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. Whoopsies! Anyways, here's something I found interesting: Nintendo made a yoshi digital pet game in 1998 to promote Yoshi's Story.
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.
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.
Hatching
Vibing, content with life
Presumably exercising
Playing and briefly getting Thanos-snapped out of existence
Smelling and eating food
"pisst off"
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.