Kirby's Avalanche

Kirby's Avalanche is one of the strangest chapters in the history of this Nintendo-cherished franchise, because it isn't actually an original Kirby title. The game was created by reskinning the Japanese hit Puyo Puyo from studio Compile – Nintendo at the time decided that a falling-block puzzle game with colorful gelatinous creatures wouldn't succeed in the Western market without a face players already knew, so it turned it into a story set in the world of Dream Land, while Puyo Puyo itself had to wait a while longer for a major international release under its own name.

The mechanics themselves remained untouched: the player arranges pairs of colored blobs to form chains of four or more matching colors, which then disappear. The longer the chain of combos, the more "garbage" gets sent onto the opponent's board – and it's precisely the battle structure, with Kirby gradually facing off against King Dedede and other characters from his own game series, that gives this game a different identity than the Japanese original or the later international release of Puyo Puyo under its own name. The graphics and music were reworked to match the style of Kirby's universe, including characteristic character portraits during battles and quips that comment on how the fight is going.

The game offers both a progressive story mode, in which the player fights through a gallery of opponents up to the final King Dedede, and a direct two-player duel on a single screen – it was precisely this multiplayer mode that made the game a popular choice on the Super Nintendo, in an era when falling-block puzzle titles were among the most common social genres on consoles. The title remained exclusive to the SNES and was never ported to another platform in this particular form.

Why play: Kirby's Avalanche will appeal to players who enjoy fast puzzle duels in the style of Tetris Attack or Puyo Puyo and want to see how Nintendo managed to wrap another company's game in its own brand – the battles are clear, snappy, and still work today as an entertaining challenge for two players on one screen.