Yoshi's Cookie on NES -or-

The Fat Ass Dinosaur That Snatched All My Cookies
by: Aron Deppert

When I got my first Game Boy, it came with Tetris. I also bought two more games: Yoshi's Cookie and Super Mario Land. Of the three games the one that brought me the most enjoyment, playtime, and FRUSTRATION was Yoshi's cookie. Though Yoshi and his cookies have been seen on many Nintendo systems, we will be discussing the NES version here.

This game taught me a valuable lesson: never go into business with a dinosaur, no matter how adorable he may be. In Yoshi's Cookie, Yoshi and Mario open up a cookie factory together. As the game's minimal plot unfolds, it is revealed that Mario does all the work of sliding cookies around, while Yoshi is presumably somewhere in the back, probably eating raw cookie dough. He certainly doesn't seem to be concerned with poor Mario, who is locked in a tiny box with only two levers to save their factory from certain doom.


Mario in his prison, frantically matching cookies to keep from exploding!

The gameplay is pretty simple: you slide entire rows of cookies up, down, left, or right to make either an entire row or column the same type of cookie. When you do, they slide off to the right of the screen and fill up a mysterious meter who's true (and possibly diabolical) purpose is never revealed. To clear a level you must clear the playing field of cookies, which sounds kind of difficult, but initially it is actually very simple. Yoshi's cookie lulls you into a false sense of security early on with stages that can be cleared with one or two moves. However, later on, as more types of cookies are added to your screen, more advanced tactics are needed to avoid Armageddon.

Once you clear an entire stage, you are rewarded with a cutscene of Mario rolling a cookie or two, probably to eat it. I imagine I would be pretty hungry two after sitting in a tiny, hot box for so long. Inevitably during this cutscene, Yoshi will come through and snatch one or all of Mario's cookies. The little voracious lizard's insatiable appetite can't even be stopped for his best friend.


Lurking beyond the boundaries of this screenshot is Yoshi, the evil cookie bandit!

Over the course of my life I have probably logged over 200 hours in various iterations of Yoshi's cookie, and to this day can't clear the 6th level. I haven't yet gotten frustrated to the point of wanting to never play it again, which I feel says a lot for a game this dated. If you love puzzlers, then you should check this one out for sure (especially since it's available on Virtual Console now).

Image Credit: ign.com, wii.kombo.com