Wario Land

[A Black Falcon]

VBWL is so good... I've almost finished Hard Mode (just beat the second to last boss). Lost 15 lives on that boss... it's easy to get lots of lives in between bosses, but the bosses are tough in hard mode. On the last boss, I think I was down to one or two lives before I beat it... I spent some time collecting lives after that one and entered this boss prepared with 50 lives. :D

Anyway, just one more level and one more boss left... the game is really, really good. If only it'd been longer, and the VB hadn't died so fast... :(

I've also been replaying Wario Land II for GB recently (I have the GBC version of course, and originally played it on GBC, but the cart erased itself at some point (though my new save is still there), so I decided to play it on Super Game Boy, to see the color pallets and borders. I still find the game somewhat infuriatingly annoying and un-fun... addictive and compelling, sure, but incredibly frustrating and annoying to play. WLII may have far more content than either of the older titles, but it just doesn't have that special feeling of greatness that Wario Land 1 and VBWL have. Though it is good enough to halfway make me wish that I'd picked up Wario Land 3 at some point... oh well. Going from WLII to VBWL, it's very, very clear which is the better game. It's not Wario Land II.

Okay, some of that comparison is unfair because the GB and GBC are far inferior consoles power-wise to the Virtual Boy (GBC came out 3 1/2 years after VB and is far behind it in technical power...), and certainly the great visuals are part of what makes VBWL such a good game, but the great gameplay is just as much a part of that.