Can you handle this?

Yoshis Island Gone Wrong

Back in my childhood, I owned a SNES. I enjoyed playing classic games that were huge hits back then, such as Super Mario World, Mario Kart, Donkey Kong Country, and Yoshi's Island. Those were the good old days, and I am sad that things are so different nowadays.

Sixteen years later, in 2012, I was cleaning out my closet in my old room when I found the SNES and all of the games that I played in my childhood. Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Donkey Kong Country, Earth Bound, Super Meteoroid, Star Fox and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island had all been buried under a bunch of other junk I had been collecting over time.

Overcome with nostalgia, I decided to hook up my old SNES to the TV in my room, to relieve the magic of my childhood. Picking out Yoshi's Island from the pile, I noticed something rather odd about it. The sticker on the cartridge did not look the way I remembered it, with Yoshi and Baby Mario facing a Nepeanut on a puddle. Instead, it was just a picture of Baby Mario riding Yoshi in a red background and the logo just said, "Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island".

I set the game up anyway. The "Nintendo Presents" logo was normal, but then I noticed something strange. The intro when the stork is carrying Baby Mario and Baby Luigi across the sky did not appear; it just cut to the title screen where it rotates around the island with all the mountains on it, and the Yoshi's Island logo is faced up to you. I thought this was just a minor glitch, as I had not touched the game for nearly two decades, so I just proceeded to my own save file where I left off, File 1. The Game was 100% complete.

I began to explore level one. This was when things got even weirder.

There were no Shy Guys or other background enemies walking around. As I ran through the level, the old charm I remembered started to fade away. The plants were decaying, the plattforms and rocks started turning mossy, the sky was going gray, and the music was getting slow and depressing. Eventually, the music stopped. It was just dead silence.

Not knowing what to do about it, I went over to one of the assistant boxes that you talk to get hints in levels, but the text said something very abnormal.

"Prepare for shock."

All of a sudden, a door popped up. I went through it, and ended up in a sinister place that felt too dark for a Yoshi game, or even a Mario game.It was an area that was over a pool of a red liquid surrounding dead skeletons. The level also had strange looking trees, giant bubbles floating around, a pitch black sky, Toadies flying around with morbid looks in their eyes, and the background music was a distorted low pitched clarinet song. One of the gloomy Toadies swooped down and stole baby Mario from me.

I stuck Yoshi's long tongue out to try to save baby Mario, but I accidentally ended up swallowing him automatically. Yoshi then spewed out Mario's cap, along with other pixelated red stuff that looked like baby Mario's remains. Yoshi had that nervous face expression from when he is about to fight the giant frog it the third world. He stared at me with that face. After a few seconds of him staring, that scary "Game Over" music from Yoshi's Story played in the background. Then the screen went black; I was really freaked out at this point.

It cut back to the map; this time, it somehow looked more distorted than usual, and the music was not playing anymore. I reluctantly went over to the next level. Upon entering it, a caption appeared.

"You could not save him."

Yoshi took five seconds later than usual to pop out. When he did, I noticed that baby Mario was not on his back, because of what happened in the previous level.

This level was simply a piece of land floating in the middle of nowhere. The background was copied from the chain chomp level, and there was still no sound of music. A Lakitu flew by and dropped a door next to me to enter it. I walked through the door, hoping nothing freaky was gonna happen anymore.

However, when the door closed behind Yoshi after he entered it, a huge bolt of lightning flashed on the screen, which seemed to have changed the sky color to a fiendish red. All I could hear was a monster roaring and chewing on something, and Yoshi's "Owowowowowowowowowow!!!" scream from the future games. It sounded as if the poor Yoshi was being mauled.

The screen became very scratchy looking, and cut to a red background to reveal a badly injured Yoshi with a bloody black eye, bloody nose, crooked leg, and deep scar on its tail. The wounded Yoshi just limped around with a blank, emotionless expression on its face for five minutes. There was no audio at all as if the game was on mute, which it was not.

The Yoshi abruptly stopped, and began to stare at me with that same blank expression for six seconds, and then flipped me off. The game shut off by itself. I was in deep shock from what I just saw.

Later that night, when I was about to go to sleep, I heard something on my bed right next to me breathing, and I opened my eyes to see what it was.

It appeared to be Yoshi.