Nintendo Games are Tough
October 29, 2026 | 1m
And incidentally, adorable.
I've been replaying The Legendary Starfy lately. It's a game I had a lot of fun with when I was younger, one of those cuter Nintendo titles for the DS (a console with a very special place in my heart).
For anyone who hasn't played it - or played it all the way through - there are massive spoilers ahead.
...
You've been warned.
In short, the game is about a yellow starfish who lives in the sky and, after winning a cosmic game of catch, proceeds to deliberately lose a game of rock-paper-scissors. Also, he fights a lobster he previously cooked. Which is the part I'm trying to get back to.
For some context, the game is a 2D sidescroller with levels split across various stages. The secret final stage is a series of time trials where you have to go through places that look like the previous stages' locations as fast as you can. Once you complete all the levels in that stage, you get to fight the secret final boss of the game.
There's just one problem.
Those levels are insanely difficult to finish within the time limit. I've tried a few of them several times and only managed to reach the end after the time I was going for.
Normally, I'd just use cheat codes for this sort of nuisance, but there don't seem to be any for stopping the timer in this stage. There is one for changing the map you visit when you go through a door, which would be rather helpful, except it's in a format I can't use with my software.
I don't even know how I managed to complete this stage the first time, to be honest. I guess my skills were sharper then. It has been a while since I've played it.
I also recently discovered the Kirby games and have been playing one of them in my free time. I haven't gotten quite that far with it, but I can say with all confidence that it's just as tough as Starfy - and just as cute to boot.
I have a gripe with that one too, in that I heavily dislike mandatory use of motion controls. But that's a story for another day.
In regard to the title of my blog post, yes - I am aware that water is wet. It's probably just as obvious as my taste in games. And for anyone wondering how one wins a game of catch, the ball was a moon and the other player a bad guy. Guess where the ball landed.