Kirby's Anomaly

A few days ago, I decided to set up a garage sale with my family since we had too much unnecessary stuff in our storage. I found a cardboard box in my room and dug through it to find anything. That was when I found my old Nintendo Entertainment System, along with the cartridge for Kirby's Adventure. I remember Kirby's Adventure being one of the only games I had on the console, and I would play non-stop when I came back home after school. Its been a decade since I had touched my NES, so I decided to try it out again for some nostalgia.

I set up my NES, switched it on, and started playing Kirby's Adventure. The old pixel graphics and the chiptune music gave a smile to my face. I started the first level, which was Vegetable Valley. The level started out as completely normal, I was expecting some color glitches to occur since the cartridge was a little scratched, but there seemed to be no issue. But then I entered the second door in the level, and upon walking to the right, I encountered something very odd.

It was a strange, jumbled mess of black pixels, it was something that I had never seen before in any Kirby game, something that I was sure wasn't supposed to be there. The first time I encountered this entity, I didn't have enough reaction time to stop moving, and when it hit me, it killed me in an instant. My eyes widen when my brain processed what had just happened, how could Kirby have died so easily? I had full health a second ago. But it didn't worry me too much, I had three more lives after all, and I know about the minigame after the level that gives me an extra life. When I went back to where I died, I saw it again, standing there and doing nothing. When I saw it, I assumed it was some sort of sprite glitch, similar to the famous Missingno. encounter with Pokémon. My mind suddenly started racing, and I wanted to see what would happen if I tried absorbing this thing. So that was what I attempted to do, and I did succeed in absorbing it, but what I did not expect was the outcome. Absorbing its abilities changed Kirby's sprite to pitch black. At first, it seemed that it didn't really give Kirby any special powers, since nothing would happen. But then I ran into an enemy, and it got killed by Kirby in a flash. I was stunned at how quick it happened; I knew what was happening on my screen was more than just a sprite glitch. But this only turned into a nightmare when I entered the third door of the level, and Kirby’s sprite changed completely. He was still pitch black, but he grew taller and lanker. He appeared to have three legs and arms with fingers that stretched to the ground. There were also random tiny pixels flying around it like fleas. To put it in short, it scared the life out of me, and I almost threw my NES controller into the TV.

I was still able to control this monster, but it seemed to run much faster than Kirby. I couldn’t make it float like Kirby would normally be able to do; it was only able to run, jump, and kill any enemy that appeared on screen. The music in the background was also changed. It was like somebody readjusted all the notes to the wrong places, causing it to sound out of tune and unbearable to listen to. However, I finally reached the end of the level, and everything seemed to have come back to normal for a while. The Crane Fever minigame didn't have anything too unusual at least. But all that just happened made me lose the energy to continue playing, so I turned off the NES and placed it on the desk in my room.