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It seems as though this Kirby game doesn’t have 2-player co-op, so we’re back to swapping P1 for what we call “levels and lives”. Neither of us could make it through a scrolling section, and we got our first game over of the game. The first couple of levels roll by pretty quickly, and then on the third one we were caught. We’re actually strapped for lives for the first time since we started but it’s no big deal. This one has an odd woody theme going on and it’s filled with booby traps. We took out the boss of this World, and headed straight into Neo Star. Besides, it’s like training, so this early stuff should be a breeze when we come back to it. It feels good to be putting down some levels and moving the game along. Mayhap’s we should break the streak, and work on collecting the collectables? Nah. We’re having more trouble getting each of the Crystals, and are coming to the realization that we’re basically going to need to play this whole game over again.
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We missed a Crystal (even though it was in plain sight!) and took down the boss without too much trouble.Īqua Star was next, and we found out that Cutter and Spark gives you a LIGHTSABER! Needless to say, we kept that power for as long as we could. It took a little bit to get back in the swing of things (especially after all this twitchy Halo 4 action), so we managed to die a couple of time right off the bat before we got back into platformer mode. We left off just after 2-2, so we headed to Rock Star and pumped up Course 3. I think a lot of the Crystals that we’re missing have more to do with having the right power to break blocks, which we never seem to have. We did, however, manage to score all three in one run-through of two of the levels, so that felt kinda nice. I guess we’re pretty much resigned to doing most of these levels over again, but it’ll be easier just ‘cleaning up’ spare Crystals, instead of trying to do all three in one go. We found a couple more fun power combinations, like Double-Bomb (enemy-seeking missiles) or Double-Ice (giant snowball), and missed a couple of really obvious crystals, completely by accident. Shiver Star was up next, with suitably ice-themed levels. We’re still not doing that well on Shard count, but we’ve decided to keep going instead of backtracking now. Amazing what a short break will do sometimes, right? The boss took us a couple tries, but once we got his pattern down, it was a simple matter. Why do all these bosses have second forms?Still on Neo Star, we took another run at the fourth course and beat it with no effort. That turned out to be the trick and netted us what might have been an infuriating search. To get into the shaft, we had to blast open a door with the Animal Buddy combo, and that gave me the idea to use Rick the Hamster’s climbing ability from Kirby’s Dream Land 3. We found a use for the Animal Buddy combo we found last time though: at one point, we had to go straight up a long vertical shaft, but it was too far to fly (since they finally put a cap on Kirby’s flight ability in this one). Pretty much the same stuff that’s always annoying, carrying a poor ability combo with you until the end of a level. Most of the leftover Shards were pretty easy, with a few teeth-grinders mixed in there. Also, instead of going through beating the last boss twice, we opted to skip the ‘fake’ ending and start over again to accumulate missed Shards. Ripple Star as a whole was actually pretty easy, much more reminiscent of Pop Star than Neo or Shiver Stars, which have been the peak of difficulty in this game.
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Knowing that we were going to have to go back and redo levels to collect Crystals, we put a concentrated effort into getting all the Shards in the world and managed to succeed, with only one exception. That is not a healthy Star…Anyway, we headed into Ripple Star and cleaned up there.