Back when I was a kid, there was a company called LodgeNet. LodgeNet provided a very unique and very strange gaming service; sometimes, when you checked into a hotel room, right below that big, bulky CRT nestled into a shitty wooden cabinet, there would be a controller hardwired into the TV. In its earliest days, it would have been a Super Nintendo controller. But that was before my time, and before LodgeNet really started to take off as a company. When I was around, it was a Nintendo 64 controller. These controllers were modified to have a little LodgeNet button pak fixed into the top middle part of the controller, letting you flick through menus to order games to play, which would then be streamed from a modified Nintendo 64 somewhere in the hotel directly to your TV. Much like the premium, pay-per-view hotel channels, these were premium, pay-per-hour Nintendo ROMs. $6.95 got you one hour of playtime, which meant that I was expressly forbidden from so much as ever touching the controller by my parents. They were completely right to do so; my folks didn't have a lot of money, and we only ever went to a hotel twice in my entire childhood. Both times, though, the LodgeNet Nintendo 64 controller would always be there. Sitting under the TV. Coaxing me in. Begging me to try it out, all for the low, low price of $6.95. I wanted to play it so badly. I'd wait until my parents left me in the room by myself to hurriedly open up the menu and browse the games on display, amazed at how many titles there were.

One of those games was Kirby 64.

I don't know what it was about it that drew me to it, at first. I have to guess that it was just because I hadn't seen a 3D Kirby game before. I'd played games like Pokemon Stadium and Super Smash Bros. at friends' houses before, so those weren't novel. But I'd never seen or heard anything about Kirby 64. I hadn't even realized it existed. Time went on, and I eventually forgot about it. Later in life, I found out that most people thought it was kind of middling. A lot of professional critics gave out 7s at the time (which to this day remains one of the lowest scores any publication is willing to give to a giant like Nintendo), and friends that I made as an adult weren't too hot on it. As far as I'd been told, Kirby 64 was fine, at best.

Nobody told me this was the best Kirby game.

I'm stunned. Seriously, all of these years, and I never once bothered to check it out because nobody ever seemed that excited by it. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best Kirby has ever been, just ahead of Super Star Ultra.

There's so much personality on display here. Everything looks like it was pulled together into a little diorama. Underwater caves block the camera with rocky walls, leaving only the gaps between them visible. A portion of the mall level has Kirby wandering through department stores as you view him through the glass windows outside, in a section that looks remarkably like he's strutting through someone's dollhouse. There's a toy box feel to the aesthetic of this game that really helps to sell a lot of these light, funny cutscenes. Kirby's got the greatest little fat boy waddle I've ever seen. The faces he makes are unparalleled. Watching him cry when I fuck up the picnic minigame and leave him with nothing to eat while everyone around him chows down is both incredibly funny and incredibly sad.

It also gets bizarre. O2 is a notorious example, but that fight tends to overshadow a lot of the smaller, stranger subtleties that are here. Whenever Kirby gets the Cutter ability, he peels his face off and flings it like a boomerang, making his body turn into this weird little egg shape that can only hop around while you wait for your head to come back. The clamping spike arms he gets look like The Thing meeting Yoshi's Story. Everything that's adorable is matched by everything that's weird, and it creates this wonderfully dream-like tone where you're making Kirby constantly drift from place to place, shifting and morphing through all of these different ability combos just to see what pink amalgamation he ends up turning into this time.

The power combos are an inspired evolution of the copy ability, and one that I'm amazed hasn't ever come back to the series in the twenty years since. They're definitely marred by the movement system — Kirby is a bit too sluggish for his own good — but it's still more than interesting conceptually, and the execution here feels like they nailed the idea on their first attempt. Everyone is going to come away from this with one power combo that they loved more than any other, and they're all going to be different answers. I was especially fond of the drill and the fridge, but there's a lot to experiment with, and the game gives you ample opportunity to try just about everything out in the very short time it takes to beat it. Locking the true final boss behind collecting all of the crystal shards was more than a little annoying and feels like something made to pad out game time, which is something that really wasn't needed.

This is the most "Kirby" that Kirby has ever been. I'm surprised that Sakurai had almost nothing to do with this, because the rest of the team at HAL seem to have understood Kirby better than any of the other games in the series have. He's a little pink man who goes on adventures with his friends, mows through enemies with overpowered attacks he stole from them, and then he kills God. It rules.

Miracle Matter was harder than college.