Happy Lamp Flowers :)

A gif from a 3D animated Yoshi's Story commercial. It starts with eggs being juggled by Yoshi off-screen with the caption: 'Can you juggle eggs?' It pans down to Yoshi being surrounded by egg shells, looking around, and throwing his remaining egg at the camera. The caption says: 'Yoshi can't! But he can throw them.

December 17th, 2023 (Sunday)

I had this entire entry written out in Codepen, but I accidentally clicked on one of my bookmarks and lost all my progress. Shit fucking sucked.

It's been a while since I last wrote anything. Anyways, here's something I found interesting: Nintendo made a yoshi digital pet game in 1998 to promote Yoshi's Story.

A scan of a Toronto Star newspaper article from March 28th, 1999. It is titled 'Virtual Yoshi' and reads: Though Yoshi's Story is a fairly uncomplicated game, Nintendo's programmers have included a few secondary challenges to keep players from getting too bored. If you find yourself going in circles, Nintendo has created an official website for the game at www.yoshisstory.com. As the site is packed with publicity material, you'll have to do a lot of bouncing around to find any valuable information. And, of course, the truly desperate can buy a Yoshi's Story game guide, which includes a complete atlas to Yoshi's world. Order it through the order link at www.yoshisstory.com/yoshi/guide.html. If you don't want to buy the manual or even the game, visitors to the site can adopt their own Yoshi Web Pet at www.yoshisstory.com/yoshi/pet.html. It's free, but you have to come back and play with the little guy every couple of days.

From the Toronto Star on March 28th, 1999

According to Little Yoshi's N64 Page, the game consisted of you feeding/exercising/playing with your yoshi every day for 5-10 minutes. It aged one year every day. Your yoshi's fullness/health/happiness meters were shown as flower petals (just like Yoshi's Story) and if you tried to do anything with it while its meters were full, your yoshi would get "pisst off".

The graphics consisted of Yoshi's Story artwork in gifs, some of which were saved by Yoshi's Story Book (shown below, the first gif might not work though). They wrote that your yoshi had a score and everyone's yoshies could be ranked. Yoshies could also get kidnapped by Bowser, join the rest of the yoshies on Yoshi's Island, or die.

A still gif of a green Yoshi doing a peace sign with his left hand.

A gif of a pink Yoshi being carried away by a Toady.

By August 2001, the game's servers went down for supposed upgrades. Players were reassured that their yoshies were "in a special nature reserve where they are being fed the finest melons and given top-notch care", which I find very sweet. This message was up until at least February 2002 and the page started redirecting to Nintendo's official website in or before August 2002. For a browser game that only existed to promote another game, a lifespan of 2-3 years is kind of impressive.

Due to the game's age and requirement of an NSider user ID (a service that probably died before most of the NeoCities userbase was born), I heavily doubt this game will ever resurface. ~~I'm perfectly fine with that, because there's another officially licensed Nintendo game I'd MUCH rather see resurface...~~

December 30th, 2023 (Saturday)

Minor update on the Yoshi web pet game!

I was browsing through GifCities (avoid this website if you have an old/slow computer) and found more gifs of YtWP, courtesy of Yoshi Ducky.

A still gif of a blue Yoshi doing a peace sign with his left hand.

Hatching

A gif of a blue Yoshi standing on his left tippy toe with his arms spread out and gently tilting back and forth. He looks happy.

Vibing, content with life

Presumably exercising

A gif of a blue Yoshi throwing an egg and completely disappearing for a frame or two.

Playing and briefly getting Thanos-snapped out of existence

A still gif of a blue Yoshi doing a peace sign with his left hand. This is the same as the gif of him hatching, only this Yoshi is on the left side of the gif rather than the center.

Smelling and eating food

A still gif of a blue Yoshi sticking his tongue out and looking like a cat about to vomit.

"pisst off"

A gif of a blue Yoshi being carried away by a Toady.

See you space Yoshi...

There's also gifs of the pink, yellow, and green Yoshies. Aside from their colours, they're exactly the same as the gifs above.