Collection essentials #286: Yoshi’s Safari (SNES)

You ought to know by now that I like light gun games, so this one’s a pretty obvious include for the list. This game has you playing as Mario armed with a bazooka and riding on Yoshi in order to fight Bowser and his cronies. 

There’s not a ton I have to say about this game as the gameplay isn’t anything really groundbreaking. A lot of the game is just shooting whatever moves, though occasionally you may have to make Yoshi jump, choose a pathway or something like that which slightly varies it up. There are few items to find as well to help you out. The game features a series of boss fights and sometimes they involve some sort of gimmick so you can’t win by just shooting whatever moves without any thought. Notably, there’s a two-player mode where a second player uses a regular SNES controller to control Yoshi as player 1 just focuses on shooting. The main complaint I have with the game is that it starts out too slow, being a big bland and repetitive out of the gate, and that’s pretty unfortunate for a game like this where you normally expect to enjoy the action right out of the gate.

The visuals in this game are done well, with a lot of large and neat-looking sprites. The world of Mario is well-represented here and is a good reason to check this game out. The music is alright, though nothing especially impressive.

Yoshi’s Safari is notable for being the first game where the iconic princess of the Mario series was referred to as “Peach” worldwide. Outside Japan up to this point, they had always named her “Princess Toadstool”. She famously switched to "Peach" permanently a few years later been known worldwide as Princess Peach ever since.

Overall I wouldn’t call Yoshi’s Safari a great game, but it’s still pretty neat. Not a whole lot of people played it due to it requiring the Super Scope, and I didn’t back in the day for that reason, so to me it’s an interesting piece of old school Mario that got overlooked. It wouldn’t feel right to own a Super Scope and not have it in my library.