely afoot - although it was really a move to 3D CG. Just before Yoshi returned, Donkey Kong had also returned in Donkey Kong Country. Rare (who would later create Goldeneye) created a 2D game that looked and felt like it was 3D by using sprites created by 3D computer graphic modelling rather than hand crafted per sprite. It was a popular look and the game itself was a huge success^[3] and so there was internal pressure to mimic the look in a true Super Mario game.

That pressure was not enough to actually bear fruit in 1995 and instead, Nintendo stuffed some special Super FX chips^[4] into a cartridge to be able to squeeze some more modernity out of the Super Nintendo. The previous, "big" title with a Super FX chip was Starfox which enabled polygons to make a 3D world on a 16-bit console but this was a game that used a 2D engine with effects.
The game itself drew upon the Mario heritage to create a complete platforming package where Yoshi is transporting a baby Mario through the levels but there was a slight variation to the Mario blueprint as there was also a shooting element. Yoshi could eat enemies and then lay an egg which you could then throw at objects. This was used to open switches, collect objects and, of course, attack. It changed the style a little and felt a little impure, to me. At the same time, the collectibles were nice and clear and so there was good reason to revisit levels - something that was more important in an age of saved games meaning that you did not have to replay earlier levels (though warps existed to jump through worlds in even Super Mario Bros).
The mid-90s were a real point of inflexion for the industry though, and this joy of a game - made with love and huge backing sold merely well. Four million sales is not bad at all, but this was after the 9 million selling Donkey Kong Country and the release of the Sony Playstation (with the jaw-dropping Ridge Racer. Change was coming (or had come) - and cartoon graphics were not the future. There were plenty of factors behind those changes, but they would lead to a very different marketplace and, eventually a very different Nintendo^[5] - and also a very different Mario lineage. The next true Mario was Super Mario 64 launching on the Nintendo 64 and showcasing almost everything that made Nintendo masters of that craft - and crucially it was in 3D both in visual and gameplay terms. Nintendo would still make 2D Mario games - it is just that they would be much, much closer in style to Donkey Kong Country with a pseudo 3D CG look that was fairly consistent with the real 3D Mario games - even down to the faintly annoying "It'sa me!" voices. The "New Super Mario Bros." series of games, debuting on the Nintendo DS, have been very successful with the 3D look but I do feel that they look a little charmless. The gameplay remains as compelling and charming as ever, and it is gameplay that counts, right?
Yoshi's Island, in the end, pointed to a future that never quite was, but in the post 3D world, it has a look that is still charming and often alluded to in the way that so many games now look - especially in the indie scene.

3 other Y titles that might be interesting:
Ys - A cult series of JRPGs starting in 1987. 
Yoshi's Safari - A shooting game but with cute, cartoon characters. Nintendo all over. 
Yakuza - Sega's love letter to Tokyo and both Shenmue and Virtua Fighter. The split between Japan and the rest in gaming is perfectly embodied here.

^{1. Super Mario Bros 2 as we knew it in Europe/US had a very different feel to the original game with a number of different characters as it was actually a re-skinned version of another game (with slight adjustments, read about it http://www.themushroomkingdom.net/smb2_ddp.shtml) - Doki Doki Panic. Super Mario Bros 2 in Japan was, effectively, a number of different levels using the same basic look and feel of Super Mario Bros - a sort of DLC actually.↩}

^{2. Super Mario World is probably my favourite Mario game - though there are no real Mario games that are bad - they are all sprinkled with magic dust as far as I can tell.. The A to Z is, however, a harsh method. Many people consider the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom to have been the greatest hardware of gaming (I do not agree with this actually, my favourite console is probably the PlayStation 2 - it was just at the point where art design meant more than polygons. Just.) but almost all of the great games of that time were prefixed with "Super" and so with one fell swoop, an almost entire library was discarded.↩}

<sup>3. I checked this, and it was the second best-selling SNES game - which seems quite different to my memory of the time. It sold over 8 million copies, making it more popular than even Super Mario Kart and beaten only by Super Mario World - and that was a pack-in title for many years.↩
4. Super FX chips were implemented in certain games in order to expand the capability of the Super Nintendo on a per game basis. The SNES and MD had a few games where the game cartridge itself also had features such as a built in multitap on the J-Cart or, for Virtua Racing on the MD, a "Virtua" chipset similar to the Super FX.↩
5. These changes are not really in scope for this but the N64 era made Nintendo a little more cautious in some ways and even more daring in others. They are still going, and from a developer point of view, they definitely still understand game mechanics better than most.↩</sup>