Yoshi's Cookie Review - Screenshot 1 of 2

Another Mario puzzler? Say it ain't so! Like Yoshi (Mario & Yoshi in Europe), Yoshi's Cookie is less well known than Dr. Mario and Wario's Woods, mainly because, well, it's not that interesting.

To its merit, it's not another falling block puzzler. In fact, this is one of the more unique puzzlers on Virtual Console. The objective is to create lines of cookies in order to make them disappear. You start out with a "block" of them, and new pieces gradually approach from the right and top. You play by putting your cursor on a cookie, pressing the action button and then moving the D-pad to either move the entire row of cookies left or right, or the entire column up or down. Like a Rubik's Cube, the cookies wrap around, so if you move a column up, the highest cookie will move out of the top of screen and re-appear at the bottom.

Yoshi's Cookie Review - Screenshot 2 of 2

After clearing the entire playing field, the next stage begins, and this pretty much goes on until you lose, as in Dr. Mario and other puzzlers. Should you get down to one remaining column / row, it won't be auto-cleared — because there's nothing to match them with. You need to chain at least two cookies together, so the only answer is to wait for new cookies to attach from the sides. Besides the main mode, there's little else aside a two player versus mode.

Conclusion

Yoshi's Cookie is a decent puzzler that's a tad more original than puzzlers of a falling block nature, but we would suggest waiting for the SNES version to show up instead which, aside from improved audio and visuals that use sprites from Super Mario World, features more content via an added puzzle mode and amusing cutscenes.