There is no emulation of Kirby: Tilt & Tumblr in Ba Sing Se. Right, Kirby? Uh oh, he's hitting us with that 🤨 i don't even know why bro do that, we are progressing smoothly with no deaths whatsoever (falsehoods). Oh wait... I know these crunchy voice clips. It's when he fucking falls off a fucking cliff in the anime. No? Well, they might as well be. I'm hearing it a bit too much though. You're falling once your whole body is above a pit, which makes perfect sense, yet idk this is supposed to intensify moments of dread where your Tesla (Kirby) just doesnt control how you expect him too and he barely cheats death. Right now it's just "bruh I just died, Alexa play Astronomia 2K19". I'm not sure why that is or how to fix it, but I know how to complain about it and the customer is king I hear.

It's nice how the gist of the gameplay is both the crutch and the random hypnagogic jerk. As all good gimmick games should be. Even something as simple as deciding whether you want more stars, time bonuses, or Backloggd micro-celebrity reputation points changes everytime u jump. That aside, it's also great that it focuses on hazards rather than enemies, although both would serve similar purposes here. Great selection of bosses, Kracko, Kracko, Kracko... more like Krackhead he's always coming back for more! I can't believe we fought him a la Space Invaders, instead of being stationary you can make it close and personal, and while there's only one enemy, the arena keeps downsizing? Very cash money.

Well, that sure is something Nintendo created, their game design is all over the screen, it innovates but is also a bit archaic. I'm not sure why it's a Kirby game if they wanted to half-assess that aspect (money), they get my special thumb of disapproval! I think my time record for a death is 0.3574 seconds, luckily I had 80 lives at the end, roughly equal to the lives of 9 cats. I guess I can treat Kirby like lifestock 😂 I would never do this to my boy, rest assured. I have some integrity, worst I can do is turn him into a ball... AGAIN. This man is possessed. He gotta have gobbled up a devil fruit. But if Monkey Ball can do it, why not Kirby? Jokes aside, I did not expect such finely tuned slope physics on Game Boy, but if I've ever come across any befor, I simply forgor.

Gang please standby I think we need to confirm whether this has too many gimmicks. For 2 hours and 28 levels, I think we got the right amount. I don't wanna see another cloud going through all the cos and the sin. It put me through all the stages of grief in non-chronological order. The timeline is disrupted. 𝓪𝓫𝓸𝓻𝓽 fellas.

Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is a perfect toy.

A toy is not a bad thing for a video game to be, it's not a bad thing to be at all. While a certain type of person will drown themselves in sobriety, the reality is that the joy of play is not only a worthwhile positive experience, it is a constructive one. A toy is a piece of art that informs and prepares us for other art. Kirby is in one sense an early exploration of the possibilities of now formalized gyroscope-based control methods, and in another sense the most fully-featured and high-concept game of the "Pigs in Clover" type. A perfect example of how primitive and romantic art are two sides of a single coin largely informed by the flow of time and changes in technology.

This isn't just a game where you lead a ball through a maze. The ball is a character with a voice and a personality, and the stakes of their journey are at a cosmic scale. The game asks, what would it be like for gravity to drag this "ball" through sand? What would it be like for it to glide through water, to pop it up into the air with a flick of the wrist? What would it be like to steer a raft or manipulate a cloud through the sky? No other game of this type that I have ever played has payed so much consideration to the eccentricities of the actual activity of rolling a ball, and nearly all other games of this type shed any kind of whimsy in favor of being a literal digital recreation of the original wooden toys that inspired them.

Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble has space shooter segments. It has a shooting gallery that uses much more typical, modern gyro-aiming. It has a hurdle race wherein the player jolts their GameBoy to jump. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is like if the Wii Remote was designed for only a single game, and that game was the best possible version of both Wii Sports and Skyward Sword in a single package. Gimmicks aren't bad unless they're put somewhere they don't belong or aren't utilized to their full potential, and Kirby puts its novel input method to perfect use.

This game has possibly the best 8-bit artwork that Kirby ever received, its certainly the best looking of the GameBoy entries in the series. While much of the soundtrack is from the Dreamland games, its original pieces are some of the best chiptunes that the GameBoy ever squealed out. While classic characters like Kracko and Waddle Dee make their appearances, the game also has various new funny little fellows; I especially like the robots and ghosts that appear in the boss stages.

There's all kinds of interesting and tactile gameplay quirks here. Repeatedly bouncing off of the pinball-style bumpers will put the player in an invulnerable state, and many of the game's secrets are hidden under objects that can only be destroyed while in this state. The game has a number of segments where the player is on some kind of floating platform, but even when the platform moves automatically as in most platformers, the player's tilting can influence the speed of these and other objects in the game world. The floor of the play area is littered with collectable tiles which can be flipped by the player to either reward them with more points towards their score, or more seconds towards their time limit.

And the cartridge is pink!!! How cool is that?!?!?!

I’m going to be honest here, this review isn’t legitimate. I normally don’t like to review games as I played it with a hack that improves the experience because I feel like it makes the review invalid in my mind. It’s fine if others do it but for me, it just makes me feel bad. I made an exception with this game. If you don’t know, there’s a hack that lets you play with the d-pad and buttons for the whole game. It’s not perfect but thanks to this, I got to enjoy a game I probably would have never done before.

This game has some fun level design but I do feel like it does repeat some ideas a little too much along with repetitive themes. For a game with 32 stages, it could be a bit better. What is here though is pretty fun and probably due to the hack, it was a pretty easy adventure. There’s even some fun minigames here like the one where you can make Kirby drive off a cliff and die, that’s hilarious. Once you 100% the game, you have to play the whole game again but it’s a little harder and those red stars you need for 100% are in the exact same areas which feels a bit lazy. I was surprised at how well thought out the level design was and how it never really felt dull and even at times feels kind of smart with the placement of obstacles. I do wish the bosses were better though with how it’s normally supposed to be controlled, I get why they’re the way they are.

I don’t really have too much to say about my playthrough but I enjoyed what was there even with the issues and I do wish 100% did more than just be like “wow you did perfect” because that took like 5 hours. Just try not to do it in one sitting and you'll be fine. The game is on NSO if you wanna try it with the Gyro controls but I probably will just stick to this hack even if it’s not the intended way to play the game.

Oh my god. This is a game that seems really cool and neat but I have absolutely no idea if this would have been better on like, a theoretical backlit game boy where it would feel less sensitive and therefore not quite as bad as it does. Maybe I should try and fix my gyro sensor but honestly it’s way too much of an ungodly nightmare to control for me that I just found myself getting frustrated and wanting to throw my Switch at the wall, which is absolutely not the feeling you want from a Kirby game.

Sorry Kirb. This is a miss from me buddy. I feel like rating it lower would be unfair considering I feel like it’s probably pretty competent if you do gel with this kinda game but boy I don’t.

In this game Kirby can't float on his own so he dies when falling on the edges of the map.

I played this on my phone to try to come close to the original experience with the motion controls. Man this game gets frustrating quick, but it's so cute and it's really polished.

I won't finish it as I can't take a whole game with these controls.

Finally, after all these years, I have now played and beaten every (non BS Satellite) Kirby game! I don't like emulating Kirby games I haven't played before, so I'm thankful this was put on NSO as I didn't have the $250 to shell out for a physical copy like I did with SFC Super Star Stacker.

Kirby's last ever 8-bit adventure sees him curling up into a ball for most of the game for the first time, with you tilting the wheel to move him around. He's a little slippery though, so you've got to be careful which can be a bit annoying when the game asks for you to be precise.

This is also the second game in the series where Kirby is voiced, and the last game where he would be until Return to Dream Land. Since it's on the GBC the audio is super crunched, but honestly there's a charm to that which I like and I admire when devs go that extra mile even if it isn't always perfect. It's just re-used samples from Kirby 64 and Smash 64 which is a little disappointing but I gotta admit I smiled at the KIRBY TILT N TUMBLE on the title. Just wish King Dedede was voiced too that would have been rad.

The levels feel like Kirby's traction was a bit better in development, as one touch of the wrong thing will send him to the other side of the earth. It's only really bad in a few levels which are scattered (the difficulty curve feels off for some reason). My only true complaint with the controls is that shaking the console to jump was not a well thought out idea, as it gets really hard to jump and control your direction at the same time. That really should have just been a button. It makes simple things like jumping on a static cloud tough.

The minigames are solid, I wish two of them didn't just use tilt functionality as a cursor but at least one's a shooting gallery and the other is Simon Says so they're different enough.

The levels themselves however are really creative and took full advantage of the control scheme in their design. No idea overstays its welcome (except the bosses, I do wish that the Watchers were used way less often and they had one or two more unique ones) and the level gimmicks all get their fair share of use. A few don't succeed, but most of them do.

The graphics are top notch and filled with cute animations, and the soundtrack's original songs are solid. As for remixes I wish they branched out of Kirby's Dream Land as I'd love to hear a GB arrange of Gourmet Race or at least the verse of King Dedede's theme that was added in Kirby Super Star in 8-bit, but these are the sacrifices you have to make for fitting Kirby's voice I guess. My only other audio complaint is that the Balloon song starts over every time you grab the power up rather than continuing to play it during the loop.

My journey with Kirby isn't over, as I still have some games I need to 100%, including this one which its requirements sound like a pain in the ass, but I know I'll eventually do it (but maybe with a no-gyro controls mod) and hey, maybe it'll be cheaper at some point and I can own it too!

You know, in hindsight, I should have known better. A game purely reliant on gyro controls for your movement of a ball around many narrow courses where you can (and DEFINITELY WILL) fall off the track. I get it, Nintendo has always loved experimenting with motion controls. As another review here suggested, maybe this would actually be better on the actual Gameboy with less responsive gyro capabilities so it would be easier to handle. As it stands however on the Switch, it is far too easy to send Kirby off a cliff or over a jump at ever so slightly the wrong angle.

Despite being a utterly frustrating experience, it does still get a couple of points for effort. It is still well made, and it looks pretty good. While most of the boss fights are reskins of each other, the final one was pretty enjoyable at least. As another virtue of being a GameBoy game, it also has some positively CRUNCHY audio (especially on Kirby's lines) so be prepared to hear some garbled screams or even drowning(!) sound effects that sound straight out of the GameBoy speakers.

Overall, I recommend you do not play this. But if you absolutely must (perhaps out of a love for Kirby), I recommend being prepared to abuse the NSO rewind features if that's how you're playing it.

As a Kirby: Canvas Curse enjoyer, this was another hit for me! Like, if you can count on anything it’s the Kirby series utilizing a motherfuckin’ peripheral. I’m a sucker for cool cartridges, and I’ve always eyed this game on eBay in hopes my copy of WarioWare Twisted would have a buddy. Lucky for me this got added to the NSO Game Boy player pretty quickly, and it’s a great addition because it utilizes, 20+ years on, an under-utilized Nintendo peripheral: the freakin’ joy-cons!

Although the game definitely is clunkier on the Switch than I’d imagine it’d be on a Game Boy Color, shaking around the entire machine in handheld mode is a bit much, but with modern motion controls, the game was really smooth to play. It’s Kirby’s Super Monkey Ball, but instead of you moving around a board within a 3D space, the Game Boy is the board and real life is the 3D space. It’s a really interesting approach to handheld gaming; the way a console can be free floating, and the screen is not tied down by wires or weight.

The game is also very fair. It’s so easy to have a physics game like this be so frustrating, and this game can be, but it’s also fair. Levels are short because the playtime is lengthened by you replaying the same tough sections over and over. I often found that once I got over certain humps, my player instincts told me that there was going to be so much left, only for the goal to be within reach. One would also think ‘game over’s would be frequent, but this game gives out a lot of lives. It’s easy to get 1ups, but not too easy. At least for me, it felt like I was getting a very balance and proportional amount of extra lives based on how many times I needed to try a level. I only did get a ‘game over’ on a very, very tricky boss that I was not being patient enough to figure out.

To some, these games may seem like gimmicks, but also, when you look at the entire Kirby series, these games are kind of a big part of our favorite little pink sphere! This, Canvas Curse, Epic Yarn, Kirby games have a real knack for having fun with a console’s whole thing. This game has a lot of charm and works amazing for an early motion-control-cartridge game. Has a lot of really great Kirby sprite work, too!

I'm very happy Nintendo has put this out officially. As a big emulation buff, getting their quirkier titles to run on a PC or Portable Emulation machine was always more trouble than its worth so I'm glad I have a way to play this game, for the most part, as it was intended and I hope this continues with Yoshi Topsy Turvy and especially WarioWare Twisted.

The game itself benefits greatly from coming with something I pay for anyway, because I wouldn't have bought this by itself. Its more a novelty albeit one I had a decent amount of fun with for the brief time I played it. The idea well runs pretty dry in the second half as a lot of the levels feel similar, and 5 of the 8 bosses are the same thing on different arenas.

Ok this rating may seem ridiculous, but I cannot stress enough just HOW MUCH FUN this game is on the Switch. The tilt controls work perfectly, and the level design takes full advantage of the game's main concept. It never gets stale, as so many fresh ideas are thrown in throughout to mix things up. It's so much more than just a gimmick. I hope this game's average rating improves in the future. I highly recommend this overlooked game. If you like the ball-rolling levels from Mario Galaxy, you'll like this game just the same.

As a kid I had Yoshi Topsy Turvy for the Gameboy Advance, which was a solidly mediocre game where the gyroscopic controls really felt like a gimmick. So I went into this with low expectations, but was pleasantly surprised to find a really solid game. It reminded me a lot of playing with those wooden marble labyrinths as a kid. The gameplay is simple but solid, with a handful of little optional challenging sections to get the collectables. This is probably way easier to play on the switch than it was on the Gameboy Color though, what with having to bend around to still be able to see the screen and all.