"Kirby's Avalanche" (Super Nintendo)

A Kirby-themed "Puyo Pop" variant, featuring most of the familiar characters in the Kirby franchise. Has different levels of difficulty, along with a hidden feature when defeating the game on "Hardest" mode.

Roughly twenty years later, I'm still playing this game. And yes, I'm playing on my Super Nintendo originally bought back in 1993 which works like a beauty.

You don't need an introduction: Kirby is just awesome, and a force not to mess with. King Dedede doesn't care though as long as he settles the score against Kirby, but this time it's different. Instead of the old-fashioned face-to-face combat, this challenge requires a puzzle-laden skill: Avalanche! No, not the mountainous disaster during skiing/snowboarding, and no, not the NHL hockey team the Colorado Avalanche—it's a Tetris-like puzzle game where color-coded 'blobs' must match 4 pieces in order to clear your board and trigger boulders dropping against your opponents! It's not as hard as it sounds.

If you've played the timeless hit Tetris then there's no reason you can't play a game like this. Only difference is the blobs must match with their rightful color—minimum of 4—to cause them to explode....in a cute way. Matching them, depending how you stack the blobs, will likely trigger a boulder to be dropped on your opponent's board. When that boulder drops, it becomes an obstacle that occupies space on your board. In order to clear that boulder, or boulders, you MUST get blobs near it to match and explode, and the boulder will disappear and you can continue on with the game. Just trigger one boulder? Since you got a little gist in matching the blobs, then comes your creative muscles in building what's called a "Chain Reaction." A Chain Reaction involves building a stack of blobs in a way where the moment one blob gets a stack to explode, the non-matching colored blob will drop onto the next stack, thus exploding those stacks, and so on and so forth. Even when you first start playing, you may build a chain reaction without knowing it. However, play this game a few times and you'll be a whiz at building them. Now, when you do, you'll hear a [female] voice saying "Yes!"; If you build multiple chain reactions, you'll hear the voice say, "Excellent!" All that is to add more flare to the adrenaline of the game.

There are two voices you'll hear during the game: male and female, where the male is the enemy's chain reaction and the female is your gameplay. For the male in reaction to your opponent's chain reactions, he says:

First reaction: "Cool!"
Second reaction: "Alright!"
Third reaction: "Take that!"
Fourth reaction: "Massive!"
Fifth reaction: "Avalanche!"

That male voice will be the bane of your game playing. Playing this game for over 20 years, my opponent was able to get to "Avalanche!" once (....ONCE!), and yeah, that loss was so bad I was shaking in disgusted defeat. If I remembered right, I lost that crazy match against either
Heavy Mole
or Kracko—two opponents are grew up loathing on this game, along with Paint Roller to an extent. Believe me, if you make room for these enemies to build up chain reactions, it'll be the worst mistake you've ever done. Those enemies are psychotic.

Alright anyway, onto YOUR chain reaction voices. They are as follows:

First reaction: "Yes!"
Second reaction: "Excellent!"
Third reaction: "Watch out!"
Fourth reaction: "Here it comes!"
Fifth reaction: "Avalanche!"

I've gotten to "Avalanche!" several times, and when you're in the zone, you go full throttle. Crushing down your opponents with nothing but boulders is the best feeling in the world, and with enough practice, you'll see what I mean. What if you have a sixth reaction? Nothing, no voice is said; You very much kicked your opponent in the throat, in other words, you're on fire.

After defeating an opponent, it shows your time and how many bonus points you've accumulated. If you defeat an opponent and it took more than 125 seconds, you don't get bonus points. The least amount of time you crush your opponents, the more points you get. Sadly I wasn't able to record it on video, but I defeated Squishy in 21 seconds. How? Even if a board isn't full, when the third column from the left gets filled to the top, the player loses. Since that little octopus had some blobs stacked on the third column, that became my line of offense into splashing the eight-legged crumb bum with boulders. And that was how I defeated him in a short nick of time. What's the fastest time you defeated an opponent?

As for the music, it's amazing. I can't praise HAL enough for such awesome soundtracks. There is one and it's during the character roll-call at the end of the game and during the 2-player competition. I love the soundtrack so much I began playing it in my car. Some of you are laughing, but I'm serious. Here's the soundtrack I'm talking about:



On the options menu, there is a difficulty setting. Try beating ALL opponents on HARDEST mode, even the ones in the Training Levels without losing. Stream it live so we all could see. Me? I was only able to do it once but that's it.

I've played against my cousins and my sister, and even at the hardest hard levels, I've honed my craft with this game. I love this game so much that I've mastered it. With that said, I welcome ANY challenger willing to go up against me in a game of Avalanche (vandalism of property as a result of losing will not be tolerated). If you're serious, let me know and the winner will win....a pack of beer? Money? Let's set something up!

As for the voices, the male talent is named Michael Kelbaugh and the female voice is named Robin Krouse. If either one of you are reading this, we love to interview you on our website!

Overall, this fun, simple, yet extremely challenging game is a timeless hit. Even today, it poses high-end competition that a lot of gamers wouldn't mind taking up. Sure, it's a re-hash of a popular puzzle game, and a variant of the Japanese hit Puyo Puyo/Puyo Pop but with Kirby characters. Nevertheless, it's a game you know you'll play over and over again especially when you're pushing to perfect your Avalanche skills. Highly recommended!

Kris Caballero

Founder and operator of KCU Network, Kris has been writing since he managed a personal blog made back in late 2005. Officially retired from video production and going back to the computer sciences, Kris enjoys studying Math, Quantum Computing, playing old video/DOS games, and listening to sports radio.

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