Undertale!

Not too long ago, back around the first full week of this month actually, I finally got around to downloading a game I've heard a bunch about from various friends -- first my sister (if you remember reading "there's a lesbian fish-monster" on my random quotes list a while back... that was part of her description of some of the characters in the game XD), and later several of my friends from college, all highly recommended it, and eventually I broke down and looked up some random bits of things about it (...and encountered spoilers, but not too many spoilers, and half the time I didn't know what was a real spoiler and what was someone's weird fanfiction since there's so much stuff out there, so even some of the actual already-seen things still came as a surprise when they really happened in the game) and then finally, when I had money to spare, bought and downloaded the game.

And last week I finished my first complete playthrough of the game.

Soooo... this is going to be a post going over what I thought of the game! There may be spoilery things here and there, for those who haven't played yet, but the "general stuff" sort of thing at the top before I go into the "what I did in my first playthrough" part should be relatively un-spoilery, with occasional minor things scattered throughout.

Overall -- probably my favorite part of the game is the characters, their interactions, and the writing in general.  There is just so much silliness packed into these little text-boxes.

This isn't actually a thing that happens in the game, but it could've been. XD

Weird silly character designs all over the place, too -- a lot of the NPCs kinda look like something you'd find scribbled in the margins of my worksheets from college, actually.  Sometimes they remind me of the weird awkward ones that I look back and go "what the heck was this supposed to be??" when I find them -- the sort of diamond-stick-figure things in one area and the weird stretched-out guy staring at a donut, completely freaked out by how much he paid for it, both come to mind.  One odd thing I noticed is that the game seems to be really good at taking a character trait that you might not be fond of in people and then making a character who has that trait really, really likeable somehow.  Papyrus is always bragging about how great he is, but he's so funny that it doesn't bug you and there's definitely more to him than just "funny skeleton" even if that's the most obvious part.

This also doesn't actually happen in the game.  But there's Papyrus in it. XD

Sans talks in all-lowercase, which usually comes across as having a sort of nasty dismissive tone when real people do it on the internet, and yet he doesn't really give me that impression -- he's more of an "all lowercase because he's just too lazy to use the shift key" sort of guy.  Asgore is the guy who kickstarted the whole "kill every human who falls down" thing (...we've all said stuff we regretted when we got pissed off sometime, right? well... that's his regrettable angry moment) but he's not really a villain at all, and I ended up really feeling bad for the guy by the time I met him and got to know a little about him.  Toriel's initially nice but turns out to be overprotective to an almost crazy extent... but then again, Asgore is one of the hardest fights in the game and she thinks Asgore really does want to kill all the humans (...is that why they broke up?), so it kinda makes sense that she wouldn't want seemingly helpless little kidlets going off to fight him and probably getting killed (...twice.  maybe three times.)

And here we see why Toriel uses fire magic
for cooking rather than the oven... XD

And Mettaton's a killer robot who puts you through all these sadistic game-show trap puzzle things and then tries to turn you against Alphys (...who is absurdly cute... and okay maybe the robot wasn't entirely making everything up, she was also absurdly lonely and tended toward self-loathing and people sometimes do messed-up things in that kind of situation... but I get the feeling that Mettaton was exaggerating a little, he does try to make everything super dramatic after all), but by the end of his fight I actually ended up liking the guy, especially when it turned out that he actually cares about his fans and decided that he'd rather stay down there with them than go to the surface and become even more famous if he had the chance.  And so on.  I basically ended up liking pretty much every major character and even some of the minor ones grew on me way more than expected.

...and then there's that flower, who I kinda want to strangle, especially after what he did near the end of the game.  Buuuut... yeah, overall I really like the characters in this game. XD

The music is also really great (...I kinda regret not going ahead and buying the game+soundtrack bundle when I got the game itself), and it's always nice to see a game as recent as 2015 that doesn't feel the need to throw in "3D for 3D's sake."  Seriously, it really annoys me that pretty much all the major game companies (even Nintendo has jumped face-first into the bullshit bandwagon now it seems, aside from some download-only games...) no longer make games using 2D sprite-based graphics, everything has to be 3D models now even if it looks way worse with 3D than the same game with high-quality sprites (or heck, even medium-quality sprites) would.  Look at the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games for a good example of great sprites degrading into garbage 3D as the series went on.  But yeah, while a few of the sprites are kinda awkward, overall they work really well and the characters' different facial expressions (everyone has a ton of them for their textbox-portrait graphics) and the battle sprites' animations definitely add a lot to it.

Now the more spoilery part.  Here's how things ended up going in my playthrough.  Everything was going well for a while, I was leaving the harmless critters alone (why would I kill slightly confused frogs and terrified little bug things??) and laughing my butt off at Napstablook saying "Z" out loud rather than actually snoring (I was not expecting that one, I actually cracked up and laughed out loud when the textbox mentioning that came up), and then stayed at Toriel's house for a bit.  Then came the fight with her, and I assumed based on the fact that she killed me in about 10 seconds the first time that you were supposed to fight back and (like she said before the fight) prove to her that you were strong enough to survive outside the ruins.  Was fighting, not getting killed by fireballs  this time, and then her HP got to around the 1/4 mark and I figured maybe sometime soon she'd admit I wasn't just a wimpy harmless kidlet and let me go.  No sign of change in behavior, no name turning yellow indicating you can end the fight by sparing her, so... okay, maybe I need to get her HP a little lower?  Apparently not because I attack again and out of nowhere do 300 damage rather than the 25ish I had been doing before.  I accidentally killed Toriel.  I think I actually said "No!" to the computer the moment it happened, it was completely unexpected and I really was not trying to do that.  Then Flowey shows up and tells me that he hopes I'm happy with my "choice."  His reactions when I dodged his "friendliness pellets" in the first encounter cracked me up a bit, but this... yeah, that flower got on my bad side at this point.  THAT WASN'T MY CHOICE YOU STUPID FLOWER I DIDN'T EXPECT TO GET A RANDOM SUPER-CRITICAL-HIT OUT OF NOWHERE AND KILL HER! But before I could throw a brick at him he ducks back underground and... pretty much vanishes for the rest of the game, oddly enough.  I don't think I ever encountered him again until the end.  I guess maybe he only shows up to taunt you when you accidentally (or not-so-accidentally) kill someone, since I didn't kill anyone else in my playthrough.  I was actually probably a bit overly careful not to kill anyone for a while after what happened with Toriel, to the point of hardly even using the Fight command (I think Undyne, maybe Mettaton, and Asgore might've been the only ones I actually hit, including random encounters... and Asgore didn't give me any choice.)

After that was the Snowdin area, and Papyrus and Sans' appearance.  Papyrus cracked me up.  His final sequence of attacks, with the "COOL DUDE" spelled out in bones and the humongous bone that stretched the screen just so it could fit and the dog stealing a bone and everything just cracked me up.  And how he had spaghetti hidden in his hat, and also populating his half of the fridge, and how he apparently AGES SPAGHETTI IN A BARREL before cooking it.  Is that something you can even do with pasta?  Barrel-aged pasta?  Is it like... a bunch of regular ol' dry spaghetti stuck in a barrel for days/weeks and then pulled out to be cooked, or does he make his own from scratch and then dries it in the barrel, or what?

Anyway... after that was the Waterfall area where you are being stalked by a lesbian fishmonster.  It's also populated by a bunch of other random critters, and is apparently the home of Napstablook who owns a snail ranch (somehow I avoided stumbling across any mention of this during my pre-playing-the-game poking around, too.  I guess Napstablook's goofy moments aren't ones that get posted all over the internet over and over.)  I had an armless yellow thing follow me around for a while, carried a seemingly pointless umbrella (...was there a point to the random stash of umbrellas?), and ran into something called "Temmie" which panicked and ran away when I flexed my muscles (which also somehow summoned the horse-merman guy out of nowhere for a flexing contest.  Apparently he can hear the sound of muscles flexing from a mile away.)  Undyne -- the aforementioned lesbian fishmonster -- apparently knew that I'd killed Toriel somehow, and apparently did not know that it was by accident, because even after I gave her water when she got all dehydrated on the lava bridge (which she chased me over while trying to kill me with spears) she never actually let me into her house or anything, not even when Papyrus suggested that all three of us hang out.  This led to another funny Papyrus line -- something along the lines of "I don't remember murderering anyone -- though I am a pretty hardcore kind of guy."  Yes, he says murderering, not murdering. XD  I really want to see whatever silly scene happens if you do get to hang out with Papyrus and Undyne, so I know I'll be doing at least one more playthrough at some point.

This is Undyne.  She suplexes huge boulders just because she can.

After Waterfall was Hotland, where the bridge located over convenient fish-dehydrating lava was found.  And also a big ol' mad scientist lab sitting right out in the open.  This was home to Alphys the adorable scientist lizardsaurus monster thing, who I'd become mildly obsessed with during the week or so leading up to me playing the game (she's just.... ridiculously cute for some reason.  I want to give her a hug. XD)  Between her and Papyrus I'd probably have a really hard time bringing myself to killing Undyne -- Papyrus and Undyne are friends of course, and then there's how Alphys has a huge crush on the fish, and I'd really rather not see her reaction to finding out that not only is her favorite fish dead but the human who she's been helping out was the one who did it.  I'm not sure if she even finds out if you do kill Undyne, though, considering that she mentioned in my run through the game that she forgot to actually watch my fight with Undyne and was going to call her to ask about it later (...and then it seems like she procrastinated a lot and didn't even do that.  Though Undyne does randomly call her, apparently to talk about the weather... except that there isn't really varying weather down there so that wouldn't be much to talk about... hmm.)  But anyway... I was not expecting Mettaton to suddenly burst through the wall of Alphys's lab for a quiz game, nor was I expecting the ridiculously rigged questions ("how many letters in Mettaton?"... and then it endlessly adds more N's to the end until they wrap around the screen.)  However, I was expecting the answer about who Alphys had a crush on -- I'd stumbled across fanart and such referencing that scene before -- and picked the fish right away. XD

Further into Hotland, there was something called "the core" which apparently is how the monsters generate their electricity.  I think it was mentioned that it had something to do with geothermal energy, but it seemed like more than that was going on there going by just how weird the place was on the inside here and there? I dunno.  Also, apparently Mettaton owns a resort hotel built into this power-plant-type structure.  Complete with food court (where I finally found out who the fast food worker cat guy I've seen pictures of was) and sketchy alley out back (where two critters with strong "like, totally" accents sold me garbage and tried to get me to bring them burgers, but then wouldn't actually take said burgers if I did.  Oh, and apparently the burgers from Mettaton's restaurant are made out of edible sequins and glitter, however that works.)  Somewhere in here there was also a Mettaton cooking show, and a spoof of Final Fantasy 6's opera house scene featuring Mettaton (in "rectangle" form) in a dress, singing about how "you're going to die... a lot... it'll suck."  This was another one of those scenes that actually made me crack up laughing out loud.  Somewhere in here there were also unexpected spiders -- I knew about Muffet, but had no idea what point in the game you actually encountered her and until I came across her spider-bake-sale stand this far in I thought she might be earlier in the game but in an area I somehow missed, for some reason.  That led to a somewhat long fight, but in the end Muffet decided to let me go because I'd bought some cider from the other spider bake sale way back at the start of the game.  After all these Mettaton encounters (...and spiders), I finally got to fight him -- well, sort of.  First I flipped a switch on his rectangle form's back and then he became his "humanoid with really long legs" form and started spontaneously dancing all over the place, and apparently trying to kick me while dropping bombs and such from the ceiling.  After a while he ended up like the Black Knight in Monty Python -- not just disarmed but dis-legged too, just sitting there as a torso attempting to bleed on me (but since he's a robot that sent electrical sparks flying everywhere which would actually be kinda dangerous.)  And then... his battery ran out, and Alphys dragged him off for repairs.  Apparently dancing on actual legs drains his power supply a lot faster than wheeling around like a demented unicycle in rectangle mode.

At some point after this Alphys's lab closed up.  Not sure what happened there, and since Alphys never gave me her phone number (she only added me on monster-Facebook) I couldn't even call to check like I could with Papyrus and... well, not Toriel since I accidentally killed her. :(  I guess she must've been busy repairing Mettaton.  Anyway... after a bit of further exploration (somewhere around this point I went back and found the Temmie Village, paid for one of their college tuition, and... saw them add some super expensive armor to the shop that I can't imagine ever affording), I went onward to the capital city (it was mostly just a background, as it turned out, since I pretty much took an elevator that skipped right to the path leading to Asgore's place.)  And... yeah, Asgore's house was pretty much an exact copy of Toriel's, all the way down to the big comfy chair.  I'm not sure if that means Toriel was the one who decided on the house layout of both houses and Asgore just never changed it, or if Asgore somehow arranged his house to look just like Toriel's house after they broke up (...did he send someone to her place to see what furniture she had just so he could get the same stuff, or what? XD)  I found a knife that described itself as being "good for chopping weeds," and it turned out that I actually got to use it for its intended purpose a bit later on.  Oh, and Sans showed up to say... well, not a whole lot, besides explaining that Flowey was full of it and it's not actually "love" that you're accumulating when you kill monsters, it's a higher level of violence -- so "LOVE" was an acronym.  I know thanks to spoilers that if you've gone around killing everyone he'll actually attack you here, but apparently my level of accidental murdereryness was acceptable (...I did get the feeling he never found out that I killed Toriel, though, since he talks about her a lot later on in the game and never implies that he knows she's dead.)


And then... Asgore.

 (...yeah, I just inserted his theme song into this post.  Honestly this may just be my favorite song from the game.)

Big ol' goat king with a great theme song and a really hard boss fight.  He smashes your Mercy button with his shicker (I knew this happened ahead of time  but seeing it in action the first time was still impressive), forcing you to either fight or talk to him... and talking doesn't seem to accomplish much.  After two or three deaths to His Goatiness, I finally manage to beat him -- I was so relieved to see that my last hit didn't actually kill him, it just knocked him down to a small sliver of HP and I still had a chance to let him live.

...well, I would have if FLOWEY hadn't shown up and killed him instead, anyway. >_<

And then Flowey got even creepier, basically turning into a Cthulhu monster (and the only full-color boss in the game -- everyone else was mostly black and white with a few colors for special effects on attacks.)  I somehow beat this thing on my second try, even though Asgore took several attempts.  And then... Flowey in his usual shape pops up on the screen again, crumpled up and weak, with the Fight/Mercy buttons and nothing but wind as the background music.

Unlike Asgore's Fight/Mercy choice (which took a split-second), it took me like 10 minutes of back and forth to decide, but eventually I decided that Flowey killing Asgore was not something I particularly wanted to forgive and used that old knife for its intended purpose and chopped some weeds.

...and immediately felt like I had probably messed up.  Immediately he goes into creepy-face mode and starts taunting you again, even up to the moment he finally gets hit and... randomly reverts to a normal non-creepy-faced flower.  (I later attempted to go back to my save file and try letting him live instead, but this just changed Asgore's final speech -- he mentioned his son's name this time -- and had him kill himself rather than Flowey doing it.  Though Flowey still showed up afterward, breaking Asgore's soul-heart-thingie and taunting me again before vanishing.  Apparently you can't fight Cthulhu Flowey again in the same save file after beating him once, which means I never saw what happens if you choose to spare him at the end.  I guess I'll have to save that for another playthrough.)

And then, the ending.  My lost kidlet (I named the main character "Fritos" just to be silly) has escaped the underground... somehow... but now Undyne is the ruler of the place, everyone thinks I was the one who killed Asgore (I guess Flowey kept himself hidden from most of the monsters...), and Undyne is training up a massive army in preparation of another war against the humans.

So... I escaped, and I can still call skeletons on the phone whenever I want... but I also have a lesbian fishmonster wanting to kill me, if she can ever figure out a way to get through the barrier.  Oops.


At first I was a little confused about why Undyne suddenly wants to kill me so badly (I mean... she knows I was nice to Papyrus, she should know that Alphys liked me, if she's been in touch with Alphys she also knows I didn't kill Mettaton, I even gave her some water when she was dehydrated!) but thinking a bit more, I'm guessing it was all because Asgore died.  She was the head of the Royal Guard after all, Asgore being dead is the absolute last thing she'd want happening.  There's no way they could've known that I didn't do it when Asgore disappeared, they just would've found him mysteriously gone and the hall leading to the barrier torn up from a fight.  Basically... it's all the freaking flower's fault.  I have to wonder if sparing him at the end changes that any, though -- I mean, I doubt he'd tell Undyne that he was the one who killed Asgore instead of the human doing it (that's probably a good way to get speared in the face), but maybe he'd at least stick around long enough that somebody might see him there when they came to investigate the king disappearing and have some suspicion that it could've been him?

I guess I must have gotten what people call a "neutral" ending, though as I've found out since then there's not just one neutral ending but a whole bunch of them depending on what you did (who you killed, who you befriended, etc.) throughout the game -- I haven't spoiler'ed myself on what the others all are, but I am aware that the reason mine turned out the way I did was because of how things went.

The Gallbastard

Well, it's been a while since I've posted a "what's going on in my life" sort of thing on here, but that's probably because it's been a while since there's been much going on in my life that would really lend itself to a blog post ("I think this girl might like me but I'm not sure if I'm just reading too much into things" and "some people at work suck" can only really be posted so many times before people probably get sick of reading them, and in the case of the work thing I'd honestly rather just forget those people exist when I'm not around them so writing about them here would be a bit counterproductive. XD)

This past month, though, has been a bit more eventful than usual.  And mostly in a bad way.  Starting shortly after my birthday (yeah, I'm 30 now, though I still look 20ish because apparently I stopped aging 10 years ago XD), I started getting sick on and off, stomach pain and sometimes even vomiting to start with.  Stomach pain one day, then it got better, then it came back even worse during my lunch break at work another day, which lead to me having to go home early (and also to me throwing up in the parking lot... and again several more times that night at my apartment.)  Over the next few days there was more stomach pain, and some new symptoms like chills/fever that had not been present before.  I ended up lying around the house watching random Youtube videos (mostly some guy playing through Pokémon ROM hacks), drinking tiny amounts of ginger ale at a time and occasionally trying to eat if I thought I might be able to keep something down.  Usually, stuff stayed down -- there was no nauseated feeling of "oh crap I'm gonna throw up" hovering over me, and when that did happen it was really sudden and not really preceded by the usual "barfy" feeling at all.  Stomach pain started to go away somewhat.  So I figured I'd try to go to work... yeah, that did not go well.  Got the chills, started shivering uncontrollably, and ended up leaving work after half an hour (shortly after throwing up back at the lockers.)  Later that night I threw up again and it was green.  And insanely acidic, like way beyond the point of normal barf.  Got in touch with my mom and we ended up going to the urgent care place in Staunton the next day, after calling several hospitals and such and finding they were all closed for the weekend.  Some checking of various things later, they thought it could be my appendix and recommended going to the hospital right away.  Nearest one was Augusta, so we went over there (after some... bizarre inability to follow directions on my mom's part... she seriously drove right by the street we were supposed to turn onto, even though she recognized the name as the one we were supposed to turn onto, because it "didn't seem like it'd been 3 miles yet."  Ugh >_<), and I ended up being put on an IV due to the fact that I was pretty dehydrated at this point.  This was actually not as weird as I was expecting; the process of having it put in was no worse than a minor shot and it just felt somewhat cold as the fluids started to go in.  And then I felt much better afterward, as the dehydration was apparently pretty bad at that point.  Speaking of things being pretty bad, I had a fever in the 102-103 range... yeah, apparently I was pretty sick a couple weeks ago.

Anyway... they did more tests -- blood, CT, and even an ultrasound on my stomach area -- and determined that while my appendix was perfectly normal (and my kidneys and liver were also in great shape), a certain other internal organ had gone bad...

...yep, it was my gallbladder, which was apparently severely inflamed on one side and full of stones.  It looks like that's been what has been causing my occasional "stomach pain, throw up, stomach hurts the rest of the night and then it goes away for a while" sickness that has been happening on and off (but mostly off) for the past few years, starting while I was in SVU.  I stayed in the hospital that night, with IV fluids keeping me hydrated (and anti-nausea and pain meds also being pumped into me that way along the way), and the next morning they wheeled me into the operating room for the surgery.

Which thankfully I don't remember anything of.  I was knocked out so thoroughly that I don't even remember being wheeled into the operating room in the first place -- my memory jumps from hanging out in the waiting room before surgery to being back in my usual hospital room several hours afterward, with all kinds of weird bandages on my stomach that weren't there before.  The surgery apparently took 3 hours (though they were able to do it laproscopically -- that's probably spelled wrong -- rather than having to make a bigger incision), thanks to how badly inflamed and full of stones the Gallbastard was at this point.  I had a drain hole in my side with a little plastic tube leading to this grenade-looking thing, which would slowly fill up with gross blood gunk over time (this stopped before I left the hospital, thankfully, and after another couple days I was able to take the padding and tape off of that spot where it had been without too much trouble, and no further oozing.)  I ended up staying in the hospital for another two nights -- Sunday and Monday -- during which I found that I could actually eat again without getting sick and throwing it back up.  Also watched a lot of random old TV shows... I remember bits of Walker: Texas Ranger, Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends, and so on (and some not-so-old shows too; there was a crime type show called Flashpoint that I don't think I'd ever stumbled across before), and ended up following the news a bit as they covered the shooting in Orlando.  And since they moved my IV to my right arm, I ended up drawing left-handed a bit.  Here's a couple of those pages...

Not as much of a reversion to elementary-school level as I had expected.

If the eyes of a mustache are upon you...
...lay off the pain meds, because mustaches don't have eyes. XD

It was a little odd how the stay in the hospital started to seem somewhat vacation-like after the surgery happened -- I mean, things hurt in my stomach area (a lot, especially when I tried to get up out of bed or lay back down), but with the dehydration gone and me able to eat and sleep at least semi-normally again it was actually kinda nice.  Of course, looking back I really couldn't sleep even remotely close to normally -- I was on the pain meds, and had to lay on my back instead of my usual position on my stomach since the surgery had been so recent and it probably would've hurt a lot to try and lay face-down -- but compared to having to get up in the middle of the night to throw up (or not getting much sleep at all due to stomach pain) it was an improvement.

Speaking of those pain meds... the side-effects of the one they gave me (I believe it was called Percocet or something like that, though I'm pretty sure that's just one of several brand names for oxycodone or something along those lines) were really, really weird.  I didn't hallucinate like I've heard some other people mentioning, but I did see things whenever I closed my eyes.  It's hard to describe now that I'm not really on the pills anymore (I'll take a single pill before bed now, but that's it -- none during the day, and never two at a time like they were giving me at the hospital!), but basically, instead of the usual blackness with occasional colored spots where lights were before you closed your eyes, I would see all kinds of random stuff whenever I closed my eyes.  Text scrolling in front of me, sometimes stuff I could read fragments of (the word "Ypsilanti" came up, and apparently that's a name? I don't recall ever hearing it before seeing it in my weird closed-eye-hallucinations...) and other times stuff I couldn't catch anything of at all -- like it was in a foreign language, or just a little too far away to see clearly.  Sometimes images, usually moving, instead... scenes of some grayish-looking city mostly, but there were different things every now and then.  And sometimes those would start to fade into red, which made me want to open my eyes again because this freaked me out, for some reason I was afraid that if the red became too bright something bad would happen or something.  I'm not really sure, I was on drugs at the time. XD  This continued all the way up through my ride home from the hospital on Tuesday -- I would close my eyes and see a different road, rather than the one we were currently driving on, and sometimes it would start to fade to red like I'd previously mentioned.  These other roads usually had some neat stone construction type stuff on the side, sort of reminding me of bridges and things you'd see in a historic area.  I think sometimes there were even cobblestone-ish roads.

But yeah... the Tuesday after the surgery I finally headed home.  Well, "home" -- I went to Mom's house in the middle of nowhere, since I wasn't really in any shape to be taking care of myself and living alone at that point.  There was a good bit of pain whenever I tried to stand up from sitting (or especially lying down), getting out of bed was a struggle, that sort of thing.  Eating was no problem, though I've been shying away from greasy/fried and spicy stuff so far and trying to stick to smaller amounts of food in one sitting than I would normally eat (though I found out today that eating a whole sub works just fine so long as I don't order any appetizers or anything with it, so I figure that when it comes to anything that's not fried/greasy/spicy I should be able to eat normally.)  After a while of recovering, I've finally moved back into my apartment (earlier today, actually!) since the pain is nearly gone and things like sitting, standing, and even bending over to pick things up aren't hard to do at all anymore.  I'm getting a lot better sleep lately, and have even started having dreams again, which I'm guessing is a good sign since you need to get to a certain level of deep sleep to have dreams at all.  Several weird ones in the past few days -- one involving me pushing Ruth around in a shopping cart (and random rhododendron leaves appearing out of nowhere), another one where I was riding a bicycle (...I don't actually know how!), and one involving people I knew from high school and a house with some weird giant obstacle-course thing built in (the kitchen was in the same room as this, oddly enough.)

So... yeah.  In case anyone was wondering what the heck's been up with me lately... well, the Gallbastard decided to attack and I've been recovering. XD

I figure I will be well enough to go back to work soon, though now the question is not so much "do I feel like going back" as "will they actually get around to filling out the paperwork I need to have done before I can go back?"... which is a real pain.  I faxed one set of forms to the hospital on Monday but haven't heard back from them yet, so it looks like they'll be taking a week or more to get that done.  I'll probably try to fax the "return to work" form to them on Monday after I fill out my part of that; unfortunately wasn't able to do that until now because it asks for an "estimated return-to-work date" and I really had no idea until I was already starting to feel a lot better.  And yet they expect it to be sent to the company that handles Wal-Mart's leave of absence stuff three days ahead of that return-to-work date... pretty much everything related to the paperwork here is really irritating and I'll be glad when I'm finally done with it and stuff can just go back to normal.

Until then, I guess I'll be finishing up my recovery here in Buena Vista.  Not sure when going back to work again will happen, but I do have a follow-up appointment with the doctor on Thursday so hopefully it won't be much longer after that.

Why do we still have urinals?

I'm sure you've all seen both of these things before.  Usually not in the same stall like that, because most men's bathrooms are apparently designed with creeps who want to peek on other people's crotchy-parts in mind rather than those who want to just walk in pee in peace... but you've seen both of them before.  On the upper-left is a toilet.  In the lower-right is a useless piece of porcelain garbage.

Also known as a urinal.

(For any aliens or far-future time-travelers may be reading this, a urinal is like a toilet that's hung on a wall and can only be used for peeing.  I'm sure they don't have them where(/when) you're from.)

Anyway... urinals suck.  They're just... utterly pointless.  Any peeing that could be done in a urinal could just as easily be done in a toilet, and in a men's bathroom it's less likely that the toilet seat will be down (well, unless your area's experiencing an outbreak of La Diarrea del Diablo, of course), so those who are too lazy to adjust the seat from one position to the other won't have to put forth the tiny amount of effort required to lift it up.  (All those who have an opinion on which way the seat "should" be positioned when nobody's using it, that means you... yes, both seat-uppers and seat-downers, you're both equally wrong, the correct answer to "seat up or down?" is "who cares?"  Unless you're concerned with poo particles flying across the room upon the toilet flushing, in which case you sort of have a point, sometimes, maybe.  It's still probably not a big enough deal to make a big fuss about, but you lid-closed-if-there-even-is-a-lid people are at least not idiots like the "seat up! no, seat down!" crowd.)

Heck, any peeing that could be done in a urinal could be done better in a toilet.  With a toilet you can choose either to sit or stand depending on the configuration of your genitals, your need to poop as well as pe, or just how you're feeling that day.  With a toilet there's no risk of being splashed by your own pee no matter how close you stand (unless you're somehow blasting it into the toilet with firehose-level force, in which case see a doctor) and there's also no risk of exposing yourself to random creepy strangers if you try to stand back far enough to avoid splashing yourself with your own pee.  Why in the world do bathroom-builders think it's okay to have those tiny little "almost" dividers between urinals, or worse yet, no divider at all?  Do they think people come into bathrooms specifically to expose themselves to others, or what?  Are bathrooms designed by creepy people who love waving their dongers just barely within sight of others, hoping that somebody will accidentally catch a glimpse as they turn to leave the bathroom?

And speaking of creepy people, nobody peeks under toilet stalls to say hello, but for some reason all kinds of creeps find it perfectly acceptable to turn their heads and talk to others while standing, pants unzipped and pee flowing, in front of a urinal.  WHY DO PEOPLE THINK THIS IS OKAY? It's awkward and honestly kind of disturbing.  Among family members or something, sure, talking when one person is busy doing bathroom things might not be too horribly bad.  But I don't want some random dude talking to me when I'm peeing -- or worse, when he's peeing -- and I hope everyone reading this is sane enough to agree.

Also... with a toilet you get stalls.  You can close the door when you poop (or pee.)  There's no people walking behind you as you pee (or in front of you as you poop... but don't poop in a urinal, please.)  Privacy is a thing that exists with toilets.  Toilets are safe places.  If somebody wants to mess with you while you're in the toilet they basically need to break in, unless they're either so tiny they can squoonch themselves under the stall along the floor or they're Spider-Man or something so they just climb up over the top.  Urinals, on the other hand, are the ghetto back alley of the bathroom.  There's no hiding places.  You want to go in and out as quickly as possible just in case.  You never know when somebody might come up behind you and stab you (or say hello while you're in the middle of taking a leak, depending on the type of sketchy person involved.)

A urinal doesn't even take up that much less space than a small toilet stall.  Position the toilet paper dispenser correctly (in other words, not the way the smaller stalls in Wal-Mart do, with the dispenser so low to the ground that you have to put forth a serious effort to keep your legs from uncomfortably bumping into it if you're any bigger than maybe 5'02") and you could probably just barely wedge in two small-sized stalls in place of two or three urinals and some of the empty space that surrounds them.

Urinals are obsolete.  And not in the "this new thing came out so the old one is obsolete" sense, like how the smartphone zombies think older styles of cellphones are (they're wrong by the way; until they make a smartphone that flips closed and has the option of buttons rather than just touch-screen, regular phones will never be truly obsolete), but just universally less useful than another thing that already exists.  Kinda like some of the dumber internet slang words, pretty much.  I'd honestly rather have a freaking outhouse toilet than an indoor-plumbing urinal.

Why the heck do we still have urinals??

Kirby over the years

Since sometimes I feel like just about the only person who actually noticed this, here's a blog post about how Kirby -- yes, the round pink Nintendo character -- has had design changes over the years.  Mostly focusing on the box/instruction manual art, but also going into the in-game sprites a bit.

Anyway... the very first Kirby game, Kirby's Dream Land, came out in 1992.  This was a Game Boy game, so of course the game itself had four shades of green and that's it... the box art, on the other hand, depicted Kirby as being white.  And with white feet, even.

On the left, an advertisement for some Japanese kids' bath toy.  On the right, a video game box.

...or at least, outside of Japan it did.  In Japan, Kirby had the pink-with-red-feet coloration he's known for today.  Of course, the Japanese box art wasn't completely free of errors -- while the American box art displayed Kirby's two black "cheek marks" prominently, the Japanese box art left them out entirely!  Whoops.  Chances are this was a result of the Dream Land sprites not really showing the marks all that clearly (probably due to how small they had to be for the Game Boy), along the same lines as the reason why Kirby ended up solid white on the American box -- all they had to go off of was the in-game sprites so they had to guess.

This was the Kirby that inspired my creation of the K'hyurbhi species waaaay back when I was in 3rd grade -- white body, two black lines on the cheeks, and red feet (I believe I had seen the Kirby's Adventure box art at the time and interpreted it as "white with pink shading" rather than "really pale pink," so I knew Kirby's feet were supposed to be red.)  While Kirby's design changed, the "two black lines" cheek markings continued to be a part of my K'hyurbhi design all the way up through 2015 when I finally decided that they were whiskers and started drawing them that way.  (Meanwhile, basically everything else Kirby-like about the K'hyurbhi design, minus the round body shape, had either been changed or made less-Kirby-like by Kirby's own design changes over the years. XD)

Yep, no sign of cheek markings on these Kirbys.  Whoops.

 Colors aside, the American box art is pretty much a perfect representation of early-'90s Kirby design.  His arms are more pointed toward the end, giving them a flipper-like appearance; his feet aren't especially large compared to his body (even when he's not inflated to fly like he is on the Kirby's Dream Land box), his eyes are also relatively small compared to the modern design, and he has two black lines on his cheeks rather than the "blush marks" that would later replace them.

A little less white this time.

The box art for Kirby's Adventure (released in 1993) fixed the color issues but kept the overall design the same.  Interestingly, early-'90s Kirby was often depicted as this "really pale pink, almost white" color shown here rather than the current "high-saturation solid neon pink."  I wouldn't be surprised if Pokémon was at least somewhat responsible for the change, considering that the Jigglypuff species also has that "really pale, sometimes almost white, shade of pink" thing going on.  Heck, the change over to "neon pink" even happened in the mid/late-'90s, right around the time Pokémon was getting started.

Oddly, the Kirby's Adventure sprites seem to "predict" two changes that would later come around to Kirby's sprites -- first, the change from black cheek-markings to red ones, and later, the change of his red feet to this sort of dark magenta thing.  I'm pretty sure the feet being pink rather than red here is due to palette limitations (his mouth, pretty much always depicted as red even today, is also pink and his tongue is the same pale pink as his body), but the cheek-markings being reddish/pinkish rather than black might have been an intentional change.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that was an intentional change, because not much later...

Kirby and the cap-less mushroom are making the same face here.

...Kirby's Pinball Land, released later on in 1993, depicted Kirby with reddish cheek-markings.  And on top of that, they drew the markings as vertical lines (and there were three of them) rather than the two horizontal lines that Kirby had always had previously.  His color scheme is still the "pale pink, almost white" here, but that's about to change too, and it'll make only one more reappearance.

No Kirby games were released in 1994, but the next year there were a lot of them, with both the Game Boy and Super Nintendo getting a game or two each.  Rather than new side-scrolling games like the first two, though, the first batch were spinoffs like Pinball Land.

...is that broom-wielding potato sweeping Kirby into the hole?

First, there was Kirby Golf.  Or actually "Kirby's Dream Course."  I think it went by the name "Kirby Bowl" at some point, too -- unless that was a later game that had a name-change and I'm getting them mixed up, anyway.  But anyway, Kirby's color scheme is now more like the Kirby's Adventure title screen (minus  the weird pink mouth and feet), and the triple vertical red cheek-marks return.  1995 marks the end of "Early '90s Kirby" and the beginning of the "Mid-'90s Kirby" design.

Dedede gives a thumbs-up to awkwardly standing under a rain of blobs.

Kirby's Avalanche had a similar Kirby to the one on the box for Kirby's Dream Course.  The blinding neon pink of the later '90s has not yet arrived on the box art, though in-game is another matter...

Okay, he's not as bright a pink as the modern Kirby design quite yet, but he's definitely getting closer to that.  Interestingly, the SNES-era games (well, most of them; Dream Land 3 was very strange in a lot of ways so of course it's the odd one out) almost give Kirby a purplish tinge to his pink, rather than the more reddish hot pink of later games.

Another odd thing I'm just now noticing is that Kirby's sprites in Kirby's Avalanche (and presumably most if not all of the other SNES-era games) show his cheek markings as something closer to the solid "blush stickers" of the later designs, rather than the three vertical lines always shown on the box and in the instruction manual.  Another "prediction" or just the sprites being too small to show three tiny little lines so close together? Yeah, okay, I'm guessing it's the latter.

The spark blob thing isn't supposed to have eyeballs hanging off of it, is it...?

May of 1995 saw the release of the second in the "Kirby's Dream Land series," though really the first game is pretty far removed from the rest of the "series" considering that Kirby couldn't copy powers yet and Dark Matter wasn't involved at all (while he's been the villain of every other game titled Kirby's Dream Land, including Kirby 64 which had the same title in Japan as the "Dream Land" games despite having a different one in the US.)

Anyway, this box art is probably the definitive point where "Early '90s Kirby" changes over to "Mid-'90s Kirby" -- his eyes have gotten bigger, the pinkness is more pronounced, and his cheeks have three vertical red lines on them.

The last game where Dedededede was actually the main villain.  I think.

1996 was also a Kirbyful year, with the spinoff Breakout-type game Kirby's Block Ball making an appearance on the Game Boy and also...

...okay, some of them are just minigames, but close enough.

...Kirby Super Star, which was easily the best of the 1990s Kirby games and to this day remains one of the greatest games in the series.  Both of these games use the "Mid-'90s Kirby" design for their box and instruction manual art.

 The game also puts more effort into making the design consistent between the in-game sprites and the box/manual images -- whenever Kirby is shown big enough on screen for it, three distinct reddish cheek-markings are drawn.  This makes me guess that the "blush marks" on Kirby's cheeks in previous games were just the result of the three lines being "scrunched" by sprite size restrictions, as the same thing happens with the smaller-sized sprites in this one.

1997 also had two Kirby games (well, three in Japan, but one was just the SNES version of a Game Boy game we also got over here) -- once again a "regular" Kirby game and a "spinoff/puzzle" one, and once again with the spinoff coming out in the spring and the regular game in the fall.

Kirby's Star Stacker is one of the few Kirby games I've never actually played, so there's not a whole lot for me to say about it.  Kirby definitely still has his "mid-'90s Kirby" design here, though, with the lower-saturation pink and three vertical red cheek-marking lines.

Was Whispy Woods in this game? I... actually can't remember.  He probably was.

Also released this year was Kirby's Dream Land 3, which can be seen as either a strange step back from the level of Kirby Super Star or an awkward stumbling sideways step from Kirby's Dream Land 2.  I'm still not entirely sure what was up with this one -- it's a very odd game compared to the entire rest of the series in a lot of ways.  It wasn't a bad game by any means, but the thought that it came out a year after Super Star rather than, say, a year earlier is just bizarre to me looking back now.

Speaking of its weirdness... it's not really noticeable on the box.  You'd never guess this was such an oddball game in the Kirby series by the box art, which looks very much Kirby-ish (specifically, very much like Kirby's Dream Land 2, all the way down to the "Mid-'90s Kirby" design and presence of every single one of Kirby's friends from that game... plus a cat and little green bird that showed up here and were never seen again.)

Kirby's brothas from anotha mutha: Rick the hamster, Kine the fish, Coo the owl, Chuchu the
tentacle blob monster, Gooey the Dark Matter blob... the big cat, and... the other bird.

Even the title screen isn't especially odd, use of "blush marks" rather than the three lines aside.  But the pastel pink of Kirby's body here is definitely a hint at one of the oddities of this game...

Is he whiter in this game so Gooey's blackness stands out more?

...Kirby's color scheme has randomly reverted to "early '90s American box art" pale, almost-white pink! Why, I do not know, but for some reason Kirby is paler in this game than in any other color-graphics game in the series.  Everything from Kirby himself to the bosses to the scenery around them also has this really odd fuzzy pastel crayon-ish look to it, which is not present in any other game in the series before or after.

Okay, enough about how weird Dream Land 3 was, on to 1998!...

*cricket chirps*

Okay, apparently there were no Kirby games released in 1998.  How about 1999, then!?...

*cricket chirps louder*

...yeah, the late '90s were a period of Kirby drought following the constant stream of one or two Kirby games per year that made up the mid-'90s.  Kirby did make an appearance in Super Smash Bros. in 1999, but considering that Super Smash Bros. is not a Kirby game (or a Mario game, or a Pokémon game, or... you get the idea) I'm not going to mention it any further here.

It wouldn't be until midway through the year 2000 that another Kirby game would be released...

Kirby's awkward 3D teenage years.

 ...and that game was Kirby 64, which was (like Dream Land 3) kind of an oddball when looked at alongside the rest of the series.  Rather than having Kirby's non-round buddies of various species tagging along, the game gave the option of combining two different abilities to make... awkward fusions of the two that sometimes kinda worked.  It also randomly renamed Ado from Kirby's Dream Land 3, though I suppose you could say "Adeline" is the character's full name and she(?) goes by "Ado" for short.  Counting them as two entirely separate characters is absurd though, considering that they look pretty much the same, act pretty much the same, and even have similar names.

But anyway, Kirby 64 is the "awkward first steps into 3D" title for the Kirby series, much like Super Mario 64 (with its Chinese bootleg plastic toy Bowser, humongous Goombas, and other oddities) was for the Mario series and every 3D-graphics'ed Pokémon game prior to X and Y was for the Pokémon series.  Kirby's design has now changed over to "2000s-era Kirby," though at the time this game (and Super Smash Bros.) was released a lot of people -- such as me -- figured the look of the new Kirby was just the result of it being difficult to replicate 2D Kirby in a clunky early 3D model.  As it turns out, the rounder arms (vs. the original flipper-like pointed ones) and pink blush marks (vs. lines) were here to stay at this point.

Look, obnoxious internet fandom! There's no angry eyes on this one! >_<

...or are they?? Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, released in 2001, suddenly returned to the "mid-'90s Kirby" design, and fans of said Kirby design breathed a collective sigh of relief -- the huge eyes, blush marks, and awkward spherical hands of 3D Kirby were just an "everything looks kinda bad in 3D before they get some practice and work the kinks out" issue after all...

Damn, Kirby, you really gained some weight.  And height...

...and then the Kirby anime happened, shattering all our hopes and dreams forever.

(Okay, I'm mostly joking there.  Though I really did not like it at all when I was first exposed, the Kirby anime wasn't really that bad -- though to this day I am not fond of how they took Kirby and changed him from "vaguely-aged young person (young adult or older kid?) who's perfectly capable of forming complete sentences" to "mute and/or incoherently babbling baby" just for the sake of... cuteness, I guess?  It's fine if that's the direction the anime wanted to go with Kirby -- that's an alternate-universe kind of thing and it works there -- but the way it seems to have bled over into the games' universe now annoys me.  Kinda the same annoyance as the anime Pikachu voice showing up in the newer Pokémon games -- the two are two separate things and should be kept separate, barring occasional minor references.)

Anyway, the next Kirby game to be released was Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land in 2002, which was a remake of Kirby's Adventure using semi-Kirby Super Star style graphics.  It also had its box art designed by the All-Time Master of Inaccurately Depicting Games.

This cover would be so much more fitting if it was Kirby Super Star's"Revenge of Meta Knight" released as its own individual game...

Looking at this you'd think Meta Knight had some huge role in the game.  Well, okay, he's slightly more notable than the other end-of-level bosses due to appearing partway through levels to give you candy or sic his knights on you, but the game doesn't really revolve around him.  Also, looking at this you'd think Kirby's Fighter ability from Kirby Super Star was in the game... it's not.  The game is a remake of Kirby's Adventure which didn't have that ability.  Yes, they reused the red Fighter headband for the Throw ability in this one, but you cannot do a flying kick with the Throw ability!  That's not the worst of it, though...

...I can't actually find a picture of it, unfortunately, but I have very clear memories of noticing that they had randomly stuck characters from the Kirby anime on the box of this game.  Y'know, characters that literally do not exist in the game, or in any Kirby game.  I think it was Tiff/Tuff and Escargoon if I'm remembering right, and they were on the side or the top of the box (I had originally thought it was the back, but the back only shows Kirby in several ability hats so that wasn't it after all.)

Somewhat depressingly, much of the Kirby fandom misses all of the actual things wrong with this game's box and instead complains that "oh no, they gave Kirby angry eyes in America!"... as if angry eyes were not a standard part of Kirby's facial expression range that's perfectly normal for the "leaping into battle" poses that Kirby is often in on box art.  Seriously, the "durr why is American Kirby so angry" crowd annoys the heck out of me.  Kirby is not the Burger King, with his face frozen in a permanent goofy grin no matter the situation.  It's like "box art angry eyes" have become the Comic Sans/crocs/Nickelback of the Kirby fandom, that random little thing that's not actually so horrifically bad (or at the very least, not deserving such vocal outpourings of hate from so many morons... and worse, some otherwise-intelligent people who got pulled into the rushing dumbflow by accident and weren't able to escape before they were infected by the dumb) but gets hated on incessantly by those who don't have enough thought in their head to form their own opinions on things rather than just absorbing from the hivemind.

Oh, and Kirby's design on the box art here is full-on "2000s Kirby" now, going directly from the anime.  Compared to "Mid-'90s Kirby," he's a brighter pink, his arms are more rounded, his eyes have a visible blue hue to them and are much larger than before, his feet are also bigger, and his cheek markings have been replaced with oval pink "blush stickers."

While Kirby games didn't quite go back to the "two or three per year" pattern of the '90s at this point, the drought of 1998 and 1999 was replaced with a trickle -- one Kirby game per year, generally, but sometimes just a spinoff puzzle/ball/racing game or remake.

Angrily flying into Gamecubes everywhere.

The first of these spinoff ball/puzzle/racing games was Kirby Air Ride, which is the reason for "racing" being listed among the other standard Kirby spinoff genres.  This was Kirby's first and only Gamecube game, with the other one ending up changing into a Wii game which eventually ended up released as Kirby's Return to Dream Land many many years later.  It's also very much riding off of the Kirby anime, with the same "2000s Kirby" design featured in it and even the whole "individualized Warp Stars ridden by different characters" thing.  I never actually played Air Ride, mostly due to not having a Gamecube, but I have heard it was actually pretty good.  Maybe I'll track it down at some point, since I'd be able to play it on the Wii.

Or, as someone on Deviantart once described the behavior of Kirby's split-bodies
in this game... "Kirby and the Amazing Morons." XD

2004 brought in another new Kirby game, Kirby and the Amazing Mirror.  This one was actually a new Kirby game rather than a remake or spinoff, and it was actually 2D rather than awkward 3D, though Kirby's design is still pretty much the same as the 2000s-era awkward-3D version.  I notice they did draw Kirby's hands a little closer to the old-school "flipper" style rather than the recent "odd spheres that shouldn't be able to hold onto anything" version, though.  Funnily enough, it seems like they made some effort in this game to make it clear that the Kirby game and anime universes were not the same -- Meta Knight's sword is given a name here for the first time outside the anime, and it's not the same one it has in the anime!

As far as in-game graphics go, everything's pretty similar to Nightmare in Dream Land, which can be said for pretty much all of the GBA and DS Kirby games.

I think this "painted" look works better for Kirby than
the yarn and clay things they tried later on.

2005 was a spinoff "ball game" year.  I never actually played Canvas Curse, so I can't say much here, but the design of Kirby used seems to be very much the "2000s-era" version going by the box art... though his shade of pink is closer to "Mid-'90s Kirby."  The mid-2000s were Kirby's "European versions of games have awkward re-titles" years, as this one being called POWER PAINTBRUSH over there makes clear.

Of course he's angry, those mice want to steal his cake.

Next year we got Kirby: Squeak Squad, where mouse thieves showed up and apparently so did a monster that Dedede kept in a chest in his castle that may or may not have been a fragment of Dark Matter (I'm not 100% sure as I haven't actually played this one, only read about it.)  If so, then this is the last game that had a real appearance of Dark Matter.  This game makes Kirby's feet awkwardly huge and pointy on the end, which I am now noticing is a design change also present on Amazing Mirror's box art -- I guess you could call this bigger-pointier-feet version "Mid-2000s Kirby," though this variation of the design didn't last too long and wasn't really consistently used (the anime sometimes gives him the "huge pointy feet" thing too, for example, but not always, and most of the early-2000s games don't.)

It's called MOUSE ATTACK in Europe.

And it also introduced Kirby's most poorly-named ability, "Animal."

Grr! Rar! Me good at digging and sniffing butts.
Not so good at picking name for dog-based power.

As if Kirby were a plant, or a fungus, or a robot, or a single-celled organism, or some sort of ghost-being in his normal state, and only when absorbing the powers of a big fluffy puppy dog does he become an animal.  Why not "Dog Kirby?" "Digger Kirby," since the ability revolves around claws and digging? "Claw Kirby?"  Heck, even "Beast Kirby" might work since that's at least more specific than "Animal."  Anything -- anything -- would be better than calling it frickin' Animal Kirby.  That's like if Kirby got an ability called "Pink" which gave him the power to attack with flowers, some of which were pink -- shouldn't it be called Flower or Bloom or Petal or something? No, it's PINK KIRBY!  Ugh. >_<

After 2006, the second Kirby Drought began.  No Kirby games in 2007.  2008 brought on a remake, Kirby Super Star Ultra, which also added some extra stuff in (to the game that already had the most content of any Kirby game ever made, which is pretty impressive.)  2008 also brought on the "late-2000s Kirby" design...

Kirby developing a mild case of pinkfoot disease.

As seen above, Kirby's eyes are now even bigger than before (though not by a whole lot as the 2000s-era Kirby design had already embiggened them most of the way), his feet are now a magenta-ish sort of color rather than being fully red like before, and his arms -- after briefly returning to something closer to their original flipper style in the mid-2000s -- are once again almost perfectly spherical nubs that really shouldn't be physically capable of grasping anything.


After Super Star Ultra, another Kirby game wouldn't come along until 2010 (as I said before, pretty much "the second Kirby Drought"), and that was an awkward spinoffish thing titled Epic Yarn which randomly made everything out of yarn.  I guess the Kirby take on the Paper Mario series' "everything looks like paper" art style.  Yeah, it was weird.  Apparently Kirby didn't even have his usual inhaling/absorbing abilities in that game, which is kind of puzzling to me considering they missed an opportunity to have yarn-Kirby inhale enemies and then have said enemy's yarn unravel itself and then reconstitute as the ability hat on Kirby's head.  Anyway, not going to put a picture of that one up since it's an intentional departure from standard Kirby design rather than a gradual over-time change like what I'm trying to go over here.

Kirby's pinkfoot disease has become quite severe here.

2011 ended the Kirby Drought, with two games being released in the same year for the first time in a long time.  The first of these was Kirby: Mass Attack, where Kirby was split into a ton of little Kirbys that couldn't use his full abilities, but could swarm all over enemies like a bunch of like Kirbugs to defeat them.  Like Super Star Ultra, Kirby's design here was "late 2000s Kirby" with magenta feet rather than the usual red.  Oddly, I'm only just now noticing another feature that was introduced with Late 2000s Kirby -- the lighter blue "star" highlight in his eyes, which is also present on the Super Star Ultra box art.

And now Kirby has been cured of pinkfoot.

In 2011 the Wii got its first real Kirby game, Kirby's Return to Dream Land.  Which is a strange name when you think about it, because Dream Land is the region of the planet Popstar where Kirby lives.  So it wouldn't be so much a "return" since he's... kinda been there the whole time.

Alternate title: Return to Red Feet, as this game moves away from the "magenta/almost-purplish" color of the previous few games and brings Kirby's feet back to their original red hue.  The lighter blue highlight of Late 2000s Kirby is still present, but doesn't seem to be star-shaped as far as I can tell.  So this return to red feet is the "Early 2010s Kirby" design, I guess?

2012 saw only one Kirby game, Kirby's Dream Collection, which was (as the title may suggest) just a collection of older Kirby games in a single-Wii-game package.  The box art continued the "Early 2010s Kirby" design, with all of the features of "Late 2000s Kirby" but with red feet and no star eye-sparkle.  It ended up being two years before another Kirby game came out...

See the beetle in the background? You really want to eat that one.

...and that game was Kirby Triple Deluxe, which is in my opinion one of the better Kirby games and one of the few I'd put close to Kirby Super Star.  Still the "Early 2010s Kirby" design here, with red feet, huge eyes with a lighter blue (but not star-shaped) highlight, and round everything.

The most recent Kirby game was Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (or the Rainbow Paintbrush in Europe... apparently they really don't like the word "curse" over there?), but from what I can see that's another "intentionally different design" situation like Epic Yarn was --but with clay rather than yarn -- so I'll be skipping over that one.  Aside from the clay-ness, though, it seems to use pretty much the same Kirby design as the previous few games -- huge eyes with lighter blue highlight at the bottom, round everything, and his feet are still red.

To summarize...

Early '90s Kirby:  Sometimes white, sometimes a very pale pink.  Pointed-tip flipper-like hands.  Two black horizontal lines on each cheek.  Smaller eyes and feet relative to overall body size.

Mid-'90s Kirby:  Sometimes pale pink, sometimes pink.  Hands are sometimes more rounded than before.   Three red vertical lines on each cheek.  Eyes are larger than before and sometimes have a dark blue highlight at the bottom rather than being solid black.

Early 2000s Kirby:  Pink.  Really, really pink.  Eyes are even larger than before and consistently have a blue highlight.  Pink oval "blush sticker" on each cheek.  Hands are usually almost spherical in shape.  Feet are sometimes unusually large and slightly pointed on the end.

Mid-2000s Kirby:  Like Early 2000s Kirby, but with a more consistent use of unusually large, pointy feet.  Hands are a bit more flipper-like again rather than spherical.

Late 2000s Kirby:  Like Early 2000s Kirby, but with feet that have a magenta/purplish hue to them rather than red.  Eyes now have a lighter blue highlight which is star-shaped.

Modern Kirby:  Like Late 2000s Kirby, but with red feet again.  Eyes still have a lighter blue highlight but it is round, not star-shaped.