Every game needs a moment – a moment that it alone can offer. I’m thinking of the fuse block in Lumines, where you chain a single colour through a mass of blocks and then set it off and you realise that the entire game is really about laying channels of dynamite. Or the lovely corrugated rumble in WarioWare Twisted where you turn your whole GBA to send a capsule toy down a chute and into your hand. (Random examples; I played both over the weekend.)
Kirby’s Dream Buffet has that moment. It has the moment that purely belongs to Kirby’s Dream Buffet. It comes at the end of one of the races. You have battled rivals and rushed across twisting, treacherous tracks made from waffles, strips of bacon, Victoria sponge, pools of chocolate icing. You’re ahead of the pack so when you get to the finish line you can jump into the really, really big bowl of strawberries. And then? Then you spin the left stick – I think it’s the left stick; I am always swept up in the sugar rush by this point – to eat all the strawberries. Chomp chomp chomp. It’s fabulous stuff. One last strawberry ere we die!
And at first this moment is just one bit of business in a game made of bits of business. At first, in fact, you don’t so much play Kirby’s Dream Buffet as exist through an onslaught of colour and antic chirpiness. Slowly, though, slowly and steadily, structure emerges. But even within the structure there is a certain headlong wildness that remains. As with a house cat, you can never entirely tame Kirby’s Dream Buffet.
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