I have 81 shines.

The 100 coin shine in the water fall stage is probably the easiest one such to get. I had about 121 coins at the end, and had skipped several.

I'm still missing the Yoshi shine from the second stage. I gave it a try today, but it was really pissing me off. That was the stage I mentioned how in order to activate Yoshi, you have to keep jumping back and forth between two pumps. Anyway, the last time I tried, Yoshi wanted a pinecone. Pinecones are unique in that you can't pick them up; you have to run into them to kick them to move them where you want them to go.

What was really pissing me off was that often when a pinecone would finally appear, it would just bounce off the other fruit below the pipe, and roll off to the lower level. So, it'd be unusable, and I'd have to try to get a pinecone again from the beginning. It was highly irritating.

One time the pinecone rolled right next to the edge of floor, so I couldn't get behind it to kick it in the proper direction. I didn't want to waste it, because it's so annoying to get it to reappear, so I jumped down to the lower level and did a wall kick back up to the higher level, hitting the pinecone at the same time and moving it towards Yoshi.

For some reason, Yoshi seems difficult to control in that stage. He's supposed to control like he did in Yoshi's Island; in other words, after a jump, you can tap or hold the jump button again and Yoshi will move his feet quickly to hover, extending his jump a bit and maybe even gain some extra height. I don't know what the problem is, but that move was faltering for me. I tried experimenting in a safe spot, and it seems as though Yoshi will hover no matter where in your jump (whether at the top, or if you cut it short) you hit the button again. I tried triple tapping the button, to see if I was somehow accidentally stuttering on the button, but I'd guess that was unlikely. Besides, it looks like Yoshi at least tried to hover when I'd do that, but in the harbor stage if the move fails he just drops like a rock.



Right at this very moment, I'm at a secret action stage found in the hub world. You have to take Yoshi across three boats (if Yoshi touches deep water directly, he dissolves) to reach an island where you need his fruit juice squirt to open a pipe. It's rather time consuming to get there, since you just have to wait for each boat.

And the stage seems pretty challenging (which wouldn't be a problem, except that I don't want to get a game over and have to take Yoshi all the way through that boat sequence again). You have to ride a lilly pad over some poisonous water to collect 8 red coins. You can only control the pad's direction by squirting water in the opposite direction. It really doesn't control well at all. Anyway, I had 5 red coins, but missed some, so took a crazy jump to the wall of the trough the water flows down. It was possible to land safely on it! It's extremely narrow, but I was able to slowly walk back to the beginning of the stage, where the lilly pad regenerated. I'll have to try to get the others in a while. I think I only really need two, because it looked like the last one was safely above ground at the end of the course.

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
-Orwell